THE PRACTICE OF

EVERYDAY LIFE

Michel de Certeau

Translated by Steven F. Rendall

UNIVERSITY O F CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS To the ordinary man.

Ckrkclcy and Lor Angclcs. Cslifornu

To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless

thousands on the streets. In invoking here at the outset of my narratives

the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity,

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. 1 inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. What are

London. England
we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the

COPYRIGHT 1984 BY THE REGENTS OFTHE UNlVEllflTY O f CALIFORNIA rumble of history to license us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate

to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the

inspiring muses?

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of

Certeau, Michel de. societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect

The practice of everyday life.

representations, He squats now at the center of our scientific stages. The

Translation o f Arts de fairc. floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names

I.Social history-Addresses. essays, lectures.

1. Title.
and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary

HNkC4313 1984 909 83-18070

characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. The increasingly

ISBN 0-520-04750-8

sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
details-parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives that

formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the

stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. We witness the

advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city,

administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven

tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of

quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered

river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities

that belong to no one.

198 THE UNNAMA BLE
Beyond the signs that, from all sides, bring the connection of both
sexuality and death to writing into writing, one can ask whether the
historical movement that displaces the repressed figures-“In Freud’s
time, it was sexuality and moralism; now, it’s an unlimited technological
violence and an absurd death”’-is not rather the progressive revelation
of the model that articulated social practices and that comes to represen­
tation as its efficacity diminishes. The decadence of a civilization con­
structed on the power of writing against death is shown by the possibility
of writing what organized it. Only the end of an age makes it possible to
say what made it live, as if it had to die in order to become a book.
T o write (this book), then, is to be forced to march through enemy
territory, in the very area where loss prevails, beyond the protected
domain that had been delimited by the act of localizing death elsewhere.
It is to produce sentences with the lexicon of the mortal, in proximity to
and even within the space of death. It is to practice the relation between
enjoying and manipulating, in the in-between space where a loss (a
lapse) of the production of goods creates the possibility of an expectation
(a belief) without appropriation but already grateful. Since Mallarmb,
scriptural experience has deployed itself in the relation between the act
of moving forward and the death-dealing soil on which its wandering
leaves its track. I n this respect, the writer is also a dying man who is
trying t o speak. But in the death that his footsteps inscribe on a black
(and not blank) page, he knows and he can express the desire that
expects from the other the marvellous and ephemeral excess of surviving
through a n attention that it alters.
Indeterminate
“The anarchy of the chiaroscuro of
the everyday.”
Lukacs
a pluralist epistemology composed of a “multi­
T
HEORY FAVORS
plicity of points of view, each of them having roughly an equal
power of generality.” It is an art of “circulating along paths or
fibers,” an art of transportation and intersection; for theory progress is
a n “interlacing.” Depending on individual physiology, it is supposed to
lead to “a philosophy of communication without substance, that is, with
neither fixity nor reference.”’
But rational technics liquidates dogmatism in a less light-hearted way.
It resists the ifiterferences that create opacity and ambiguity in planning
projects or reductions to two dimensions. It has its own mode of opera­
tion, that of legibility and distinguishing between functions, on the page
where it can write them side by side, one after the other, in such a way
as to be able to transfer this image onto the ground or onto the faGade,
in cities or in machines.
The legibility of the functional relations between elements and the
reproduction of the model by enlargements and reliefs-these are the
two operational principles of technics. To be sure, they have taken a
road of an unlimited sophistication, responding to the diversification of
demand, itself moreover included within the system, put on cards, and
analytically distributed over a space whose essence (even inside the com­
puter)* is to be a re?dable artifact, an object open from end to end to the
survey of a n immobile eye. A strange chiasm: theory moves in the direc­
tion of the indeterminate, while technology moves toward the func­
tionalist distinction and in that way transforms everything and transforms
itself as well. As if the one sets out lucidly on the twisting paths of the
