Certeau’s now classic analyses of the ordinary processes of creative appropriation are well-known. He develops in L’Invention du quotidien a series of models designed to bring into focus dispersed and unrecognised forms of creativity. Readers are shown not passively to receive a text, but to produce their own secondary ‘text’ on the basis of that primary text, recombining and ‘metaphorizing’ (transporting) its elements so as to generate something new. Those who inhabit the towns built by planners and architects are shown, as it were, to create their own places within those spaces. The same might be said of those who visit the exhibitions of cultural institutions. Users ‘insinuate’ jarring or unpredictable elements into the cultural systems they negotiate (television schedules, literary canons, factory regulations, recipes), thereby overdetermining those elements and filling the systems with microscopic fissures and rifts. As speaking subjects take hold of a preexisting linguistic system and bend it to their purposes while simultaneously following its laws, so Certeau’s ordinary subjects are not simply moulded by the regulations and symbolic structures of social life. These constitute instead the material on which their creative practices of ‘reemployment’, ‘metaphorization’, ‘insinuation’ and ‘utterance’ can be put to work, with greater or lesser effect.54
I have already suggested how the first volume of L’Invention du
quotidien – Certeau’s best-known book for anglophone readers – tends to
present these processes as essentially individualised practices (at one point Certeau even compares them to ‘wandering lines’ drawn by autistic children (IQ 57 [34]). This is not, however, the whole story, and they need to be framed in the context of Certeau’s other writings if their significance for cultural policy
53
In particular, one could underline Certeau’s major contribution to the process by which cultural policy research now produces, as Antoine Hennion has put it, an ‘infinitely more varied and specific representation’ of diverse ‘publics’ than in the period when such representations were produced through ‘the combination of the theories of critical sociology [i.e., broadly speaking, the sociology of culture inspired by Bourdieu] and the results of global statistical surveys’ (Hennion, ‘Le grand écart’, p. 13).
54
See the first volume of L’Invention du quotidien; for an overview, see Ahearne, Michel de
thinking is to be grasped. In L’Ordinaire de la communication [‘The Everyday Nature of Communication’], a report commissioned by the Minister for Culture of the new Socialist government in 1982 and written in collaboration with Luce Giard, the agents of these practices of creative appropriation figure essentially as user-groups (members of informal musical associations, youth clubs, immigrant groups, local computer clubs, etc.), themselves subtly organised around and dynamised by particular members who function as informal cultural intermediaries.55 We have seen how Certeau aims both to facilitate such processes of self-organisation, and to ‘represent’ them in such a way that they become a graspable and credible object for governmental support at national and local levels (rather than a dimly perceived and nebulous ‘no-man’s land’ alongside the more manifest stars of the cultural world). This broader framing of the analytic models developed in L’Invention du quotidien also counters the alternately neo-liberal or anarchistic readings that the book can encourage when taken on its own. If individuals have the resources to create their own spaces within the social order, so such arguments run, then government interference is what must be resisted. L’Ordinaire de la communication, by contrast, stresses the difficulties that impede the formation of the groupings in question (administrative indifference, lack of facilities or appropriate publicity, lack of information, linguistic and cultural barriers), as well as the significant impact that relatively minor provision can make to the dynamics of their development (access to public spaces, local publications, user-friendly databases, consultancy, etc.). Governmental cultural policy thereby acquires in this respect a role that is both fundamental and ‘delicate’ (PP 195 [117]):
The daily murmur of this secret creativity provides the necessary foundation, and the only chance of success, for any state intervention. But the existence of such an activity on the part of users can only be the postulate of a policy of stimulation and not its effect, however desired the latter might be. Hence the importance of locating this creativity and of recognising its places and its role.56
If such creativity is not ‘located’ and materially ‘recognised’, it may wither away or be stifled. Equally, however, it may be rendered sterile and will not attract grass-roots participation if subjected to univocal governmental direction or symbolic exploitation. L’Ordinaire de la communication thus advocates ‘compensatory and transitive interventions adjusted to given situations’.57
55
The letter of 28 October 1982 from Jacques Sallois (Jack Lang’s cabinet director) giving Certeau and Giard their brief is included at the beginning of the published report: L’Ordinaire
de la communication (Paris: Dalloz, 1983). The sections of the report written by Certeau and
Giard may be found at PP 163-224 [89-139]. 56
PP 172 [96 – trans. mod.]. 57
While, as we will see below, its propositions are envisaged as part of an overall governmental strategy, it describes how
The partial character, tactical in a certain sense, of the analyses and measures that are put forward here refers to the schema of a democratic society in which the state itself plays only a partial role, without for all that believing itself to be weakened or dispossessed of its legitimate powers. (PP 174 [97]).
