History as a Kind of Writing. Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography

History as a Kind of Writing: Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography Carrard, Philippe. The South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 100, Number 2, Spring 2001, pp. 465-482 (Article) Published by Duke University Press

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Philippe Carrard History as a Kind of Writing: Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography

Over the past ten years, Certeau’s work has often been regarded as a ‘‘founding charter’’ (to use Tom Conley’s term) for cultural studies.1 Because of its concern with ordinary people and everyday life, as well as with issues of otherness, difference, and exclusion, that work now appears related to the kind of research that developed in England during the s and s, then spread to the United States, where it met with considerable success in the academy. Some of the essays collected in L’invention du quotidien have been anthologized in cultural studies readers, and Certeau is frequently cited in those.2 However, his work’s current status in cultural studies should not overshadow the novelty and significance of his contributions to other fields, particularly to what I have elsewhere proposed calling the ‘‘poetics of historiography’’: the rules, codes, and conventions that frame historical writing.3 Indeed, when Certeau’s first essays on historiography appeared in the early s, very few French scholars were concerned with the operations of academic writing. Historians were doing ‘‘normal’’ research, striving to accumulate more information about the past and to open

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up ‘‘new’’ fields of investigation.4 While ready enough to discuss their methods (the main debates then pertaining to the nature and relevance of quantification), they were less eager to take up issues of epistemology and quite reluctant to reflect on the procedures they used in writing up their data.5 Conversely, literary critics had little interest in historiography. The ‘‘structuralists,’’ for example, dealt mostly with fiction or with modes like the press report.6 The journals to which they were contributing, such as Communications and Poétique, published no articles about historiography during the s and s. (Poétique’s first issue devoted to the subject, ‘‘Le texte de l’histoire,’’ appeared in .) For a long time, the only analysis of history as writing was Roland Barthes’s ‘‘Discours de l’histoire,’’ and it was no accident that Certeau would frequently quote from this article in his own examination of historiography.7 A central aspect of Certeau’s work is its constant attention to ‘‘ways of ’’ or ‘‘arts of ’’ (manières de, arts de), whether ‘‘doing,’’ ‘‘saying,’’ ‘‘thinking,’’ or ‘‘believing.’’ However, that attention is not always directed to the business of everyday life and the ‘‘tactics’’ ordinary people employ to affirm their identity. ‘‘Culture,’’ for Certeau, included ‘‘academic culture,’’ whose habits, like those of the urban walker, the casual reader, or the teller of folktales, must be dissected. Academic discourse, in particular, must be considered another ‘‘way of,’’ consisting in a set of procedures for dealing with specific subjects, and the roles that such procedures play should always be accounted for in the analysis. Thus Certeau accused Raymond Aron of treating the different theories he analyzed in his Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire as mere ‘‘ideas’’ that respond to one another in a kind of ‘‘undefined game.’’ 8 Such a conceptualization ignored the fact that ideas are not disembodied and, more generally, that history is also a practice. Historians ‘‘do history’’ as theologians ‘‘do theology,’’ an expression Certeau would have us ‘‘take seriously,’’ that is, without erasing the verb (the ‘‘producing act’’) in order to privilege the complement (the ‘‘object produced’’).9 In the case of history, ‘‘to do’’ now mostly means ‘‘to write’’; facing the white page, historians apply themselves to ‘‘constructing sentences’’ with the information they have accumulated. According to Certeau, the task of those who study historical discourse is to analyze such ‘‘sentences,’’ specifically, to describe how historians have written them in relation to a certain ‘‘place’’ (e.g., the university), a certain state of the discipline (e.g., the return of the ‘‘political’’), and certain rules of


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textualization (e.g., the use of ‘‘the plain style’’).10 In other words, Certeau’s ‘‘discourse analysis’’ does not posit the ‘‘closure of the text,’’ as (some) structuralist analyses did during the s and early s. Instead, it assumes that a text was written by someone, for someone else, and under circumstances that can usually be specified. It is thus to a pragmatics, or a rhetoric, that I shall now turn to examine how Certeau deals with those textual aspects that are of interest to the poetician, namely, disposition, enunciation, and diction. Roger Chartier credits L’écriture de l’histoire with being one of the first studies to show that historical writing is always (or inevitably) organized as a narrative. In that respect, Chartier argues, Certeau’s book ‘‘paved the way’’ for further reflections, including Paul Ricoeur’s well-known thesis (developed in Temps et récit) that ‘‘history, in all its forms, even the most structural, even the least factual, falls under storytelling.’’ 11 Yet in his study of historical discourse, Certeau devotes little space to ‘‘disposition,’’ that is, to the way(s) in which historians arrange their data discursively. He sometimes contrasts a history that seeks to ‘‘resurrect’’ the past and unfolds as a ‘‘narrative’’ with more advanced forms of research that ‘‘build models’’ and compare ‘‘series.’’ 12 However, model and series here refer to the methods used by historians of the Annales school in the s and early s, when they turned to quantification; those terms do not signify forms of textual arrangement, and Certeau never explains what has supposedly replaced narrative in current research. Elsewhere in L’écriture de l’histoire, though, he firmly asserts that histories necessarily come about as stories, without distinguishing between a historiography still reliant on narrative and one that has moved on to something else. For him, then, the ‘‘first constraint’’ on historical discourse consists of reversing the direction of research and writing history in ‘‘chronological order.’’ 13 Whereas historians start their investigations in the present and move back to the past, conventions of writing require that when they finally textualize their data they start in the past and move forward to the present. Of course, as Certeau admits, chronological order can be flexible. Historical discourse proceeds at different speeds, ‘‘slowing down’’ or ‘‘accelerating’’ so as to produce different ‘‘effects of meaning.’’ Nevertheless, historiography always posits a ‘‘time of things’’ as the ‘‘condition’’ of ‘‘discursive time,’’ that is, of the way the material is temporally ordered when it is written up.14 This assumption entails that history, ‘‘viewed as a text,’’


