Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X
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Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative - ISSN 1780-678X |
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An Uncanny Thinker: Michel de Certeau |
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Author: Alex Demeulenaere Abstract (E): This paper analyses the genealogy of the Freudian "Unheimliche” in the work of French scholar Michel de Certeau. Certeau does not use it as a stable concept because he consciously questions the unproblematic use of so-called univocal concepts. Yet, an attentive reading shows how his discourse exercises both the temporal and the spatial dimensions of the uncanny. Abstract (F): Ce texte analyse la genealogie de l'"Unheimliche” Freudien dans l'oeuvre du chercheur français Michel de Certeau. Certeau ne l'emploie pas comme un référent stable puisqu'il problématise consciemment l'usage irréflechi de concepts soi-disant univoques. Cependant, une lecture attentive montre comment son discours est marqué par les dimensions spatiales et temporelles de l'inquiétante étrangeté. Keywords: historiography, psychoanalysis, writing, Certeau, Kofman, The Sandman |
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1. Two levelsMichel de Certeau, a great reader of Freud (cf. Certeau 1975 and 1987), has often written about the issues raised or generated by the Freudian text on "Das unheimliche" ("The 'Uncanny'"). In many of Certeau's texts, the uncanny is a central concept, be it in two different ways. On a basic discursive level, the word appears literally on key moments in his oeuvre, also in texts that do not deal explicitly with Freud or psychoanalysis. In a first step, we will analyse Certeau's use of the uncanny, because, it will soon be obvious that the stable semantics normally associated with concepts are modified or perverted by Certeau.1 As we will see, this instability can be linked to the translation, but it should also be interpreted as an example of the difficult relation Certeau has with concepts as such. Yet, these conceptual problems cannot conceal the fundamental uncanny character of Certeau's texts. The semantic tissue underlying his narratives is characterised by the tension between familiarity and strangeness, the Same and the Other, God and the Devil. These oppositions will sound surprisingly familiar to readers of the Freudian interpretation of Hoffmann's tale "Der Sandmann". In a second step, we will look more closely at some of these uncanny aspects in Certeau's work and examine their influence on some of his main research topics: the rise of writing in western modernity, psychoanalysis, historiography, and mysticism. 2. A disturbing disseminationIn French, the German unheimlich is normally translated as inquiétante étrangeté (in English: disturbing strangeness). This option renders the negative particle -un through though terms with a negative connotation, inquiétante and étrangeté. However, it is also the most reassuring translation: the double negativity relegates events that are qualified as inquiétante étrangeté immediately to the dark world of the Other. The disturbing is étrange, the strange is inquiétant. The circle is closed, with a double lock. Sometimes, it seems as if science intends to objectify the uncanny by placing it outside the self in order to unravel it with an easy mind. Yet, Freud has always insisted on the internal ambiguity of the uncanny, when he studied the semantic overlap between unheimlich and heimlich in German using a few lexicographic definitions and examples. I will apply this Freudian method to some texts of Michel de Certeau in order to trace the multiple textual faces of the uncanny in his work, guided by the same question: is it possible to detect a univocal semantic nucleus for the uncanny in Certeau's discourse? A cursory scan of the work delivers the following results:
These citations reveal a few interesting features. First, the standard expression inquiétante étrangeté is replaced by the more unusual inquiétante familiarité. The fact that Certeau uses this translation twice between quotation marks indicates that in his eyes inquiétante familiarité is the best manner to introduce the Freudian unheimliche in French. Second, the idea of a unified concept seems to stagger due to the semantic explosion of translations: signifiers are disseminated over the semantic fields of closeness and distance, of familiarity and strangeness, of the Same and the Other. One fundamental and undecidable question underpins the various combinations of substantives and adjectives: are we facing a strange familiarity (étrange familiarité) or a familiar strangeness (familière étrangeté)? For Certeau, this ambiguity seems to be more important than a possible choice between either of the two. Of course, one could argue that this semantic vagueness is a mere consequence of stylistic inaccuracy and a lack of scientific coherence. In a lengthy essay on Certeau, Koen Geldof has demonstrated the shakiness of this argument (Geldof 1996: 144): Certeau's whole work is explicitly and rigorously marked by an obsessive circumspection for the improper and careless use of concepts. Moreover, in L'écriture de l'histoire, Certeau himself has explicitly warned his readers for the reception and recycling of Freudian concepts:
Certeau's refusal to appropriate the uncanny in a smooth and unproblematic way as a useful concept is based on a consciously scientific position. Hence, the lexical diversity is not the result of mere sloppiness, it is the symptom of the non-conceptual status of the uncanny. Consequently, we will have to analyse how the constant overlap of the strange and same, of the disturbing and the familiar functions on a meta-conceptual level and insinuates an almost impalpable schizophrenia in certain modern western discourses, such as historiography. 3. Psychoanalysis and historyThe transfer from psychoanalysis to historiography is hardly surprising. Freud observed that one of the main features of the uncanny lies in a problematic relation with the past. In Histoire et psychanalyse entre science et fiction, Certeau analyses the more general relations between both disciplines and opposes them in their different ways of dealing with the past. In psychoanalysis, he writes, this past always uncannily appears in the present. It haunts the patient, taking the shape of a phantom or a revenant:
Traditional historiography has another way of writing the past, as it looks at history as a set of controllable and manageable set of events, systems and discourses. Historiography as defined by Leopold von Ranke takes a colonising and anatomising view on history and makes an autopsy of the past before placing it in marvellous scriptural tombs. The present is our subjectival now and on the other side of the wall lies the objectival past. Certeau thus identifies two clearly distinct discursive positions or spaces in traditional historiographic practices:
As the use of the adjective supposés already suggests, Certeau contests this safe discursive position of the historian. In his opinion, one should not consider historiography as a funeral, but, as Stephen Greenblatt writes in Shakespearean Negotiations, "speak with the dead" (Greenblatt 1988: 1). In order to demonstrate this thesis, Certeau analyses traditional historiographic practice through psychoanalytic glasses. The basic assumption is that (Western) writing of history represents on a social scale what dealing with psychic events is on a more individual level: certain events, evolutions, facts have to be dealt with, meaning that they have to be preserved and forgotten at the same time. That is why writing history implies the creation of a place - the past - that can be studied from another safe place and perspective - the present. Certeau characterises this as a discursive practice with a radical constructivist bias: one does not study history but make history. This kind of discursive activity is a typical offspring of Western modernity as it began to develop since the sixteenth century, because it combines the two basic features of modernity: writing (écriture) and working (travail). Historiography represents a Traum-arbeit on a larger, social scale, that creates sense through the application of certain procedures on a chaotic mass, in order to transform it into a rational product:
If travel discourse is the symbol of the colonisation of the Other, historiography marks the colonisation of the Past. In both cases, a key instrument for those discursive practices of power is writing. Scholars like Todorov and Greenblatt have extensively demonstrated how this "technology" had a decisive impact in the conquest of the Americas, Certeau shows its importance for the capture of the past. The kind of historiography described above could only occur as a result of the massive impact writing has had on Western modernity. In L'invention du quotidien and L'écriture de l'histoire, Certeau extensively analyses how written history has created a manageable past, at the cost of a massive exclusion of popular and oral forms of culture that did not fit the rationalist framework. But for Certeau, this written product cannot totally hush the disturbing and haunting voices of the other. The more you try to bury the dead, the harder they whisper. 4. The revenantWe have already spoken about history as a way of dealing with the dead. For Certeau, this is an ambiguous operation: historians show an undeniable fascination for the radical alterity of the dead, they examine the voices d'outre-tombe. But often, initial fascination turns into safe distance and wonder quickly becomes a funeral:
Just like the operations of the consciousness, these scriptural graves are defective: there is a fissure in the construction, a leak in the system. In an almost totemic way, historiography is infected by what it touches as the past always seems to overhaul the present. And thus the real not only reveals itself in discourse, it also makes a disturbing appearance when writing is confronted with its own limits or, in other words, when the factory of history suddenly has to face its industrial waste. In psychoanalytic terms, we could speak here of the return of the repressed:
Underneath the familiar reality of the history of countries, kings and civilisations, there is an enormous reservoir of anonymous and other voices pushing and sometimes emerging at the surface of things. It is in those moments - i.e., a case of collective madness in the heart of France in 1634 (cf. Certeau 1970) - that the great hermeneutic paradigms are confronted with their contingency. The same always contains the other in itself, the devil is always inside. In that respect, it is remarkable to notice how absolute otherness is rarely really threatening, it even often leads to authentic wonder (cf. Greenblatt 1991: 26-51). The uncanny on the other hand, with its mysterious interaction of familiar and strange elements, is far more disturbing. Certeau argues that reality hides in these uncanny moments of clash with the voices excluded in writing, and he pleads for an analysis of those margins of discourse. Still, his critique of Ranke's view on history does not imply an absolute relativism:
This displacement has far-reaching consequences for the epistemological claims of historiography. If for Freud the unheimliche symbolises the shattering of the autonomous subject, the uncanny here marks how a triumphant manner of writing history is excavated by what it does not write, by what it cannot think. 5. Freud and historyIt is not surprising then that Certeau's texts are haunted by the voice of a famous dead, Sigmund Freud, whose influence can be felt throughout. Certeau has explicitly tried to articulate this Freudian intertext and to study how psychoanalysis permits a new conceptualisation of history. Initially, the psychoanalyst proceeds just like the historian: he tries to situate elements belonging to a present (i.e. the story of a patient) in a temporal and causal series. Yet, this operation results in a very uncanny artefact, rather than in the reassuring, redundant epiphany of a "tombeau scriptuaire". For Freud, history often leads to its contrary: in an effort to explain things, it makes that what looked familiar suddenly appear strange. The uncanny is the paradoxical side effect of history: L'interprétation part benoîtement de "ce qu'on peut rencontrer partout" nous dit Freud, mais elle fait avouer au présent et au quotidien "les conclusions les plus étranges" (GW. 328). L'histoire est une forme de cette étrangeté. (Certeau 1975: 296) For Freud, the production of the uncanny is not only the work of historiography but also the effect of history itself. One of the basic assumptions that Certeau detects in Freud's works on history, is that some ambiguous phenomena have become more complex under the influence of history. In Freud's analysis of a demonic neurosis in the sixteenth century, he shows for instance that this possession was far more visible then and that it only has become a strange event for a cultivated, twentieth-century individual. Thus, Freud detects what he calls an Urbild - a law of the father who is at the same time a familiar God and a strange Devil - beyond modernity. The Aufklärung, then, is responsible for the analytic unravelling of this ambivalent origin into an infinite number of univocal, comprehensive and manageable semantic units. This effect of history in language makes the past at once more readable and less comprehensible. It is in such a constellation that the uncanny can appear:
It is not surprising then to see that Freud always tries to invert the course of history and to go back to that ambivalent origin, be it on a social scale, a linguistic or an individual one. This move becomes apparent in the first part of "Das unheimliche", where Freud intends to show the common root of heimlich and unheimlich in German. Both terms have been dissociated for the sake of semantic univocity, but this process suffers a few faillures. Sometimes the old ambiguity persists in the modern use of the terms. Freud shows for instance how heimlich has a very ambiguous use, and concludes that both terms emerge from a unified, ambiguous original concept. Language functions here as reservoir of traces that subtly refer to the disturbing forces at work beneath the familiar surface of words. 6. Psychoanalysis and mysticismCerteau regards Freudian psychoanalysis with mixed feelings: he acknowledges its revolutionary impact on the optimistic positivism of the nineteenth century. Yet, there is a flipside to this medal: psychoanalysis can easily become itself a scriptural machinery with a unified body of unproblematic concepts. The penseur du soupçon often relapses into the doctor who colonises the unconscious. This ambiguity appears to be inherent to psychoanalysis, and Certeau does not explicitly make a choice for either side of psychoanalysis. This intermediate position is clear in La fable mystique (Certeau 1982), an analysis of early modern mystics. As such, it is clearly a historiographic work that intends to describe the birth, modalities and functions of this specific kind of discourse. Yet, from the beginning the possibility of an epiphanous, truthful grand narrative is emphatically excluded. For Certeau, this history should not unveil the presence of absolute structures; it can only reach its target by following the mystic discourse in its search for dissemination of the many figures of the One in the multiple practices of everyday life. The following citation shows how the historian and the mystic have to become one in their collective search for the uncanny details that appear everywhere (cf. the use of "se convertir"):
