The Moving Ground: Locating Everyday Life

Catherine Driscoll

I want to ask here about what Michel de Certeau calls "the place from which one deals with culture" in an essay of that title, considering both his deployment within cultural studies and his understanding of "everyday life," which is still the most influential focus for that deployment. Certeau begins his essay by claiming that "nothing authorizes me to speak of culture," and yet "a field of inquiry and its borders need to be staked out. I would like to devote a few sentences to a site of reflection on culture."1 The volume of translations in which this essay is included, Culture in the Plural, is explicitly addressed to cultural studies and its interest in Certeau's model of the everyday. As a result, it is opposed to the "authorized" organization of life, along with those who "speak of" or "deal with" culture, until "the everyday" becomes "the marginality of a majority," at which point "practice ceases to have its own language."2 What seems imperative, then, is placing Certeau's thought on the everyday within the broader frame of his work.

Certeau specifies the everyday as the "cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an

The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:2, Spring 2001.
Copyright © 2002 by Duke University Press.

activity that is unsigned, unreadable and unsymbolized." Thus, as I will argue here, this cultural activity is opposed, first and foremost, to cultural analysis, or, "the place from which one deals with culture." Underlying this opposition, however, is Certeau's place from which analysis proceeds and the gap between it and the (unorganized) un-placed everyday that is nevertheless positioned by that analysis as an organized object. Accordingly, the everyday is already arguably organized (placed) by either its exclusion from "cultural analysis" or its placement as an object for cultural studies. The relations between this place and this order in Certeau might serve to address some of the assumptions involved in speaking about "everyday life" in cultural studies, particularly the tendency to position it as other to any proper organization of culture and thus as the unknowable cultural substratum identified with "unconscious" processes of meaning production.

The Practice of Everyday Life has influenced debates over whether cultural studies has a specific object and method of study, that is, one not already covered by any of the disciplines that have helped to constitute it. What cultural studies designates as everyday life in its nascent canon of methods and objects has proved a useful alternative to "popular culture" as the object of cultural studies. Although recent utilizations of Certeau might serve to include references to his other influential texts—The Writing of History or Heterologies, in particular—The Practice of Everyday Life remains the core Certeau work for cultural studies. Because everyday life constitutes a field of analysis that is not directly covered by any discipline other than cultural studies, that text's predominance seems entirely justifiable. What its applications generally miss, however, is equally relevant to the diverse practices of cultural studies. In particular, his critiques of history as a discipline and the importance of psychoanalysis to his work, each of which helped to shape Certeau's understanding of the location of everyday life, are often neglected even in cultural studies work on everyday life per se.

As with all of his texts, The Practice of Everyday Life reflects the psychoanalytic foundations of Certeau's cultural analyses, which consistently turn on a process of differential recognition and on a figure of unknowable but constitutive difference that, following Jacques Lacan, might be called the Other. Certeau's disciplinary and methodological critiques, like his very methods, rely on that differential recognition: you understand your culture by knowing a culture different from—in fact, other than—your own. Furthermore, Certeau's work consistently supports the idea that culture, in terms of the way

it is understood and lived, contains a fundamentally unknowable content. He quotes Lacan (Seminar III) to the effect that speech becomes possible only with the presumption of an Other: "there precisely as it is recognized, but as it is not known."4

Certeau's analyses of how culture is studied, while predominantly directed at history, also address anthropology, psychology, theology, sociology, and literary studies—the basic components of any genealogy of cultural studies. The nature of these analyses suggests that some of the recurring debates or even entrenched problems of cultural studies might benefit from a consideration of his various engagements with such disciplines. I am neither inclined to survey Certeau citations nor asserting that no use has been made of his disciplinary critiques, but rather (conceding some inevitable degree of generalization) referring to how cultural studies is practiced institutionally, namely, as an interdisciplinary academic program even when located within a single department. Increasingly defined by and with reference to a series of introductions (as paraphrases or excerpts) to both the concept of culture and the conceptualization of cultural studies (as a new interdisciplinary or counterdisciplinary discipline), the field has come to be framed as an imaginary collectivity. As such, "cultural studies" can be interrogated in terms of the use it makes of Certeau. His commentaries on and critiques of disciplines as practices are obviously relevant to inquiries by cultural studies into its own methodologies. This is perhaps most evident in the recurring tensions between ethnography and textual analysis as contexts for introducing or even defining cultural studies. Certeau has observed about "ethnology," for example, that it "is not innocent. It represents one of the forms of colonization. The interest that ethnology brings to popular culture assumes a relationship of forces between the bourgeoisie to which these ethnologists belong and the mass of the milieu that becomes the object of their gaze."6