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only ‘‘constitutes a narrative,’’ Certeau’s implicit definition of narrative here being a genre in which events and situations are presented along a temporal axis.15 While not really deciding whether historical discourse obligatorily falls under storytelling, Certeau is less equivocal in assessing narrative from a normative viewpoint. Ricoeur has described the debates over the value of narrative that have preoccupied the French historiographic community since the s, specifically, the attacks on narrative by the Annales school and the genre’s subsequent ‘‘eclipse.’’ 16 I won’t return to that welldocumented controversy, therefore, except to point out that it was still boiling in the s. François Furet, for example, summarized the standard Annales position in an article published in —the very year L’écriture de l’histoire appeared. Describing how his discipline had moved from ‘‘narrative history’’ to ‘‘problem history,’’ Furet recounted and celebrated once again the supposed triumph of the Annales over other, less sophisticated research communities. Serious scholars, according to him, had stopped telling the story of ‘‘unique events’’ and ‘‘incomparable experiences’’ in the haphazard way that used to characterize historical investigations. Deliberately constructing their object(s) now, they sought to define—and solve—the ‘‘problems’’ that a period poses.17 Although Certeau did not explicitly engage with the Annales historians, his appraisal and defense of narrative must be situated in the context of that ongoing conversation. For Certeau, narrative is, above all, a most serviceable ‘‘way of doing.’’ In popular culture, stories provide useful ‘‘repertories of action schemes,’’ which teach ‘‘possible tactics in a given (social) system.’’ Thus, by recounting such things as the games they have played, people can record some of the ‘‘rules and moves’’ they find useful and worth ‘‘memorizing.’’ 18 But Certeau does not confine narrative to the realm of the ‘‘tactics’’ adopted by ordinary people in an effort to cope with the world. He argues that storytelling also ‘‘sneaks’’ into scientific discourse, for instance, and into the texts of such respected theorists as Marx, Freud, Bourdieu, and especially Foucault.19 Indeed, Foucault fails to define the status of the ‘‘historical structures’’ he has identified, contenting himself with ‘‘narrating them,’’ as anthropologists do when they study distant societies.20 His example should, according to Certeau, lead us to ask whether it is not time to recognize narrative’s ‘‘theoretical legitimacy,’’ to look upon narrative ‘‘not as some ineradicable remnant (or a remnant still to be eradicated)’’ but as a ‘‘necessary form for a theory of practices.’’ 21 Yet, as his inter-



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rogatory construction reveals, that theory was still to come when Certeau was writing in the late s and early s. He himself did not take it on, and he died before many of the numerous studies devoted to narrative (its forms, functions, history, uses in scholarship, etc.) had appeared, following the genre’s ‘‘rediscovery’’ in the mid-s.22 Neither Certeau’s (occasional) analyses of history as a kind of narrative nor his efforts to rehabilitate storytelling as a way of making sense of things led him to conflate history with fiction, however. Unlike Hayden White (whose work, curiously, he never discussed), Certeau did not deem history’s reliance on narrative as a reason to blur the boundaries between factual and fictional discourse. Indeed, one of his most important contributions to the study of historiographic ‘‘disposition’’ consists precisely in identifying a major difference between narrative and historiography: the ‘‘split structure [structure dédoublée]’’ of historical texts, which are in fact ‘‘layered [ feuilletés]’’ by both utterances originating with the historian and testimonials— quotations and references whose function is to warrant the veracity of such utterances.23 Obviously, fictional texts are not ‘‘split’’ (at least not as historiography is); they need not quote from other texts to affirm their version of events, and any footnotes they may include usually function as ‘‘fictive devices’’—the ‘‘means by which those who employ them pretend to write history without intending to write it.’’ 24 The identification of this difference foreshadowed the defenses of historiography’s distinctiveness that would be mounted against the proclivity to merge all discourses, whether under the rubric of a general ‘‘narrativity’’ (à la Greimas) or of ‘‘fiction’’ in particular (à la White).25 Moreover, it anticipated such analyses of historiography as those by Chartier and Krzysztof Pomian, who, also viewing it as formally different from fiction, related that difference to disciplinary requirements and regarded textual features like footnotes as signs of the specific kind of knowledge garnered from archival research.26 Like those scholars, Certeau concerned himself with identifying (some of ) the discursive tenets of historiographic accounts. Nor did he stop there either, likewise attributing the ‘‘splitness’’ of historical texts to the demands of the discipline, notably, the need to ground accounts of the past on documentary evidence. For Certeau, in short, historiographic and fictional narratives were distinct entities—but only from the standpoint of what I earlier called the pragmatics of discourse, meaning not just the formal traits that characterize them, but also how those traits function in a social context.