The practical considerations of L’Ordinaire de la communication thus
complicate the famous distinction between the strategies of institutions and the tactics of ordinary users as developed in L’Invention du quotidien. In order to enable localised tacticians to consolidate their own (micro-)group strategies as described in the previous section, the ‘strategies’ of cultural policy-makers must themselves incorporate locally adjusted ‘tactics’. The relations between ‘strategic’ cultural institutions and their ‘tactical’ users cannot in this framework be reduced to a clear-cut opposition.
Certeau’s underlying reflection on institutions has received less attention than his analyses of those creative practices that elude, resist or skip around institutional constraints.58 In the context of his cultural policy thinking, however, we must explore how those practices depend on the institutions against which they seem to work (they are, in a sense, parasitical upon the institutional configurations on which they feed). This will show the peculiar kind of institutional reponsibility that falls in Certeau’s framework to the architects of a national cultural policy. For the purposes of exposition, we can isolate three moments in Certeau’s thinking on institutions.
We have seen already how the events of May 1968 signified for Certeau a crisis whereby those institutions that were supposed to ‘represent’ the social body had ceased to do so:
A schism between the irreducibility of conscience and the objectivity of social institutions appeared to me at once as the denounced and unacceptable fact, that is, as the current problem of thought and action.59 The protestors had in Certeau’s account demanded a system of representation that would indeed be ‘representative’ insofar as it would ‘give speech to everyone’ and be ‘true’ (PP 75 [38]). Insofar as Certeau declares his solidarity
58
For some brief but helpful indications, see Luce Giard, ‘Mystique et politique, ou l’institution comme objet second’, in Giard, Martin & Revel, Histoire, mystique et politique.
Michel de Certeau (Grenoble : Jérôme Millon, 1991), pp. 9-45 (Giard addresses the question
of the ‘institution’ as such at pp. 42-4); and Pierre Mayol, ‘Michel de Certeau, l’historien et la culture ordinaire’, p. 201.
59
with this question of ‘conscience’, we might describe this first moment in his reflection on institutions as an aspiration towards a more ‘coherent’ or transparent representative apparatus for the negotiation of political and cultural conflict.
As suggested above, Certeau’s subsequent experience of politico-cultural institutions would direct this aspiration towards less direct forms of expression. His work for the Ministry of Culture and the Cultural Commission of the Sixth Plan led him to contrast the explicit discourse of governmental bodies (an ‘impotent language’) and their implicit functioning (obeying ‘powers that have become invisible’) (CAP 190 [121]).60 Universities likewise looked similarly unlikely to become transparently representative institutions, ‘managed by an anonymous and saturated administration – an enormous body, sick with inertia, opaque to itself, living a complex life that is nowhere ever explained, that has become insensitive to higher directives, to inoculations of theory, or to outside stimuli’ (CAP 114 [60]). The schism denounced in May 1968 as a political anomaly had come by the mid-1970s to appear as something altogether more structural. Indeed, inspired no doubt by the beleaguered predicament of the Ministry of Culture itself in the government, Certeau describes how the ‘invisible powers’ of the State itself were fragmented into equally invisible competing units, taking effective decision-making away from politically accountable or even rationally technocratic directives.61 Simply to continue denouncing this state of affairs from a position of detached observation would be politically ineffectual. Within this ‘moment’ of his reflection, Certeau looks instead to consider this quasi-structural opacification of institutions as a framework within which to adjust forms of action. Engagement in these institutions provided, at the very least, a tactical purchase on the ‘real’. This could be developed along more strategic lines through coordination in ‘transversal networks’ with like-minded agents embedded in other institutions.62 Working as a kind of discreet alien presence within established institutions, such networks could serve within limits to direct resources to particular projects and experiments, or to circumvent political and administrative obstacles. Clearly, this was a style of action developed in a political and institutional context (the conservatively and neo-liberally governed France of the 1970s) inimical to the cultural policy agenda nurtured by Certeau. Nevertheless, it is striking that he did not advocate any simple rejection of institutional engagement: on the contrary, this was seen as a condition of effective action (providing notably essential points of leverage, flows of information, and proxy ‘representation’ for those outside such institutions).