The interactions between textuality and history (or empiricism) that are fundamental to Certeau's interrogation of historiographic practice are also relevant to the internal debates of cultural studies. More specifically, his analysis of history would suggest how this definitive gap bears on textual analysis. Certeau's usage of "historiography" distinguishes between history as practice and history as object of that practice. Historiography—as discipline, epistemology, or philosophy—remains the writing of history, which evades, desires, and depends on an unknowable described by Certeau as "the

unknown immensity that seduces and menaces our knowledge." The questions raised by this insight about history are also crucial to cultural studies, as discipline and practice. Certeau's work emphasizes that merely distancing cultural studies from textual analysis while aligning it more closely with history's "material" premises would not short-circuit its interrogation by critics of textual analysis. That is, if textual analysis involves (as its critics claim) pulling apart the threads of a particular text or object as if these speak for a culture, and if it is guilty of a focus on the figural rather than the material effects of cultural objects, then (Certeau might argue) the same holds for the processes of historical analysis. While he would seem to demand self-reflexivity as a necessary element of critical practice, what also follows from that is the necessity of a conception of the Other upon which to found the possibility of speaking. By extension (and via Lacan), the possibility of speaking of culture requires the Other as the site of lack.* Some of Lacan's significance to Certeau's models of both "speech" and "culture" are suggested in his Heterologies essay, where Certeau claims that "Lacan" (i.e., the speech called Lacan) is, like culture, fundamentally unknowable, even unsituated or unplaced.*

Certeau begins The Writing of History with a quotation from Alphonse Dupront: "The sole historical quest for 'meaning' remains indeed a quest for the Other." This desiring inscription of an Other which is the unknown of culture—specifically, of the culture from which analysis is being produced—is pivotal to the practice of history. Now entwined in its projects and practices with the social sciences more generally, including cultural studies, history explains or at least speaks of culture through the examination of an Other culture. As Certeau puts it in The Practice of Everyday Life, "Other regions give us back what our culture has excluded from its discourse."*11 History, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies all rest on a set of assumptions about the autonomy of analysis—that analysis proceeds from a position which, though rarely phrased as neutral, can at least be posed as practically more objective than that of "everyday life." This claim to autonomy, or at least to detached reflection, has not been relegated to the anthropological antecedents of cultural studies, as some analyses of everyday life seem to claim. Even at its most self-reflexive, cultural studies is often opposed to an anthropology "defined by its relation to an 'allocchronic' Other—an Other defined as such by its sociocultural difference within a quite different structure of time, and especially by what's understood as a qualitative difference

in social organization.” According to this opposition, “cultural studies takes as its object the ordinary culture (conceding the difficulty of those terms)... of its own society.” In their earliest recognizable forms, historiography and anthropology arose from an encounter with the Other, and cultural studies remains within the field of this analysis and interpretation, which unavoidably reflects (sometimes without seeming aware of it) on the cultural location from which the analysis proceeds. Studying the everyday life of your own or a closely aligned culture (or sectors of it) is not the classic anthropological situation whereby you seek to understand the basic tenets of the culture you are observing, yet cultural studies nevertheless continues to take up everyday life as a frame for observing fields to which the observer belongs only tangentially or ironically, if at all. This supposition might be addressed through Certeau’s critiques of those anthropological and historiographical strategies that he describes, with reference to Montaigne, as articulating a “heterological tradition, in which the discourse about the other is a means of constructing a discourse authorized by the other.”

These are well-travelled debates for cultural studies, but its practitioners continue to seem comfortable critiquing the discursive relations between anthropologists or historians and that other culture they study, while positing their own work as the study of the same rather than an other culture. This not only seems to conveniently sidestep the critiques of the social sciences by Certeau (and Foucault), but also appears to be deliberately misleading. How might cultural studies be thought to address the same cultural location as the one from which it proceeds? How would that continuity be established? In much work it remains a given that analyzing everyday life is not an everyday practice and is even probably what Henri Lefebvre, anticipating Certeau, called a critique.