aleatory and the metaphoric,’ while the other tries desperately to sup­
pose that the utilitarian and functionalist law of its own mechanism is
“natural.”
I99
200 INDETERMINA TE
It is that which happens beneath technology and disturbs its operation
which interests us here. This is technology’s limit, which has long since
been noticed but to which we must give a significance other than the
delimitation of a no man’s land. This is a matter of actual practices.
Conceptual engineers are familiar with this sort of movement, which
they call “resistance” and which disturbs functionalist calculations (an
elitist form of bureaucratic structure). They cannot not perceive the
fictive character instilled in a n order by its relationship to everyday
reality.‘ But they must not acknowledge this relationship. It would be a
sort of I&se-majestCto talk ironically about this subject in offices, and
the guilty person would be cashiered.’ Do not touch this is a work of
art. Leaving this functionalist rationality to the proliferation of its
elegant euphemisms (euphemisms that persist everywhere in the dis­
course of administration and power), let us then return to the murmur­
ing of everyday practices.
They d o not form pockets in economic society. They have nothing in
common with these marginalities that technical organization quickly
integrates in order to turn them into signifiers and objects of exchange.
On the contrary, it is through them that an uncodeable difference
insinuates itself into the happy relation the system would like to have
with the operations it claims to administer. Far from being a local, and
thus classifiable, revolt, it is a common and silent, almost sheeplike
subversion-our own. I will point out only two symptoms: a “ubiquity”
of the place, and gaps in time. This will suggest that social spaces, which
are strptified, cannot be reduced to their unregulatable and constructable
surface and that avatars reintroduce the unthought element of the cir­
cumstantial into calculated time. There are illegibilities of the layered
depths in a single place, of ruses in action and of historical accidents.
The writing of these evocations is sketched out, ironically and fleetingly,
in graffiti, as if the bicycle painted on a wall, the insignia of a common
transit, detached itself and made itself available for indeterminate tours.6
Stratified places
The kind of difference that defines every place is not on the order of a
juxta-position but rather takes the form of imbricated strata. The ele­
ments spread out on the same surface can be enumerated; they are
available for analysis; they form a manageable surface. Every urban
“renovation” nonetheless prefers a tabula rasa on which to write in
INDETERMINA TE 20 1
cement the composition created in the laboratory on the basis of discrete
“needs” to which functional responses are to be made. The system also
produces need, the primary “substance” of this composition, by isolating
it. This unit is as neat and clean (propre) as digits are. Moreover, the
lack of satisfaction that defines each need calls for and justifies in advance
the construction that combines it with other needs. This is the logic of
production: ever since the eighteenth century, it has engendered its own
discursive and practical space, on the basis of points of concentration-
the office, the factory. the city. It rejects the relevance of places it does
not create.
However, beneath the fabricating and universal writing of technology,
opaque and stubborn places remain. The revolutions of history, economic
mutations, demographic mixtures lie in layers within it, and remain
there, hidden in customs, rites, and spatial practices. The legible dis­
courses that formerly articulated them have disappeared, or left only
fragments in language. This place, on its surface, seems to be a collage.
In reality, in its depth it is ubiquitous. A piling u p of hetereogeneous
places. Each one, like a deteriorating page of a book, refers to a different
mode of territorial unity, of socioeconomic distribution, of political con­
flicts and of identifying symbolism.
The whole, made u p of pieces that are not contemporary and still
linked to totalities that have fallen into ruins, is managed by subtle and
compensatory equilibria that silently guarantee complementarities. These
infinitesimal movements, multiform activities, are homologous to that
“boiling mass of electrons, protons, photons, . . . all entities whose prop­
erties are ill-defined and in perpetual interaction” by means of which,
according to RenC Thom, physical theory represents the universe. These
movements give the illusion, in a neighborhood or village, of “immobil­
ity.” An illusory inertia. This operation first became visible from that
point at which, from the distance of a class that has “distinguished” itself
from the rest, observation grasps only the relation between what it wants
t o produce and what resists it. The village, the neighborhood, the block
are moreover not the only things that make the fragments of hetero­
geneous strata function together. The smallest sentence in common lan­
guage works (marche) in the same way. Its semantic unity plays on
compensatory equilibria that are just as subtle, on which syntactical or
lexical analysis imposes a superficial framework, that of an “elite” that
takes its models for reality. It would be more appropriate to appeal to
the oneiric (but theoretical because it articulates practice) model evoked
- 202 INDETERMINA TE INDE TERMlNA TE 203