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Enunciation, arguably the main item in Certeau’s pragmatics, covers such aspects as who is speaking, to whom, and under what circumstances. Although he revealingly called his book about May  La prise de parole and gave chapters in La possession de Loudun, La fable mystique, and Une politique de la langue such titles as ‘‘Le discours de la possession,’’ ‘‘Manières de parler,’’ and ‘‘La voix de l’autre,’’ Certeau’s focus was always on the facts enunciated in documents, on the diverse processes of appropriation (or disappropriation) of speech in pamphlets, for example, or mystic writing and texts by the ‘‘possessed,’’ as well as dialectal utterances. In terms of enunciation in historiographic discourse proper, Certeau defined historiography, conventionally enough, as ‘‘discourse in the third person’’ that treats ‘‘battles, politics, or salaries,’’ but where ‘‘nobody is there to endorse the utterance.’’ 27 Yet he would no more content himself with a definition so commonplace than would Barthes, from whom he borrowed the ‘‘nobody is there’’ part. As Hervé Martin has noted, Certeau went on to trace the ‘‘linguistic marks’’ that betray both the historian’s presence and his or her training in the area of enunciation.28 One such mark, the researcher’s ‘‘I,’’ is a feature of the extensive introductions to studies like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Paysans du Languedoc () and, especially, Pierre Vilar’s La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne (). Those introductions not only outline the ‘‘history of the object studied’’ but also, to some extent, the ‘‘history of the subject-historian’’ in terms of specifying the ‘‘place of the speaker.’’ 29 Of course, the scope of the scholars’ involvement there was determined by the exigencies of the dissertation (both works being lengthy thèses d’état). That sort of constraint aside, the historian may explain how the project developed, which methodologies were employed, and whatever difficulties were encountered, but ought not to take sides in the given conflicts, much less introduce what American literary critics came to call ‘‘the personal’’ (anything to do with family life, say, in relation to the research). Nevertheless, according to Certeau, these interventions of the ‘‘subject-historian’’ constitute an interesting twist on the ‘‘return of the repressed’’; however restrained they may be, such authorial intrusions flout the ‘‘censure of enunciation’’ in historical discourse, ultimately revealing that someone ‘‘is there to endorse the utterance.’’ 30 For the poetician, Certeau’s second most important contribution to the analysis of historiographic enunciation consisted in his exploration of the academic nous. The practice of writing in the first-person plural rather than the singular ( je) is still common in French scholarly discourse, and stern



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pronouncements are periodically issued to reaffirm its merits. Political historian René Rémond, stating his own opinion in a recent biographical profile, defended nous as beneficial pedagogically (relating readers and researchers), psychologically (preserving a scholarly modesty), and epistemologically (rendering the endeavor one that other members of the disciplinary community could have conducted). The first-person plural, he argued, implies an ‘‘act of faith in the universality of historical truth,’’ as well as the ‘‘conviction of being able to attain a certain objectivity.’’ 31 Certeau took a less sanguine position. To begin with, using nous does not imply the existence of any such thing as ‘‘historical truth,’’ nor that truth is ‘‘universal’’ and ‘‘objectivity’’ attainable. Endowing the discipline of history with that much power is certainly an ‘‘act of faith,’’ but in the sense of ‘‘wishful thinking.’’ For Certeau, employing nous is, above all, a ‘‘convention,’’ more precisely, a way of ‘‘appropriating language’’ while erasing the most visible signs of that gesture. This convention, by solving a problem of textualization, makes it possible to write ‘‘without a subject of writing,’’ and it fulfills an important epistemological function by eliminating the potential grounding of historical discourse in either an ‘‘individual’’ (‘‘the author, his personal philosophy, etc.’’) or a ‘‘global subject’’ (‘‘time, society, etc.’’). Instead, a ‘‘place’’ opens up where that discourse can ‘‘originate without being reduced to it.’’ 32 Thus, as Gérard Genette and other poeticians do in their analyses of ‘‘voice,’’ Certeau specifies both the identity and the position of the speaker in the texts he analyzes. Then he goes one step further, assigning a location to that speaker that is not merely textual, as it is in Genette’s ‘‘homodiegetic’’ and ‘‘heterodiegetic’’ narrative modes, where the narrator may or may not be a character in the story he or she is telling.33 Certeau’s ‘‘place’’ is comprehensive, moreover, insofar as it extends not just to the historian’s presence in the text but also to his/her institutional affiliation and professional memberships, with all their attendant ideologies, methodologies, and procedures. The aspect of enunciation in historical discourse to which Certeau most often returns is, arguably, quotation. Indeed, history for him is basically a ‘‘heterology,’’ a ‘‘discourse about the other’’ (although it does not comprehend that other), and quoting different voices is a highly meaningful way of making historical descriptions as exhaustive as possible.34 Quotations, as we have already seen, can be components in the disposition, or ‘‘split structure,’’ of historiographic texts, but they also fall within the purview of enunciation, involving as they do a major shift in terms of who is speaking. The