I want to return, then, to the selective focus of cultural studies on The Practice of Everyday Life and to those sections within it that focus favors. Certeau’s introduction, by now widely reproduced in readers and comparable cultural studies texts, has interested cultural theorists for its insistence on the productivity of consumption. The practice of everyday life defined there is an “investigation of the ways in which users—commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules—operate.” Accordingly, Certeau would make “everyday practices,’ways of operating’ or doing things, no longer appear as merely the obscure background of social activity.” While these “ways of operating” are apparently organized around plenitude rather

than lack, Certeau would also seem to be proposing (or assuming) that distinct levels of consciousness underlie the production of meaning in everyday life. But individuals apparently need not recognize that they are producing meaning from culture (or evading a determination of their possible meanings) in order to do so. The other frequently cited sections of The Practice of Everyday Life reflect this everyday organization which both is and is not conscious: in particular, walking the city—a use of space that is itself a production of culture, but which demands of its participants no awareness that they are producing culture—and what Certeau calls "poaching." As a figure for consumer practices, this presumes consciousness of common and differing interests and pleasures, even of taste and identification, but demands no consciousness of poaching itself. Consumers may steal their culture knowingly, then, without knowing that they are stealing.

Certeau claims that such "tactics," by which discipline is evaded in everyday life, definitively avoid any "borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality." Everyday life is defined by those practices that do not require reference to a culture other than one's own. Its distinctness from "propriely organized" life corresponds to Certeau's distinction between the tactical and the strategic, where the tactic is "a calculus which cannot count on a 'proper' (a spatial or institutional) localization, nor thus on a borderline distinguishing the other as a visible totality. The place of a tactic belongs to the other." Tactics "constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into 'opportunities'" and thus also comprise pastimes that are not so much devalued by social structures as themselves proper to "the disempowered." Certeau glosses this as follows: "The weak must constantly turn to their own ends forces alien to them." But is "everyday life," as Meaghan Morris claims, "popular culture as a way of operating—rather than a set of contents?" It is a disempowerment resulting from a lack of organizational recognition (language) that defines "everyday life"—acting within "a system too vast to be their own, too tightly woven for them to escape from it—and it is the subversive intent of its practitioners that further distinguishes "ways of operating" from "everyday practices."

Distinction is also the right term for that distance between consumption as research and consumption as everyday, given that what Pierre Bourdieu calls "cultural capital" is indeed at issue. The means by which the everyday is organized are also processes of distinction organized by lack, as is the diffusion of "everyday life" in the practice of cultural studies. The everyday in

this instance is thus the material, the unexamined, component of cultural production. Going to a movie or reading a novel or playing music is popularly recognized as either the consumption or the production of culture, or even as both. But the everyday is the practice of culture without reflection on its productivity or its meaning. It is only as "everyday" that culture "is characterized as a nonplace in which everything goes, in which anything can circulate."19

While cultural studies has increasingly argued, even assumed, that popular and other forms of cultural consumption can be practiced with a degree of knowledge about their ideological context (at least ironically), this has not overturned its fundamental distinction between what is and is not organized as cultural production. Certeau regarded this as "a specifically Western tension: everyday life runs directly against the grain of a collective conviction that has been a typically Western structure for more than four centuries, namely, that a connection must exist between productive labor and personal development."20 As Lefebvre had argued in "The Everyday and Everydayness," "In order for the everyday to have ever been engaged as a concept, the reality it designates had to have become dominant and the old obsessions about shortages—'Give us this day our daily bread...'—had to disappear. Until recently, things, furniture, and buildings were built one by one, and each existed in relation to accepted moral and social references, to symbols."21 The newly dominant reality was "leisure time," and much of Certeau's work is compatible with this formulation. Yet Lefebvre also argued that we could not "get beyond the everyday," positing we could live as something other than a product of changes to relations of production. It was not only, or even necessarily, leisure that would constitute the everyday, but also whatever remained after eliminating "all specialized activities."22 The question of everyday life, then, is not that recurring one about whether cultural studies is the study of popular culture because—as Certeau frames it—the everyday cuts across popular culture, high culture, and such cultural practices as dying or walking, which are clearly neither, but are rather activities organized in terms of something other than economic production.