by Freud in discussing the city of Rome, whose epochs all survive in the
surne place, intact and mutually interacting?
The place is a palimpsest. Scientific analysis knows only its most
recent text; and even then the latter is for science no more than the
result of its epistemological decisions, its criteria and its goals. Why
should it then be surprising that operations conceived in relation to this
reconstitution have a “fictive” character and owe their (provisional?)
success less to their perspicacity than to their power of breaking down
the complexion of these interrelations between disparate forces and
times.
a n occasion, that is, o n casual time, are thus, scattered all along dura­
tion, in the situation of acts of thought. Permanent practices of thought.
Thus to eliminate the unforeseen o r expel it from calculation as an
illegitimate accident and a n obstacle to rationality is to interdict the
possibility of a living and “mythical” practice of the city. It is to leave its
inhabitants only the scraps of a programming produced by the power of
the other and altered by the event. Casual time is what is narrated in the
actual discourse of the city: an indeterminate fable, better articulated on
the metaphorical practices and stratified places than on the empire of
the evident in functionalist technocracy.

Casual time
Another figure of the transportation of planning projects in the direction
of what they d o not determine is the unforeseen. The time that passes,
interrupts or connects (and which has no doubt never been thought) is
not programmed time. This would be a truism if it were not put in
parentheses by prospective planning projects, even when they construct
multiple hypotheses. Casual time appears only as the darkness that
causes an “accident” and a lacuna in production. It is a lapse in the
system, and its diabolic adversary; it is what historiography is supposed
to exorcize by substituting for these incongruities of the other the trans­
parent organicity of a scientific intelligibility (correlations, “causes” and
effects, serial continuities, etc.). What prospective studies d o not do,
historiography takes care of, responding to the same (fundamental)
requirement of covering up the obscenity of indeterminacy with the
production of a (fictive) “reason.”
These times constructed by discourse appear, in reality, as broken and
jerky. Subjected to “servitudes” and dependencies,’ theoretical time is in
fact a time linked to the improbable, to failures, to diversions, and thus
displaced by its other. It is the equivalent of what circulates in language
as a “temporal metaphoric^."^ And, strangely, the relation of the ma­
nipulable to gaps is precisely what constitutes symbolization, which is a
putting-together of what coheres without being coherent, of what makes
connection without being thinkable.
The gap or failure of reason is precisely the blind spot that makes it
accede to another dimension, the dimension of thinking, which articu­
lates itself on the different as its indeterminable necessity. The symbolic
is inseparable from gaps. Everyday practices, based o n their relation to