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historian, no longer writing in his or her own name, reproduces the words of another. In discussing that shift, Certeau here again does not attempt a detailed dissection of its realization, but rather signals (in a note) the use to which historians may put such devices as ‘‘indirect speech’’ and ‘‘quotation marks.’’ 35 However, unlike Genette, he is not concerned with distinguishing among the diverse ways of transmitting the ‘‘other’s words,’’ such as in ‘‘narrativized,’’ ‘‘reported,’’ and ‘‘transposed’’ speeches.36 (Elsewhere, Certeau focuses on the function of quotations in historiography, describing them as the ‘‘absolute weapon of make believe.’’) 37 Indeed, the historian’s recourse to documents ‘‘produces reliability’’: it ‘‘guarantees’’ (or ‘‘validates’’) the knowledge that the historian supplies and thereby brings about a powerful ‘‘reality effect.’’ In other words, quotations enable historians to endow their texts with the attribute Certeau holds to be essential in scholarly discourse: credibility (or, in the case of historical research, ‘‘referential credibility’’).38 Certeau would later define his endeavor as an attempted ‘‘anthropology of credibility,’’ the scope of which would extend from the ‘‘so-called ‘superstitions’ to the sciences and the media.’’ 39 As the passages I have just examined show, his program was already in place by the early s, even though it was limited then to the specific fields of religion and historiography. Interestingly, Certeau does not confine his analysis of quotations in historical discourse to the way in which that inserted material reinforces the plausibility of the historian’s account. He also mentions the capacity of such material to ‘‘mess up’’ what the historian has patiently staged, to ‘‘slowly erode’’ the ‘‘organizing concepts’’ on which the historiographic enterprise is based. Certeau shows how in La Catalogne dans l’Espagne moderne, for instance, Vilar links the mercantilism of the Catalan ruling class with the nationalism ‘‘used by that class in order to establish political domination’’ even as he introduces documentary evidence indicating that Catalan nationalism also originated ‘‘in the unhappy consciousness of a threatened nation.’’ Vilar’s quotations thus effectively ‘‘displace the initial staging’’ of his basic argument, albeit without leading to any modification of it.40 Admittedly,Certeau did not assume—as (some) American deconstructionists were starting to do in the early s—that rhetoric necessarily undercuts logic, in this case, that the documentary evidence on which historians rely to bolster their accounts is bound to turn against them, confounding the thesis it is supposed to uphold. His analysis of the ambiguous role of the documents in Vilar’s work merely shows that examining a system need not be restricted to



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describing its smooth, ‘‘correct’’ functioning, but may also consider any elements that perturb it by generating ‘‘noise’’ and drawing attention to textual mechanisms that should have operated silently. The third aspect of historiographic enunciation that Certeau explores is its vous—the readers to whom such texts are implicitly addressed. As Philippe Lejeune has argued vis-à-vis autobiography—that the names of author, narrator, and main ‘‘characters’’ establish an ‘‘autobiographical pact’’— Certeau sees historiography as entailing an ‘‘enunciative contract between addresser and addressee.’’ 41 The terms of that contract are ‘‘pedagogical’’ and ‘‘institutional,’’ with historians tacitly advising their readers, ‘‘I am about to teach you . . . what you do not know,’’ and the text you are about to read was written not by me but ‘‘by the things themselves.’’ 42 Although Certeau took the figure of historiography’s readers no further in Histoire et psychanalyse, his stress on the pedagogical side of the contract suggests that the audience he had in mind was the ‘‘general public’’: people interested in the past and desiring (more) information about it, who trust historians to report, with as little meddling as possible, ‘‘what actually happened.’’ In L’écriture, however, he insists that historical discourse is also addressed to a smaller group of specialists: the ‘‘peers’’ or ‘‘colleagues’’ who ‘‘grade the text according to scientific criteria that are different from the public’s’’ and ‘‘decisive’’ for its reception as a scholarly work.43 Such components of historiographic enunciation as footnotes and references to prior research inscribe that specialized, professional reader who will presumably assess whether the game has been played by the rules, and how well. Regardless of the addressee’s competence, though, what interests Certeau is the role played by the addresser’s ‘‘place’’ in the ‘‘enunciative contract.’’ Although he does not take up the subject of the paratext, he does point out that such information about the author as his or her title of ‘‘professor’’ or membership in ‘‘a learned society,’’ provided along with the book, contributes to the establishment of that pact.44 Indeed, however differently readers may interpret such titles as ‘‘professor,’’ they can hardly avoid making some value judgment on the basis of that occupational identity. The author’s name and ‘‘social membership’’ thus help to shape the reader’s reception of the text, underscoring once again the epistemological effect of ‘‘place’’ on the status of historiographic discourse. In contrast to the frequency of his recourse to various aspects of enunciation, Certeau devotes relatively little attention to the related issue of focalization, or the ‘‘focus of perception,’’ 45 in historiography. He does not