Is the everyday, then, as Lawrence Grossberg has claimed, the central object of cultural studies?23 What does this mean for the focuses and presumptions of cultural studies, especially after reading Certeau, given its inevitable distancing from its own practice, which is at one important level so highly specialized and not at all everyday? Morris, while defining ba-

nality as the overfamiliar, does not reduce everyday life to this. For her, "everyday life" operates less as the populist mode of cultural studies than within its analytics of popular culture—exemplified by Iain Chambers's objection to imposing what he considers the contemplative methods of an "academic mind"24 on popular culture. Morris takes issue with such unproductive oppositions as "contemplation/distraction" or "academic/popular," since these may "serve only to limit and distort the possibilities of popular practice." Certeau's project, by contrast, "is not a theory of popular culture but a 'science of singularity'":

For Certeau, a recognition that the "ordinary" and the "popular" can act as a mask in analytical discourses does not imply that the study of popular culture is impossible except as recuperation. Instead, it demands that we show how the ordinary introduces itself into analytical techniques, and this requires a displacement in the institutional practice of knowledge.25

And yet, recognizing the consequence of casting the everyday in oppositional terms as the positing of an excluded Other, Morris is rightly "skeptical that a theory grounded on (rather than tactically using) the category of otherness can ever end up anywhere else"—a question raised by her reading that demands further examination.26

When understood as the place of the Other, that is, excluded from the proper organization of culture, the everyday is not only different from the culture in which its analysis occurs; it is also fundamentally unknowable. And it is the Lacanian model, within which all others are conceived as such relative to the constitutive space of the Other, accepting all its self-contradictions, that provides the framework for Certeau's theory of speaking about or dealing with culture. This space of the Other and its entailed mode of subject formation and desire, which are specific to Lacanian psychoanalysis, tend to be opposed to Foucaldian discourse analysis in the taxonomies of contemporary cultural theory. Wlad Godzich claims, for example, that "Certeau's conception of discourse, so different from Foucault's hegemonic one, recovers an agential dimension for us."27 Foucault's own rejection of "psychoanalysts and semiologists of every sign and symptom—who would subjugate the multiplicity of desire to the twofold law of structure and lack"—might well apply to Certeau, but it is not in any case on strictly psychoanalytic grounds that he departs from Foucault. Indeed,

Certeau could be read as marking a certain continuity between Lacan and Foucault. Of the latter's historiographic practice, Certeau wrote: "Beneath thoughts, he discerns an 'epistemological foundation' which makes them possible. Between the many institutions, experiences, and doctrines of an age, he detects a coherence which, though not explicit, is nonetheless the condition and organizing principle of a culture." The Lacanian symbolic order, which defines the space of the Other, might also indicate this coherence, an alignment also apparent in Foucault's insistence on speaking not of subjects but of subject positions. For Lacan as well there is only the position of the subject and the place of the Other, despite reasonably clear indications that these localizations are neither subject to nor manifestations of history in the usual sense. Certeau would thus draw on both Lacan and Foucault to argue that "each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of . . . relational determinations interact."

Certeau's citations of Foucault interrogate the latter's claims about the internality of everything to discourse while accepting and expanding on Lacan's interest in what appears (nominally) to be outside of discourse or organized culture. This distinction between Lacan and Foucault does not necessarily entail any contradiction for Certeau, however, insofar as that outside can also be read as a discursive construct. An important line of argument may, indeed, be pursued via the discursive construction of the Other instantiated or exemplified by his analyses of colonization and the colonial narratives of religious or political historiography. The structure of the Other entailed by Certeau's understanding of heterology may also be read as a metacritique of lack, interrogating our dependence on such formulations as identity and nonidentity, same and other. Yet it is difficult to locate any critique of Lacan in Certeau's work, whereas his criticism of Foucault remains consistent across the range of texts covered here, if most explicitly articulated in Heterologies. That criticism, largely of a classically historicist bent (where does change come from within Foucault's overviews of discourses, disciplines, and epistemologies?) or a classically psychoanalytic one (what about consciousness, i.e., the Unconscious?), also emacts the foundational maneuver of cultural studies by pointing out the resistant aspects of practices that might otherwise seem complicit with "dominant" discourses.

