A Jesuit, historian, and cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau's works have opened newly horizons of historical interpretation by paying attention to the writing of narrative history. For Certeau historiography in general rose from the Europeans' encou ...
A Jesuit, historian, and cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau's works have opened newly horizons of historical interpretation by paying attention to the writing of narrative history. For Certeau historiography in general rose from the Europeans' encounter with the unknown others and investigation to alterities which otherwise nominated as 'Heterologies'(1986) in modern history, the emerging of Others are at first resulted from the division of Christianity by the Reformation. And it was essentially produced by inter-action with in the Enlightenment discourses. In Modern European history, indeed, there are two kinds of discourse on alterities: the one is 'interior alterity' which includes witchcraft and mysticism presented in his book 'The possession at Loudun'(1970). And the other one deals with 'exterior alterity' which indicates exotic meetings emerged with the New-World experience in his 'The Writing of History'(1975). Those discourses are, for Certeau, represented as 'difference', 'distance', 'division' and 'fragmentary', regarded as a practical action rather than conception or ideology.
In the first book, a religious incidence at Loudun is represented as displacement that means other within subject of possessed nuns. Certeau claims that French mornarchy could bring out political strategy to establish the absolute power in the nation by exploiting this displacement. In other words, religious world order would have shifted to political order which integrated multiple factors to the state power by realizing the State Reason. This process is the very 'reemployment' that reproduces new structural frame based on the change of paradigm of interpretative system about the world. The reemployment means that there isn't any original text but only revised editions. The texts of the modern Europe, in nature, are reproduction and diffusion of 'scriptural' writings associated with religious and political powers. The scriptural writings reappeard at each crucial moments, and transfered from the interpretative instruments to controling force. For example modern Europeans have practiced the works of production for colonial others by calling them savage, erotic and mystic.
Everydaylife in late-capitalism is heterological terrain in which a variety of dual relations are reciprocally operated. In that society norms of everyday life and and popular culture are not identified to the knowledge and the belief produced by ruling powers. By this point of view Certeau searches for accumulating driving-force that fissures and suverts established order in everydaylife of popular culture. For the purpose Certeau arranges concrete reality where subjection and resistence interwine, and presents utopian perspective to liberation in 'The Pactice of Everyday Life'(1980). however the theory of everydaylife and popular culture of Certeau, since they are the objects of which can be differently poached and appropriated by each reader. terefore the text covers unlimited potential to be diversely interpreted.
With multi-perspective, the thing Certeau tries to discribe is creative practices of everyday culture which make liberation from and resistance against the hegemony of ruling powers. In this point everyday life becomes an animatedly pactical space. Tactics are practiced through the poaching by appropriation of text in reading, by indeterminate and metaphorical operation which crushes ruling strategies in the tactical space, by shattering the panoptical perspective by city-walker, and through 'la perruque' performed by usager in the sphere of consumption. The most epochal thinking as well as intellectual contribution made by Certeau is to elevate the consumption to the space of production and strrugle. In this respect he can be considered the person who founded a new paradigm of science.