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examine in a theoretical manner the mediation, prism, or point of view through which historical data may be regulated and channeled to the reader; or rather, in conflating the questions of voice and focalization, he treats the addresser’s ‘‘place’’ as an element of the text’s enunciation.Yet, as poeticians will notice, there are a few passages in Certeau’s work that pertain to ‘‘perspective’’ in the spatial, perceptual sense of narrative theory. Those passages deal more with individual authors and texts than with historical discourse as a genre, however. In his study of Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil, for example, Certeau mentions that Léry often limits his descriptions to what he and his fellow travelers have actually observed. Such restraint can be significant, as when Léry confines his account of a Tupi celebration (which included naked dancing women) to what he first hears, then sees from outside through a small opening in the hut wall, and finally witnesses upon entering the hut. Certeau goes so far as to compare this scene with the famous episode in A la recherche du temps perdu when the sexual encounter between Charlus and Jupien is relayed through the limited viewpoint of the narrator, who—from behind a door—can only hear ‘‘violent,’’ ‘‘inarticulate’’ sounds that seem ‘‘devoid of meaning.’’ 46 Of course, for Certeau, the fact that Léry can eavesdrop on the natives is not merely a perceptual matter; it also involves knowledge, and thus power. Léry’s gaze, however obstructed at first, eventually imposes itself on the celebrating Tupi just as it does everywhere else on the earth it ‘‘scours’’ in order to construct a ‘‘representation of it.’’ 47 While his discussion of viewpoint in Léry’s narrative does not relate directly to historiography, Certeau’s analysis here did anticipate the attention to anthropological discourse later paid by scholars such as James Clifford, with his work on the ‘‘field study’’ genre. For, like Léry, anthropologists travel to observe, which (as anthropology’s critics have argued) always involves a privileged perspective; regardless of their sympathies, such researchers cannot help but assign the ‘‘object’’ position to the cultures they study and subject to their conceptual grids and interpretive schemes.48 Certeau takes a similar stance in his essays on Foucault, especially in terms of Surveiller et punir, where Foucault’s treatment of the panopticon emerges as ‘‘itself theoretically panoptical’’ when he ‘‘sees everything and becomes able to elucidate everything.’’ In order to achieve such comprehensiveness, Foucault relies on three types of ‘‘optical figures,’’ according to Certeau: ‘‘representational,’’ ‘‘analytic,’’ and ‘‘figurative’’ ‘‘tableaux’’ that repre-



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sent ‘‘exemplary narratives’’; lists of ‘‘rules and principles’’; and iconographic documents, such as ‘‘engravings and photographs.’’ 49 In his recourse to the very devices whose functioning he is investigating, Foucault surveys his terrain much as the prison guard does from a window of the panopticon. Yet Certeau, whose own procedures for textual analysis here again resemble the deconstructionist’s, does not conclude that Foucault’s project fails because it is inconsistent, with its rhetoric undermining its logic. On the contrary, he regards Foucault as placing himself in the position of overseeing observer only to expose the epistemic claim to such oversight. His ‘‘panoptical fiction’’ is therefore a ‘‘Trojan horse,’’ purposely introduced into the citadel of knowledge for the sake (and the pleasure) of subverting current scientific practice.50 Whether we buy that argument or not, the fact remains that Certeau raises an important question here (as do Clifford and other critics of disciplinary discourse), namely, whether scholars can escape their overseeing position and how they might do so without reassuming the control they claim to renounce.51

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Certeau’s contribution to the poetics of historiography includes few remarks on diction in the specific works of individual authors, as opposed to the documentary discourse on which he wrote whole chapters, analyzing the different types of ‘‘mystic sentences,’’ for example, or the devices of ‘‘blasphemy,’’ ‘‘obscenity,’’ and ‘‘mockery’’ in the ‘‘discourse of possession.’’ 52 He also asserted that a comprehensive analysis would have to include intellectual practices and account for their ‘‘style,’’ that is, the ‘‘way of doing’’ that characterizes a scientist or a group of scientists, as does the ‘‘Euclidian,’’ ‘‘Cartesian,’’ or ‘‘vectorian’’ style in mathematical writing.53 However, style here indicates a certain manner of conducting intellectual operations and does not correspond to diction’s sense in poetics or rhetoric as some combination of word choice, speech level, and sentence pattern. Certeau did not, to my knowledge, attempt to describe the style of historical discourse in this more traditional sense (at least not to the extent that he did with enunciation), so his occasional comments in that regard apply only to a particular historian or text rather than to historiography as a genre with its own distinctive stylistic attributes in addition to its enunciative earmarks. One such comment, pertaining to Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire, concerns what Certeau saw as a recurrent feature of his syntax: the use of negative and restrictive constructions like ça n’existe pas, il n’y a pas, and il n’y a que. Those constructions, having the effect of closing the argument, trigger two oppo-