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Certeau famously concludes that "if the grid of discipline is everywhere becoming clearer and more extensive, it is all the more urgent to discover how an entire society resists being reduced

to it."33 His direct critique of Foucault here is all the more remarkable for never noticing the failure of resistance to the Lacanian symbolic that frames his own poetry of making do (except, of course, madness), although Certeau's critique of anthropological discourse—of its marginalizing or oppressive capture of various others within "the Other" of and through which it speaks—can also be read as a critique of the structural inevitability of the Other in Lacan. By the same token, Certeau's understanding of the ethnographic desire to capture the Other (and the other culture) in writing from within its own space of authorized colonial power exposes it as a project relative to which psychoanalysis has proved more exemplary than explanatory.

It is still with reference to Lacan, however, that Certeau engages these effects of writing about the otherwise unwritten, unplaced Other.34 Since it is, of course, impossible to write or otherwise place the Other—as opposed to writing in its place, or rather in relation to it, and thus in the form of possessed discourse (whether "mystic speech" or "everyday life")—the Other remains unknowable except as an excluded field, however subject to discourse it may become. Indeed, Certeau's conflation of three different discursive domains in this regard drives the point home:

Similar problems appear in the relation maintained by the ethnographical tale with the "other society" that it recounts and claims to make heard. With respect to the possessed woman, the primitive, and the patient, demonological discourse, ethnographical discourse, and medical discourse effectively assume identical positions: "I know what you are saying better than you"; in other words, "my knowledge can position itself in that place whence you speak."35

Psychoanalysis explicates and promulgates an ethnology that directly shapes cultural studies, particularly with regard to its deployment of "everyday life," as Certeau demonstrates through Claude Lévi-Strauss's distinctions between the "parallel" discourses of history and ethnology as "especially interested in what is not written." What ethnology deals with is "different from everything that men usually dream of engraving in stone or committing to paper." For Lévi-Strauss, "this distinction between materials, the written or the unwritten, is doubled by another having to do with each field's relation to knowledge." Historical data is organized relative "to conscious expressions, while ethnology organizes its data in relation to unconscious conditions of social life."36 It is precisely because everyday life is not organized by any

system that would enable it to be positioned by citation or quotation that cultural studies sees a need to organize the everyday in writing, thereby to "delimit an expanse of space, an object of scientific activity."37 And, commensurately, by positing everyday life as an "unconscious" system of meaning, cultural studies establishes the grounds of its own authorization.

Certeau argues that the organized dissemination of the religious meaning of life was superseded in the same process that led to culture's study on the basis of practice rather than meaning.38 Whether his focus is historiography or everyday life, Certeau's interest remains the intersections of discourses and disciplines. Disciplinary intersections do not occur on an even plane since their discourses are hierarchical. This is not to say that some discourses are products of others, but rather that some (e.g., psychoanalysis) inform the meaning of others (e.g., everyday life). With respect to "the writing of history," if it is indeed "meaning" that constitutes the possibility of this Other that establishes religious speech and knowledge, then neither "culture" nor the Unconscious (as constituted in the act of interpreting and positioning it) would be possible without the corresponding loss of religious meaning. It is within that gap where religious meaning once held sway that Certeau located the set of materialist and psychoanalytic principles that would make the unknown of culture meaningful. The practices of cultural studies and late-modern history also render the meaning of cultural practice unknown (i.e., unknowable). Retrospectively, Certeau would describe this praxis as "perhaps a passage from the 'plural' to the multiple, and from social figures to the moving ground that they bring into view."39 What culture means is impossible to determine, and the Other, whose own life is everyday, is not merely proof of this (in the sense that I do not know what another means by this or that cultural practice), but is constituted as an object for cultural studies and thus guaranteed by virtue of this unknowability.

The interest of Certeau for cultural studies bespeaks its debt to psychoanalysis even as it continues to appropriate him while evading the significance of psychoanalytic practice to his own. Since twentieth-century sociology and anthropology are both indebted to Freud's revolutionary model of the subject, it is hardly surprising that cultural studies would depend upon psychoanalysis for its understanding of how culture is produced and constituted, how it works or operates. Certeau's "self-conscious" debt to psychoanalysis might thus lead cultural studies to consider those models of sub-

jectivity and power on which it rests, not to mention the slippery meaning of culture implicit in its practices. As indicated by its ongoing efforts to pin down that term, cultural studies does not take culture as a given. On the contrary, it is recognized as so fundamentally important to any mode of subject positioning as to be ultimately undefinable. Accordingly, "culture" is posited as not merely the product of conscious and unconscious structures but also of conscious and unconscious modes of meaning production.

