Michel de Certeau: interpretation and its other

Jeremy Ahearne

I. INTRODUCTION:
A. The book is set from 1970 onwards but does not dismisses the work
undertaken before. Prudence has been exercised to give place to the idea
of interruptions in the work of Certeau. It is set along the lines of the idea
of interpretation and its others.
II. THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL OPERATION:
A. Certeau conceives his historiography as a treatment of absence. He
analyses it as an activity which is irredeemably separated from the presence
of its object. This thwarted relation to its object constitutes for Certeau both
the starting point and the vanishing point of historical interpretation;
B. The 'literature' of the historian, a 'fabrication'...brings us only a trace of a
trace;
C. The place of the interpreter emerges in Certau's writing as precarious,
fleeting and finite. His apprehension of the other which he aspires to
understand is both given to him and taken away by a larger Other which,
precisely, can never be apprehended as such;
D. Historical documents and objects "have always been preselected and
configures according to the structures of perception which govern our
present;
E. Historians, then, 'fabricate' teh history which they produce. A disciplinary
combination of rules, techniques and conventions defines for Certeau
historiographical practice. These determine the treatment to which archival
material will be subjected. They also work against the claims of any
exclusively personal and intuitive response to the past;
F. - to elucidate unconscious or tacit effects on historiographic production of
contemporary socioeconomic and technical configurationsG. Certau's work shows that historiography cannot be defined once
and all either as a 'science' or as a 'literature' - it is inevitably caught
between the two.
H. His work produces rather what he himself in a different context calls a
'vibration of limits'.
He constantly unsettles pre-established frontiers
between inside and outside, self and other.
I. Interpretative operations miss the mark of the other.
J. He confronts historiographical discourse with its concrete and finite (real)
conditions of possibility...Certeau thus conceives what he designates as the
'real' both in terms of the intended historical object of interpretation, and also
as a function of the 'implicit' social forces and technical apparatuses which
organize interpretative activity.

K. Effective historians may, in a limited way, reorganize the way others

think.
L. Heterologies - discourses on the other.
M. ...history represents for reason the limits of the 'real'. By virtue of its
object, historiographical interpretation can therefore work at the borders of
(contemporary) interpretative models...The historical interpreter is for
Certeau simultaneously bound to and separated from the past in ways that
he or she cannot fully control.