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site responses in readers, who, faced with ‘‘mandatory paths’’ that leave only ‘‘one way out,’’ either ‘‘rebel’’ or ‘‘go along.’’ 54 Certeau makes similar observations about a specific aspect of Foucault’s vocabulary: the proliferation of terms like tools, techniques, apparatus, mechanisms, and machineries with which Foucault designates the ‘‘silent agents of history.’’ 55 Yet this ‘‘instability of the terminology’’ is not a weakness, according to Certeau, since it relates directly to the nature of Foucault’s project. Indeed, that project consists in describing the operations of an anonymous, ‘‘opaque’’ power, and the use of a wide range of synonyms to label it points to a concrete problem of textualization: the problem of what to call practices that are nonverbal and that have generally remained nameless.56 For the poetician, the interest of such comments lies in the fact that they proceed from the ‘‘bottom up,’’ that is, from identifying a certain feature of writing to examining how that feature inscribes a larger problematic. Certeau grounds his examination of Veyne’s and Foucault’s ‘‘art of thinking’’ on specific aspects of their ‘‘art of doing,’’ thus demonstrating that style or, more precisely, diction (‘‘choice of words’’) is not a finishing touch to a text (not even to a ‘‘scientific’’ text) but an integral part of its very fabric. Poeticians who do not assume that texts always function smoothly will also notice Certeau’s attention to reading, notably, his emphasis on reader resistance, whether to a text that is constraining (as in Veyne’s case) or to one that is imprecise (as in Foucault’s). For Certeau, in short, rhetorical strategies cannot predictably shape reading; however hard writers may work at coercing readers, there are no obligatory responses to the discursive moves they make. I have so far dwelled mostly on the descriptive side of Certeau’s analysis of historical discourse. That analysis also has its prescriptive aspects, one of which I want to briefly review in bringing my discussion to an end, if not to a close.We have seen how Certeau repeatedly calls for an examination of the role played by ‘‘practices’’ in the historiographic endeavor. However, his appeal is directed not only toward the epistemologist—who should stop focusing exclusively on the ‘‘ideas’’ in a work and look more closely at how they have been produced and textualized—but also targets the scholar whose text, more often than not, fails to include any reflection on the schemes and procedures it deploys. Thus, in an essay written in the aftermath of May , Certeau deplores the fact that any professor would ‘‘spend (kill) time presenting results and not explaining, through a collective praxis, how he has obtained them, something that would captivate his students.’’ 57 Elsewhere,



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he accuses those whose specialties encompass ‘‘everyday practices’’ (specifically mentioning Foucault, Bourdieu, Vernant, and Detienne) of occulting their own ‘‘ways of doing,’’ particularly the ‘‘conditions and rules of production’’ that have shaped their discourse.58 Bourdieu, for example, whose research frequently takes up ‘‘practice’’ in investigating the ‘‘explicit rules’’ and ‘‘implicit principles’’ that govern marriage, say, in the French province of Béarn, does not state his own rules and principles, such as the ‘‘assumption of coherence’’ he makes in describing the ‘‘habitus’’ of a group, or the ability to understand ‘‘what a society is without being aware of it’’ that he grants the researcher. Bourdieu’s discourse, for Certeau, thus ‘‘conceals what it knows,’’ as it does not ultimately turn on itself to examine and question its own postulates and strategies.59 Certeau’s demand that scholarly texts include a self-reflexive component has been repeatedly taken up over the past twenty years by others in disciplines ranging from sociology and anthropology to literary criticism.60 History has not remained far behind, the most theoretically minded members of the profession having contributed significantly to the literature on ‘‘selfconsciousness.’’ Thus Robert Berkhofer, in his study of history as ‘‘text and discourse,’’ devotes a whole chapter to ‘‘Reflexive (Con)Textualizations,’’ urging his colleagues to become more self-reflexive about their ‘‘rhetoric,’’ ‘‘politics,’’ ‘‘ethics,’’ and their ‘‘view of history,’’ as well as the ‘‘genre’’ they adopt and the ‘‘institutions’’ that employ them.61 Whether such self-reflexivity is even attainable is, of course, open to debate. Berkhofer assumes so in drawing up his agenda, whereas other scholars, notably, Stanley Fish, contend that it is not, because one cannot ‘‘achieve a distance on one’s own beliefs.’’ 62 Yet the task of the poetician is not to add to this discussion from a theoretical perspective; it is to ask whether historians now write in a selfreflexive manner and, if some do, how the texts they produce inscribe that self-consciousness. In short, it is to determine whether there are now alternatives to ‘‘historical discourse,’’ as Certeau and Berkhofer describe it, and to assess the difference(s) that such alternatives display. As Mark Poster notes, Certeau himself exposed historiography’s lack, but he did not say ‘‘what sort of a discourse’’ historians should now produce or how to textualize their awareness of social membership and what technical apparatus they are supposed to develop.63 Writing some twenty years after Certeau’s critique, Berkhofer cannot find works that meet his stiff requirements for ‘‘reflexive (con)textualization’’ either; he must content him-


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self with listing a few examples of ‘‘experimental’’ historiography—texts that play with viewpoint (e.g., Richard Price’s Alabi’s World), with typeface and editing (e.g., Robert Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan), or with the distinction between historical and fictional discourses, as in Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations). But, poeticians may ask, how should historians proceed in order to meet Certeau’s (and Berkhofer’s) demand for historiographic reflexivity? What should they do concretely to establish their awareness of their own rhetoric, politics, ethics, view of history, and social/institutional membership? If they were to find ways of consistently demonstrating such an awareness, moreover, would their texts remain readable? In other words, could historiographers repeatedly show the political/ethical/ideological consequences of, say, a three-part organization or the first-person singular voice, or of drawing on photography as documentary evidence, while keeping their readers interested? Furthermore, as Antoine Prost asks, wouldn’t a reflection on one’s own endeavor call for a reflection on that reflection, producing an endless regression of metatexts? 64 Although Certeau may not have addressed these questions himself, posing them now would not have been possible without his prior analysis and critique of historical discourse, especially his appeals for practice to always be taken into account. Indeed, it is in the name of practice that we poeticians ask how self-reflexivity should be textualized— provided, of course, that it is attainable. Notes Tom Conley, ‘‘Afterword: A Creative Swarm,’’ in Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis,  []), –; quotation from .  Certeau’s ‘‘Marches dans la ville’’ thus appears as ‘‘Walking in the City’’ in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (New York, ), –; Certeau is also cited several times in the papers and attendant discussions of Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York, ), by, among others, James Clifford, Lidia Curtis, John Fiske, Meaghan Morris, Linda Charnes, Elspeth Probyn, Graeme Turner, and Angela McRobbie. For an assessment of the relations between Certeau and cultural studies, see Ian Buchanan, ‘‘De Certeau and Cultural Studies,’’ New Formations  (): –.  Philippe Carrard, Poetics of the New History: French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier (Baltimore, ).  I say ‘‘essays,’’ in the plural, because Certeau’s ‘‘Production du lieu,’’ in L’écriture de l’histoire