In Culture in the Plural Certeau's methodological critiques are explicitly applied to the putative self-reflexivity of psychoanalysis as a culturally positioned analytic: "The techniques of suspicion, psychoanalytic and sociological alike, depend on the society they analyze."40 Certeau's historicized analyses of such discourses as "popular life" or "anthropology" intersect with psychological models after the Freudian manner of claiming to "have made an attempt to deal with problems of social anthropology in the light of analysis."41 In terms of those practices within cultural studies that follow from Certeau's analyses, they too partake of the unknown. As Certeau argues with reference to "ways of practicing space . . . ways of living time, reading texts, or seeing images," for any analysis of "what a practice does with prefabricated signs, what the latter become for those who use or receive them—there is an essential point that still remains, for the most part, unknown." Actions that go unrecognized as active, occurring as they do within and between, or slipping through, the recognized structures of a given culture, define that culture: "On our maps, that is what is called culture. It is an ebb and flow of muffled voices on the architects' blueprints in their advanced stages of drafting."42 Elsewhere, the tactics of everyday life (still understood as "other" in this analysis) are described as "the forms taken by the return of the repressed within the field of an order."43 Within this schema, the everyday accords with the Imaginary and the Unconscious.

Certeau's theory of culture is thus always marked by the key psychoanalytic distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness—in this case, between conscious and unconscious cultural production and consumption. Psychoanalytic premises are frequently utilized by cultural studies as if they were transparent, as if the psychoanalytic model of the subject, say, entailed no questions or interests for the analysis of culture. While the importance of Certeau to the poststructuralism of cultural studies has been covered elsewhere, those discussions have not foregrounded the necessary model of the Unconscious upon which the resistance and productive redirection of cul-

ture was based for Certeau.4 This idea of a resisting (or conforming) agency is not the self-identical subject often described as humanist, but it does specifically articulate subject positions within a broad cultural schema or grammar that maintains an unspecified stability reminiscent of the linguistic factors operating for Lacan's figural subjects caught, however perversely, in the Symbolic order.4 The putative unity of this order warrants closer examination in Certeau's work, but it remains important to acknowledge that the everyday lives of subjects in Certeau are placed within, but not fully confined by, the various cultural positions prescribed and ordered before them. While this is a persuasive account of the limitations on individual or group agency, it is in relation to the Unconscious that Certeau attends to those specificities of time, space, and voice—to history—that are crucial in terms of his own significance to cultural studies. And this equation of "culture" and the constitutive positioning of the subject in social orders with the Unconscious may have implications for cultural studies beyond an acknowledgment of the limitations on agency.

What history, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies rely on to manifest what they know, and to confirm what is unknowable, can be described in Certeauvian terms as the archive: what is recorded, how its recording takes place, and how the material recorded there becomes known; or, as Tom Conley puts it, "how events are described, how they are considered meaningful, how they become worthy of record or notice."46 While Certeau generally accounts for the archive with reference to historiography, these lines of inquiry are equally relevant to the practices of psychoanalysis and cultural studies, where the material of cultural practice is also analytically constituted for the analyst's project (by the one who is "presumed to know"); "Archives make up the world of this technical game, a world in which complexity is found, but sifted through and miniaturized, therefore made capable of being formalized."47 The analysis of everyday life is not the analysis of popular culture, although Certeau has acknowledged that The Practice of Everyday Life "grew out of studies of popular culture."48 Nor is it strictly the study of consumption practices, although this is one way in which cultural studies has been shaped by Certeau. The resonance of The Practice of Everyday Life for cultural studies seems rather to lie in its potential for the analysis of "lived experience," a concept that, belying the "lived" of a presumably individual perspective, fits the Romantic-humanist narrative of survival against economic odds to which cultural studies remains all

too partial. I want to conclude by asking about this attribution of resisting agency to everyday life. While Morris rightly notes that everyday life does not necessarily entail a pattern of resistance in Certeau's analyses, this is often how The Practice of Everyday Life is read by cultural studies. Certeau himself construed an oppositional relation between everyday life and resistance like the one he proposed between "everyday practices" and "ways of operating."