60
I develop further the contrast between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’ cultural policies in chapter four of the present study, with reference to the work of Régis Debray (see below, 4.1).
61
M. de Certeau, ‘Actions culturelles et stratégie politique’, p. 353. 62
But at a deeper level, institutions are not, in Certeau’s reflection, apparatuses that are simply used by a subject who remains external to them. On the contrary, institutions (language, the family, school, of course, but also the broad sphere of cultural policy institutions) are fundamental to the very self- constitution of the human subject. Certeau underlines this ‘inaugural’ function in a report he wrote for the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1984, and looks to ‘give back to the term “institution” the sense of that which sets up a place, creates, and enables, i.e. the active sense of that which institutes’.63 The key point in this respect, however, is that it is not a single institution that, for Certeau, ‘sets up a subject’s own space’.64 As we saw above with the example of the relations between a child, his school and his family, the subject’s conditional freedom emerges through the fact of being situated within a plurality of relations (Certeau would make the same point in a 1985 report for the OECD on the education of social minority groups).65 Autonomy is made possible through a play (jeu) among heterogeneous points of reference, the a priori indeterminable room for manoeuvre opened up by their very plurality. Institutions ‘in the plural’ are thus not, as a naïve belief in spontaneity might assert, opposed to human liberty, but are on the contrary conceived by Certeau as its necessary condition. It thus becomes a basic overall responsibility for cultural policy to foster what Certeau calls a ‘multilocation of culture’, maintaining ‘several types of cultural reference’, and developing a ‘play of different cultural authorities’ (ce jeu
d’instances culturelles différentes).66 Human subjects are thereby given a
multiplicity of sites or reference points through which to construct their itineraries and associations, and against which to situate themselves.
Certeau is not therefore, as some readings of his work might suggest, anti- institutional in any simple sense (though he was clearly hostile to efforts by any single institution to secure a monopolistic hold over the subjective life of its members). He makes the point semi-ironically in a paper given at the Amiens House of Culture in 1978, underlining that, while institutions may stifle the type of creative practices he is looking to champion, they also have a necessary role to play in its recognition and representation:
My goal is not to sack the libraries, to set fire to the museums and to shut the operas. But the overriding and sometimes exclusive importance given to the ‘great works’ and their diffusion in cultural animation is due to the fact that we are unable to discern the ‘creativity’ of the public, i.e. of ‘consumers’. Insufficient recognition has been given to the anonymous, fragmentary and ephemeral works of the millions of ordinary authors who
63
This report was published posthumously as M. de Certeau, ‘Le Sabbat Encyclopédique du Voir’, Esprit, 123, Feb 1987, pp. 66-82 (quotation from p. 78).