This return in time in search for a hidden origin resembles the Freudian operations we have analysed in the previous paragraph. Certeau himself speaks of strange similarities between those early modern mystics and psychoanalysis ("d'étranges similarités"). And the reality of the mystics as it is disclosed by the historian will be uncanny, witness the constant overlap between the familiar and the strange in the introduction to La Fable mystique. But Certeau hesitates to simply translate mysticism in terms of a modern, comprehensive psychoanalytic framework. In the end, the gap between early modern mystics and psychoanalysis seems substantial enough not to use the same concepts. And that gap can be labelled as… history, as can be demonstrated by the following excerpt, in which Certeau searches for lexical similarities between both discourses:
7. HomelessnessUp to now, we have analysed how the semantics of the uncanny allowed a fruitful transfer to history. Still, the German term has a more spatial dimension as well: unheimlich in German means the literal opposite of heimlich: not homely, without a home. Although this aspect has been very helpful, for instance to scholars in architecture (Vidler) and architects themselves (Tschumi), this dimension cannot literally be encountered in the work of Michel de Certeau. Yet, his analyses of the determination of scientific discourses by discursive places (les lieux) have once again a very uncanny taste. On many occasions, Certeau shows how modern scientific paradigms can only speak from a certain position that undermines time and again their universalistic aims. This determination of position has an influence on different levels: a social one of course, as has extensively been demonstrated by scholars like Pierre Bourdieu in studies of the ongoing professionalisation and institutionalisation of scientific practices. But this localisation has also an interdiscursive character: each historic work is delimited by the different discursive practices at work in the historic field at that moment. This is true for each scientific discipline, but especially for those who speak about the Other: ethnology, psychiatry, pedagogy, psychoanalysis… Their discourses are recognised as scientific if they are localised and localisable, delineated and disciplined. They function as strategies that impose an absolute logic on the Other, based on a stable social and institutional locus. The great scientific discourses of modernity are thus in essence sedentary, their existence implies the comfortable installation (Heimlich) in a discursive home and the delimitation of a territory. Certeau's discourse takes another turn. The first step he takes is to demystify the universal, absolute character of certain scientific practices and to identify the place from which their discourse emerges, which cannot be perceived. Historiography and psychoanalysis, for instance, should be studied in this way:
This preliminary operation allows Certeau to avoid inscribing himself in a specific scientific discourse, and to reach a meta-disciplinary point of view. And yet, this distance does not lead to scientific sclerosis due to absolute paranoia of localisation. Rather, and this is the second step, science is for Certeau a journey through multiple scientific discourses. Strategy is replaced by tactics, the unique locus of speaking by a lot of temporary discursive stops. (cf. Laermans 1996: 54) Just like that other Michel, Certeau cannot be pinned down to one scientific discipline: one cannot say whether he is a theologian, a psychoanalyst or a historian. This refusal of a uniform, consistent conceptual apparatus originates in a permanent concern not to let discourse solidify. Certeau's positive portrait of the mystic Labadie could be taken as a metaphor for his own scientific practice. It expresses a profound fascination for the virtues of nomadism. As a modern Labadie, Certeau is always on the road, never at home:
It is not a coincidence that the problem of space has led us once again to mystics like Labadie. For Certeau, mysticism bears the mark of the intermediary (l'entre-deux): it speaks with something (the One) that is at the same time present and absent, that appears and disappears in the multiple events of everyday life. If it cannot be determined whether the One is alive or dead, the figure that is most appropriate is that of a phantom. According to Certeau, mystic discourse adopts the physiognomy of its object and becomes a spectral discourse moving in an atopic space. They exert a fascinating, uncanny influence on our own locus, comparable to the effect on the "Landmann" in Kafka's famous tale:
Certeau wants to enter the experience that the mystics spoke about in their works, in order to fully understand. His key to get inside lies in a multiple discursive approach - he distinguishes four main discourses to study mystics: "le discours érotique", "le discours psychanalytique", "le discours historiographique" and "la fable", in the full knowledge that the mystic experience itself always escapes those conceptual tactics. Even though La fable mystique consciously multiplies the places of writing, it can only point in the direction of the Other, never grasp it. Once again, the uncanny plays a central role in this operation, yet it cannot function on a fully conceptual level. Above, we mentioned the gap of history as one reason, here we could invoke the homelessness of a récit de voyage. In the end, time and space do come together: Mon analyse de son histoire tourne autour de cette fable mystique. Elle n'est qu'un récit de voyage, fragmenté par le recours à des méthodes diverses (historiques, sémiotiques, psychanalytiques) dont les appareils permettent de définir successivement des "objets" saisissables dans une réalité insaisissable. […] Tel serait le "sens" de cette histoire: comme le gardien de Kafka, le livre défend un secret qu'il ne possède pas. (Certeau 1982: 24) 8. Certeau and "Der Sandmann"Up to now, we have analysed how the Freudian unheimliche had various functions in the works of Certeau. In this last paragraph, we will return to Freud and Hoffmann, with a few brief suggestions on how Hoffmann's story that provided the basis of Freud's analysis, can be reread from the perspective opened up by Certeau. One of the main interesting features we will discuss is the tension between écriture and orality in the story. "Der Sandmann" could be read as a metaphor for the whole process of western écriture or writing, that produces some reassuring tombeaux scriptuaires, but is in the end confronted with disturbing, oral remains. The narrative structure of the story is a case in point: the first part consists of a few fragments of the correspondence between the main characters Lothar, Nathanael and Klara. In those letters, Nathanael writes how he experienced some frightening events, but one also has the impression that the letters serve to canalise that fear. The écriture has a calming effect on the characters; it should place the strange things that happened in a coherent narrative. The beginning of Nathanael letter to Lothar shows for instance how not writing is associated with fear and concern, whereas writing is linked with a search for catharsis and relief:
Klara's letter to Nathanael is also marked by a sympathetic, explicative and relativistic tone. Yet, after three letters, the storytelling is taken over by an anonymous, rather sinister narrator. The second part of the story remains a text, but it has many characteristics of the fable, it is a dark tale told by an anonymous, frightening voice. "Der Sandmann" shifts from an epistolary mode, hence explicit writing, to a more fairy-tale like structure or orality. This vision is shared by the French critic Sarah Kofman in Quatre romans analytiques:
Finally, the writing and autonomous subject is continually confronted with what he tries to repress: the dark and frightening voice of the Other. In his Possession de Loudun, Certeau has shown how such a voice is often associated with the Devil. Such an interpretation has also been suggested by Kofman. She argues that the main character of this story could well be the death drive, psychoanalytic metaphor for the Devil, incarnated in the many frightening protagonists of the story (Coppelius, Spalanzani, Olimpia and in the end also Nathanael). Kofman concludes her reading as follows:
If we accept that the Devil plays an important part in "Der Sandmann" as the ultimate metaphor for the uncanny, the question remains how Freud himself deals with that issue. In other words: is he a hidden exorcist? To answer that question, we can once again have a look at Michel de Certeau, who explains in La possession de Loudun the different discursive tactics adopted by the exorcists in the case of the possession of a few nuns in seventeenth-century France. One of the main features was the denominative operation: the exorcists tried to identify the Devil with a proper name. But when questioned, the possessed Jeanne des Anges comes up with a disturbing multiplicity of names that confuse the exorcists: sometimes she calls herself Asmodée, another time Aman, or Leviathan, etc. In an often criticised part of his reading of "Der Sandmann", Freud does the same with uncanny: he tries to locate it in the story. Yet, just like the operation of the exorcists, this denomination fails. The devil has many faces, but also many names. As Kofman's analysis demonstrates, all characters in this strange story could be the incarnation of an uncanny Devil, maybe even the anonymous narrator who tells us the events. In his reading of Hoffmann, Freud certainly rises interesting and fascinating questions about how to identify and trace the uncanny, yet he cannot find univocal answers in that text. He can be seen as a modern incarnation of exorcism, as the psychoanalytic priest who tries to locate and identify strange forces in one's conscience. We have shown how the work of Certeau takes up the questions raised by Freud, but does not try to answer them by means of a univocal conceptual discourse. Certeau doesn't explain the uncanny, he adopts it in his writing, conscious of the fact that it cannot totally be exorcised…
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Alex Demeulenaere is currently preparing a Phd in French Literature at the K.U.Leuven on travel literature and post colonialism. |
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