Morris concludes her essay on Certeau's significance for cultural studies with a call for "our critique of everyday life": "This is the banality that speaks in Everyman, and in the late work of Freud—where the ordinary is no longer the object of analysis but the place from which discourse is produced."40 The question of what is banal about the everyday as the object of cultural studies is proper to the assumption that everyday life is distinguished from other practices of living by its unconsciousness (or by what Lefebvre calls its "repetitive gestures"). The everyday remains at the edge of both consciousness and knowability, where it might be thought as much a symptom as a poesis. Certeau may be seen as inflecting Lefebvre's model of everyday life with an understanding of the everyday which echoes Maurice Blanchot's: "What we are first of all, and most often: at work, at leisure, awake, asleep, in the street, in private existence. The everyday, then, is ourselves, ordinarily."50 Where Certeau's historiography intersects with Blanchot's theories of writing, however, is "the law of the other," in hierarchical relation to which writing will always be available to serve the symbolic order.31 And yet the everyday, as what we are most often, might establish a continuity—if not a groundedness insofar as Blanchot's everyday is characterized as allowing no hold, as escaping—serving at once as continuous constraint and field of opportunity. This is the point at which Certeau sees the everyday as not only recurring in the authorized order of culture but as affecting its forms and histories. As a mode of living, the continual process of escaping constraints sets up victorious individualist figures even as the everyday explicitly recognizes the interdependence of escape and constraint. The productivity of everyday life may be manifest in that interdependence, constraints on resistance also being the conditions of its possibility and those of any historical change.

While explicitly indebted to Foucault's insights on the productivity of power and the pervasiveness of discourse, Certeau's everyday still allows room for dominant figures of consciousness and identity.52 But Blanchot

draws closer to Foucault in insisting that there can be no subject of the everyday: "When I live the everyday, it is anyone, anyone whatsoever, who does so, and this anyone is, properly speaking, neither me, nor, properly speaking, the other. . . He is the one and the other in their interchangeable presence."33 The question of whose everyday life thus yields to that of the position of everyday life—one that might still recall the Other, as Certeau conceives it, except that it would not be construed as unconscious and therefore excluded from or other to discourse. This "everyday life" might include diverse historically and culturally contingent practices, but without necessarily lacking reflection or consciousness in any regard, and without beginning with the priority of speaking about or "dealing with" culture in some other, more authorized way. Neither, then, would the everyday need to be a foundational context that names the subject immutably, like a material form of the symbolic order. Everyday life could be seen as another pivotal discourse in constituting the modern subject as not wholly organized by production, but without relying on a psychologized model of the subject (i.e., on the Unconscious or on a place of the Other), those structures being inevitably drawn into cultural analysis by Certeau's claim that everyday knowledge, for example, "passes from the unconscious of its practitioners to the reflection of non-practitioners without involving any individual subject."34

The everyday comprises those practices of culture that are neither specialized as to content nor organized by a hierarchy in which production opposes consumption. Cultural studies after Certeau, however, continues to organize the everyday by an alternative but related hierarchy in which consciousness opposes lack (or even failure) of consciousness, a hierarchy that tends to bring many associated hierarchies along with it, as critics of psychoanalysis often note. Critiquing Certeau's recourse to the psychoanalytic subject and its constitutive division does not, however, reduce his work to that model or make it useless to those who have "gotten over" psychoanalysis. Certeau's everyday life might be productively rethought as the practice of the subject through the position of everyday life, as the set of tactics and technologies by which the self is constituted (however transiently) within culture. This does not require relinquishing either philosophies of affirmation and productivity or the possibilities of material cultural change. What it may require relinquishing is the romance of "the ordinary man," to the muselike alterity of whom Certeau dedicated The Practice of Everyday Life—

“this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history” and to whom cultural studies continues to pay homage in its discourse of “everyday life.”

Notes
This essay draws on a series of discussions with academics of different disciplines about the meaning and practice of cultural studies, and I remain particularly grateful to Joan Wallach Scott and Brita Pekarsky. I first presented it to the De Certeau Conference at the University of Tasmania in January 1998, for which opportunity and for his subsequent comments on this essay I am grateful to Ian Buchanan.