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







 

  

   

 

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

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(Paris, ), which concerns the process of textualization proper, had two earlier, briefer versions; see Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Faire de l’histoire: Problèmes de méthodes et problèmes de sens,’’ Recherches de science religieuse  (): –; and ‘‘L’opération historique,’’ in Nouveaux problèmes, vol.  of Faire de l’histoire, ed. Jacques le Goff and Pierre Nora (Paris, ), –. For an overview of the state of historiography at the time, see all three volumes of Faire de l’histoire: Nouveaux problèmes, Nouvelles approches, and Nouveaux objets. On the methodological debates, see, for example, Pierre Goubert, Clio parmi les hommes: Recueil d’articles (The Hague, ); and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Le territoire de l’historien (Paris, ). On epistemology, the only contribution to come then from a practicing historian was Paul Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire: Essai d’épistémologie (Paris, ). For structuralist analyses of press reports, see Violette Morin, ‘‘Des rites et des hommes: Mort d’Edith Piaf et de Jean Cocteau,’’ Communications  (): –; and Groupe Mu, ‘‘Les biographies de Paris-Match,’’ Communications  (): –. Roland Barthes, ‘‘Le discours de l’histoire,’’ Informations sur les sciences sociales  (): –. This article was reprinted in the above-mentioned  issue of Poétique. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . As Luce Giard has painstakingly established in her annotated bibliography for Le voyage mystique: Michel de Certeau (Paris, ), Certeau often wrote several versions of the same essay, modifying it in light of both his audience and new research on his topic. For the sake of homogeneity, I rely here on my own translations of the versions that figure in the latest editions of Certeau’s writings. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Ibid., . Roger Chartier, ‘‘Stratégies et tactiques: De Certeau et les ‘arts de faire,’ ’’ in Au bord de la falaise: L’histoire entre certitudes et inquiétudes (Paris, ), –; quotation from . There has been very little dialogue between Ricoeur and Certeau. For Ricoeur on Certeau’s view of history as writing, see Temps et récit (Paris, ), ; and on Certeau’s theory of the past as difference, as well as on his reading of Freud, see Le temps raconté (Paris, ), – and  n. . To my knowledge, Certeau never commented on Ricoeur’s work. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Ibid., . The emphasis throughout is Certeau’s, who liked to highlight selected terms by italicizing them. Ibid., . Ibid., . Certeau, like (most of ) his fellow historians in the s and s, would frequently discuss ‘‘narrative’’ without ever defining it expressly. Yet the implied definition in these passages accords with the poetician’s; Gerald Prince, for example, in Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative (New York, ), defines it as ‘‘at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time sequence’’ (). See Paul Ricoeur, ‘‘L’éclipse du récit,’’ in Temps et récit, –. François Furet, ‘‘De l’histoire-récit à l’histoire-problème’’ (), in L’atelier de l’histoire (Paris, ), –; quotations from . Michel de Certeau, Arts de faire, vol.  of L’invention du quotidien (Paris, ), .