228 NOTES TO PP IN-192
11. To the analysis of journeys that transport a myth from one tribe to
another and “extenuate” it gradually into a legendary tradition, an epic elabora­
tion or a political ideology (see Lkvi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale deux
[Paris: Plon, 19733, pp. 301-315), we must thus add the analysis of these slow
disinvestments, through which belief withdraws from a myth.
12. See Georges Duby, Guerriers et paysans (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 184 et
seq.; The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants,
trans. H. S . Clarke (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
13. See M. de Certeau, L’Ecriture de I’histoire, 152-212.
14. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Le Contrat social, IV, 8.
15. See Robert N. Bellah, Beyond Belie$ Essays on Religion in a Posr­
traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 168-189, on the “civil
religion” in the United States.
16. Maurice Agulhon has demonstrated this by analyzing the persistence of a
“form” of Southern French sociality in spite of the variability of its contents,
successively devout (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries), Masonic (eighteenth cen­
tury) and socialist (nineteenth century): Phitents et Francs-Maconsde I’oncienne
Provence (Paris: PUF, 1968).
17. A reproach that could be addressed to Yvon Bourdet’s subtle analyses,
which are excessively centered on the psychology or the ethics of militancy, a
figure isolated from the historical place in which it occurs: Qu’est-re qui fait
courir les militants? (Paris: Stock, 1976).
18. Daniel Mothk correctly notes that the militant is pessimistic about the
present and optimistic about the future: Le Metier de militant (Paris: Seuil,
1973).
19. See particularly the numerous studies by Henri Desroche.
20. “Signify,” in the sense of the Heraclitean fragment: “The oracle at Delphi
does not speak, it does not dissimulate, it signifies”(Diels, fragment 93).
21. See Erwin Panofsky, La Perspective comme forme symbolique (Paris:
Minuit, 1975); E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4th ed. (London: Phaidon,
1972); R. Klein, La Forme et I’lntelligible (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
22. On simulacrum, see references in Chapter X,note 13, p. 223.
23. See 0. Mannoni, Clefs pour I’imaginaire ou I’autre scene (Paris: Seuil,
1969), 9-33: “Je sais bien mais quand mCme” (on belief).
24. M. de Certeau, “History: Science and Fiction,” in Social Science as Moral
Inquiry, ed. N . Haan et al. (New York Columbia University Press, 1983),
125-1 52.
14. “The Unnamable”
I . Maurice Berger and Franqoise Hortala, Mourir li I’h8pital (Paris: Cen­
turion, 1974), 155.
2. See M. de Certeau, L’Absent de I’histoire (Paris: Mame, 1973).
3. See Guy Le Gaufey, “La Douleur mklancolique, la mort impossible et le
rtel,” Lettres de I’hcolefreudienne, No. 13 (December 1974), 38-49.
229
NOTES TO PP. 192-203
4. See Serge Leclaire, Demasquer le rdel (Paris: Seuil, 1971), 121-146.
5. James Joyce, Giacomo Joyce (New York: Viking, 1959), XIV.
6. On this topological structure of “two in the same place,” the structure of
the split subject, see M. decerteau, L’Ecriture de I’histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978). 337-352.
7. Francois Jacob, La Logique du vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 331-332.
8. Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life. The Survivors of Hiroshima (New York,
1968), quoted by A. Alvarez, Le Dieu sauvage. Essai sur le suicide (Paris:
Mercure de France, 1972), 281; The Savage God (New York: Random House,
1972).
Indeterminate
1. Michel Serres, HermPs II. L’lnterfirence (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 12-13.
2. Manuel Janco and Daniel Furjot, lnformarique et capitalisme (Paris:
Maspero, 1972). 117-127.
3. Gerald Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thoughr. Kepler to Einstein
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). especially 91-161, on the
imaginary presuppositions of science and the “complementarity” that articulates
logical rigor on imaginary structures. See also, on the role of metaphor in
scientific reasoning, Mary Hesse, The Strucrure of ScientiJic Interference (Lon­
don: Macmillan, 1974), the first and last chapters.
4. For example, on the actual itineraries that bring a project to a decision,
one would have to have many edifying (!) “stories” similar to those that Lucien
Sfez published as an addenda, unfortunately in summary form, in his Critique
de la dicision (Paris: Armand Colin, 1973). 353-356. But can that be admitted?
5. To “blasphemy” (which “lets out” the secret and “betrays” more than it re­
veals), Benveniste opposes “euphemism” (“Jiminy Christmas” for “Jesus Christ”)
which “makes allusion to a linguistic profanation without actually carrying it
out” (ProblPmes de linguistique gindrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). 11, 254-257).
A welcome concept.
6. See Ernest Berringer’s graffiti in New Y ork.
7. See M. de Certeau, L’Ecrirure de I’histoire, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard,
1978). 312-358.
8. Terms employed by lean-Claude Perrot in his masterful study GenPse
d’une ville moderne. Caen au XVIIIe siecle (Paris: Mouton, 1975), 54-98,
to designate the relation of “theories” about urban evolution to the actual
development.
9. See Harald Weinrich, Le Temps (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 225-258; Tempus,
Eesprochene und erzuhlte Welt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971).