64
See Certeau’s remarks in Analyse et prévision, p. 105. 65
See ‘Economies ethniques’ (1985), republished in PP 225-71 (p. 234) [141-74 (p. 149)]. 66
do not frequent the Houses of Culture. I would like us to ask not just how to circulate Picasso and Stockhausen among ‘the people’, but also how to introduce into the Houses of Culture the genius, the practical thought and the wily intelligence of all those unknown authors.67
For an analytic overview placing these issues within an overall Certalian strategy for State cultural policy, we can turn, as it happens, to a text not written
by Certeau himself, but by Marc Guillaume in his report The Cultural
Imperative summarizing the recommendations of the ‘Long Term Culture’
working group of the Ninth Plan.68 Guillaume notes at the beginning of the report how Certeau’s writings provided major guidelines for his analyses, and it does not seem inappropriate to read the report as a suggestive extrapolation of Certeau’s reflection for the purposes of strategic cultural planning.69 Guillaume distinguishes three broad modes of intervention for the State. Firstly, it must manage its own institutions and their traditional social missions insofar as these constitute fundamental reference points where cultural contradictions are ‘crystallized’ and negotiated. Secondly, it must ‘attend to cultural diversity’ in such a way as to create the conditions in which a plurality of socio-cultural groupings set off from the structures of the State can pursue their own autonomous projects. Finally, in the context of political decentralisation, the republican State must remain an authority for appeal and arbitration when cultural professionals or associations are subject to ‘sectarian’ political pressure at local levels (an obvious case today would be the cultural policies pursued over the last decade by local authorities run by the extreme right National Front).70
This section of Guillaume’s text can itself be read as crystallizing admirably a framework that can be induced from Certeau’s oeuvre. However, what is most interesting is perhaps less this tripartite model in itself than the kinds of relations between its parts developed by Certeau in his writings. For, as is clear above in Certeau’s proposal for new uses for a House of Culture, that domain of cultural policy concerned with managing institutions is in his reflection multiply interconnected with the domain attending to the ordinary
67
M. de Certeau, ‘Manières de faire: la culture ordinaire’, in Peuple et Culture (ed.), Pour un
renouveau de la pensée sur l’action culturelle, Paris : Peuple et Culture and Amiens : Maison
de la Culture d’Amiens, 1978, pp. 70-78 (p. 77). 68
Commissariat Général du Plan (principal rapporteur – Marc Guillaume), L’Impératif
culturel. Rapport du groupe long terme culture (Paris : La Documentation française, 1983).
69
Ibid., p. 14; for further details concerning the collaboration between Guillaume and
Certeau, see M. Guillaume ‘Vers l’autre’, in L. Giard (ed.), Le Voyage mystique. Michel de
Certeau (Paris : Recherches de Science Religieuse/Cerf, 1988), pp. 181-6 (pp. 183-4); and
Dosse, Le Marcheur blessé, pp. 458-60. 70
L’Impératif culturel, pp. 78-83; these pages are available in English translation in Ahearne,
French Cultural Policy Debates, pp. 121-6. On National Front local cultural policies, see e.g.
expanses of cultural diversity. These connections can best be brought out if we take as our guiding light the notion of experimentation, crucial to Certeau’s cultural policy thinking, and explore its relations with his thinking on cultural institutions.
Certeau’s abiding concern was ‘to bring closer together the cultural provision of the major facilities and the real practices of culture and communication’ that characterised the users of those facilities.71 When asked to propose remedies for structural blockages affecting major cultural institutions, he would propose institutional experimentations along these lines. One example of this can be seen in his analysis of the situation confronting French universities at the beginning of the 1970s. We have just seen how French universities at the time had become for Certeau the very symbol of opaque institutions, unable to represent the interests voiced by students or wider society. Faced with a new kind of ‘mass’ clientele (elite students in France do not as a rule attend universities, and undergraduate students that could secure places in other institutions of higher education would increasingly do so), Certeau argued that university teachers should cease trying to ‘reproduce’ the programme they themselves had inherited. Instead of measuring simply the degree of student ‘resistance’ to this programme, they should use the questions and current interests of the students as the starting point for their teaching practice (what light can your knowledge shed on my questions about truth, political justice, economic activity, war, language, the cult of celebrity, understandings of nature, or whatever…). Crucially, this should not lead to an a priori identification with the students’ point of view (for otherwise the space of plurality opened up by the institution would collapse demagogically around a single pole). Instead, they should use these questions, born of current concerns, to ‘traverse’ experimentally with the students those corpuses of knowledge that the teachers had mastered as a result of their own studies. For Certeau, the massification of university recruitment did not therefore necessarily present a distraction from properly cultural concerns, but instead ‘designates for culture its proper definition by referring established knowledge to a practice of thought, and the