de Certeau, Michel

Bio Sketch

Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) was a French Jesuit scholar, philosopher and cultural theorist working across history, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and theology. His most influential work for Geoffrey's research is The Practice of Everyday Life (L'invention du quotidien, 1980; trans. 1984), which theorizes everyday practices as creative, tactical resistance by "users" of a culture. He is a foundational thinker of the everyday.

Key Works

• *The Practice of Everyday Life* (1984)
• The Writing of History (1975) — history, representation and the excluded.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Strategy and Tactic
• Practiced Place (Space vs. Place)
• Narrative Space — his spatial narratology: every story as "a travel story – a spatial practice"
• Everyday Life
• Everyday Architecture
• Consumerism

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

de Certeau is arguably the central theorist of Geoffrey's the everyday research area. His strategies/tactics, "walking in the city," "la perruque" (the worker's ruse), "reading as poaching," and the "scriptural economy" give the conceptual vocabulary for understanding everyday practice as a site of creativity and resistance against spatial/urban power — directly informing Geoffrey's treatment of architecture's everyday reception and use.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• The Practice of Everyday Life (1984)
• Spatial Stories (1984/2006) — chapter 9 of The Practice of Everyday Life (excerpt pp 115–118), reprinted in Intimus (2006): the place/space distinction, "space is a practiced place," stories as metaphorai and "spatial syntaxes," and the narrative labor "constantly transform[ing] places into spaces or spaces into places." See practiced-place.
• Agarez & Mota (2015) — Bread & Butter of Architecture — mention of de Certeau's tactics
• Toward a Psychology of Everyday Living
• What is 'Everyday Life'? An Exploration of its Political Connections
• Architecture in Everyday Life
• Consumerism and Identity: Some Psychoanalytic Considerations
• The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life (Driscoll 2001) — the psychoanalytic (Lacanian) foundations of de Certeau's model; the everyday as the Other of culture.
• Cultural Phenomenology and the Everyday (Clucas 2000) — de Certeau's politicization of the everyday through tactics and ruses.
• The History of Everyday Life (Lüdtke ed. 1995) — de Certeau as a methodological reference for German alltagsgeschichte: Lüdtke cites L'invention du quotidien as the model for treating social praxis as creative everyday operation (p. 31 n. 10), against Bourdieu's more hermetic "social praxis"; the volume's Eigensinn concept parallels de Certeau's tactics while deliberately refusing their heroic edge. See alltagsgeschichte, history-from-below.
• Culturally 'Doped' or Not? (Conroy) — de Certeau's critical semiotics of the everyday; place/space and strategy/tactic.
• Everyday life in the real world (Maycroft 2007) — complicates de Certeau's tactics: suggests it may be "increasingly apt to speak of resistance to everyday life" rather than resistance from it.
• Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday (Yoka & Paschalidis eds. 2015) — the Introduction quotes de Certeau 1988: xiv–xv (the everyday "inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, [obli]que, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals") and aligns his "microscopic, multiform techniques" of re-appropriation with Eco's "semiological guerilla warfare" (see semiological-guerrilla-warfare).
• Politicizing the interior (Teston 2018) — the place/space theory as the founding layer of Augé's: de Certeau "describes space as an area that is stimulated by people," place as "an area of stasis, where everything is ordered, identifiable, and codified, and anthropological space as an experiential place within a contextual setting" — the distinction Augé dialecticizes. See strategy-and-tactic.
• Event-space: A performance model for spatial design (Hannah 2018) — the practiced-place formula as an event-space epigraph: "Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities" (The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 118) — Hannah extends the operations that practice space into performances ("our banal everyday environments can be perceived and utilized as continually fluctuating performances"), and cites the same book's spatial thesis for the objectile's dynamics: space "saturated with spaces, becomes a continual unfolding, temporally defined and multiplied by an accelerated succession of actions" (p. 118). See practiced-place, event-space, spatial-dramaturgy.