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 Ibid., .  Michel de Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction (Paris, ), .  Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Micro-Techniques and Panoptic Discourse: A Quid Pro Quo,’’ in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, ), . I am using this edition because, according to Giard, Certeau wrote this essay in English.  See, for example, Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling (Oxford, ); Didier Coste, Narrative as Communication (Minneapolis, ); Donald McCloskey, If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Experience (Chicago, ); K. Montgomery Hunter, Doctor’s Stories: The Narrative Structure of Medical Knowledge (Princeton, ); and Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature, ed. Christopher Nash (London, ).  Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, , . Certeau’s metaphoric writing here evokes ‘‘French theory’’ of the s and s, especially that of Lacan and Barthes. Translated literally, feuilleté means ‘‘foliated’’ when applied to a type of rock, ‘‘puff ’’ or ‘‘flaky’’ when applied to a type of dough. Commenting on the same ‘‘split structure,’’ the American historian Jack H. Hexter describes historical texts, more prosaically, as having a certain ‘‘look’’— the result of separating the historian’s account of the ‘‘happenings of the past’’ from his or her ‘‘citation to the records’’ of that past; see his ‘‘Footnotes, Quotations, Name Lists, and Hypothetical Subjunctives, or the Microrhetoric of History,’’ in The History Primer (New York, ), –; quotations from .  Hexter, History Primer, . Literary texts can of course be ‘‘split’’ when published in the form of ‘‘critical’’ or ‘‘annotated’’ editions. But the footnotes included in these cases were never ‘‘meant’’ to be there. Some were added by an editor, others by the author, playing the role of an editor and providing information and/or comment about his or her own text.  See A. J. Greimas and Ernest Landowski, ‘‘Les parcours du savoir,’’ in Introduction à l’analyse du discours en sciences sociales, ed. Greimas and Landowski (Paris, ), –; and Hayden White, ‘‘The Fictions of Factual Representation,’’ in Topics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore, ), –.  See Roger Chartier, ‘‘Figures rhétoriques et représentations historiques’’ (), in Au bord de la falaise, –; and Krzysztof Pomian, ‘‘Histoire et fiction,’’ Le débat  (): –. The first version of Chartier’s article (published in the Italian journal Storia della storiografia) included the subtitle ‘‘Quatre questions à Hayden White.’’  Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, .  See Hervé Martin, ‘‘Michel de Certeau et l’institution historique,’’ in Luce Giard, Jacques Revel, and Hervé Martin, Histoire, mystique et politique: Michel de Certeau (Grenoble, ), –, esp. .  Michel de Certeau, ‘‘Une épistémologie de transition: Paul Veyne,’’ Annales E.S.C.  (): –; quotations from . (This is a review of Veyne’s Comment on écrit l’histoire.)  Ibid., –. As I have shown in Poetics of the New History (–), studies published in the s sometimes staged a ‘‘first person’’ far more subjective than the ‘‘researcher’s ‘I,’ ’’ especially when the historian would be intent from the outset on advocating for the underprivileged against diverse forms of oppression, as Le Roy Ladurie was in Montaillou () and Le carnaval de romans ().



   

    

    

 





   

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  

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René Rémond, ‘‘Le contemporain du contemporain,’’ in Essais d’égo-histoire, ed. Pierre Nora (Paris, ), –; quotations from . Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Here, Certeau draws on Emile Benveniste’s ‘‘De la subjectivité dans le langage,’’ in Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris, ), –. See Gérard Genette, ‘‘Discours du récit,’’ in Figures III (Paris, ), –, esp. –. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . For a detailed analysis of Certeau’s view on (and use) of quotations, see Jeremy Ahearne, ‘‘Voices in the Text,’’ in Michel de Certeau: Interpretation and Its Other (Stanford, ), –. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire,  n. Genette, ‘‘Discours,’’ –. Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, . Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, –. Michel de Certeau, Foreword [to the  ed.], in La culture au pluriel (Paris,  []), . For a challenge to Certeau’s notion of ‘‘credibility’’ and a defense of the attainability of ‘‘historical truth,’’ see Alain Guerreau, Le féodalisme: Un horizon théorique (Paris, ), –. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, , . See Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris, ), –; and Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse, –. Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse, . On the paratext of the historiographic work, see Gérard Noiriel, ‘‘ ‘L’univers historique’: Une collection d’histoire à travers son paratexte,’’ in La ‘‘crise’’ de l’histoire (Paris, ), –. Gérard Genette, Nouveau discours du récit (Paris, ), . See Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, –, where he quotes the whole passage from Proust’s text. It is one that often figures in studies of narrative because it supplies a textbook example of ‘‘internal focalization’’; see, for example, Genette, ‘‘Discours,’’ . Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire, . Certeau writes that knowledge ‘‘ ‘piétine’ et parcourt ‘oculairement’ la terre,’’ thus personifying it and punning on the French verbs piétiner (to trample underfoot, trudge through, or step on) and parcourir (to travel over or skim). See, in particular, James Clifford, ‘‘Traveling Cultures’’ and ‘‘Spatial Practices: Fieldwork, Travel, and the Disciplining of Anthropology,’’ in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, ), – and –, respectively. Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse, , . One of Certeau’s essays on Foucault is tellingly titled ‘‘Le rire de Michel Foucault,’’ in Histoire et psychanalyse, –. Certeau also contrasts the position of the ‘‘overseer’’ to that of the ‘‘walker’’ in ‘‘Marches dans la ville,’’ in L’invention du quotidien, –. See Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIe–XVIIe siècle (Paris, ), –; and La possession de Loudon (Paris, ), –. Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse, . Certeau,‘‘Une épistémologie de transition,’’ . Certeau, Histoire et psychanalyse, .


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 Ibid., .  Certeau, ‘‘Les universités devant la culture de masse’’ (), in La culture au pluriel, .  Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, –.  Ibid., , , . Bourdieu has never, to my knowledge, replied to Certeau’s critique, nor did Foucault or the other scholars mentioned here as specialists of ‘‘everyday practices.’’  For a survey, see George E. Marcus, ‘‘On Ideologies of Reflexivity in Contemporary Efforts to Remake the Human Sciences,’’ Poetics Today  (): –.  Robert F. Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge, MA, ), –.  Stanley Fish, ‘‘Critical Self-Consciousness; Or, Can We Know What We’re Doing?,’’ in Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literature and Legal Studies (Durham, ), –; quotation from .  Mark Poster, ‘‘The Question of Agency: Michel de Certeau and the History of Consumerism,’’ diacritics  (): –; quotation from .  See Antoine Prost, Douze leçons sur l’histoire (Paris, ), .

History as a Kind of Writing. Michel de Certeau and the Poetics of Historiography

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