Michel de Certeau, “A Place from Which One Deals with Culture,” in Culture in the Plural, ed. Luce Giard, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, 1997 [1974]), 123-31; quotation from 123.
Michel de Certeau, “The Marginality of a Majority,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, 1984 [1980]), xiii.
Ibid.
Michel de Certeau, “Lacan: An Ethics of Speech,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1986), 47-64; quotation from 58.
See Michel de Certeau, “Universities versus Popular Culture,” in Culture in the Plural, 39-52, for his assessment of the particular forms of demand and possibility that shape the inclusion in tertiary education systems of not just popular-cultural products but the amalgam of practices by which cultural studies is arguably constituted.
Michel de Certeau, “Minorities,” in Culture in the Plural, 69-79; quotation from 77.
Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York, 1988 [1975]), 3.
Lacan argues in Seminar II that “the human object always constitutes itself through the intermediary of a first loss—nothing fruitful takes place in man save through the intermediary of a loss of an object”; quoted in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York, 1993), 75.
“Lacan belongs to no one,” He is Other; “The ‘proper’ place, i.e. the Ecole, fill up with anybody and anything” (Certeau, “Lacan,” 48-49).
Certeau, Writing of History, 2.
Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 51. In “The Place from Which One Deals with Culture,” Certeau further specifies that “there is no observation that is not determined by the situation created by a relation: the point has been established in different ways since Marx and Freud. Thus a group misconstrues the society in which it is inserted when it fails to recognize itself as a particular social category in the relations of production and in power relations” (129).
Introduction to Australian Cultural Studies, ed. John Frow and Meaghan Morris (St. Leonards, NSW, 1993); quotation from xxi.
Certeau, Writing of History, 68.
Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xi.
Ibid., xix, xx, xxi.

16 Meaghan Morris, "Banality in Cultural Studies," in Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. Patricia Mellancamp (Bloomington, 1990), 14-43; quotation from 30.

17 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xxii. His exemplary figure for this redirection, "the housewife," is (as Morris suggests) a representation that might be crucial to a feminist critique of Certeau's model, one that could proceed by comparing "the housewife" and "walking in the city" as everyday practices. Certeau distinguishes between such practices as "talking, reading, moving about, shopping, cooking, etc." and "ways of operating," such as "clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, hunter's cunning," maneuvers [sic], polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike operations" (xxii), and yet it remains unclear how the latter activities are inapplicable to the housewife.

18 See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA, 1984 [1979]).

19 Michel de Certeau, "Culture within Society," in Culture in the Plural, 101-21; quotation from 107.

20 Ibid., 106.

21 Henri Lefebvre, "The Everyday and Everydayness," Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 7-11; quotation from 9.

22 Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (London, 1991 [1947]), 40; and as quoted in Alice Kaplan and Kristin Ross, Everyday Life (New Haven, 1987). 2.

23 See Lawrence Grossberg, "Cultural Studies, Modern Logics, and Theories of Globalisation," in Back to Reality? Social Experience and Cultural Studies, ed. Angela McRobbie (Manchester, UK, 1997), 7-35.

24 Morris, "Banality in Cultural Studies," 18, 23.

25 Ibid., 24, 27.

26 Ibid., 36.

27 Wlad Godzich, "Foreword: The Further Possibility of Knowledge," in Certeau, Heterologies, vi-xxi; quotation from xx-xxi.

28 Michel Foucault, Preface to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York, 1977 [1972]), x-viv; quotation from xii.

29 Certeau, Heterologies, 172.

30 Lacan similarly displaces Foucault in Judith Butler's Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, 1997). While she makes no mention of Certeau here, the reasons for Butler's failure to accomplish her important task of engaging Foucault and Lacan over their theories of subjectification might intersect at several important points with his own desire to give Foucault's project "content" so as to render it adequate to the life of power.

31 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xii.

32 This understanding of heterology was suggested to me by Ian Buchanan, in reference to Richard Terdiman's work and, of course, to Hegel.

33 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xiv.

34 "Thus an exteriority, with neither beginning nor truth, would return to visit discourse" (Certeau, Writing of History, 236).

35 Ibid., 250.

39 Ibid., 210.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid., 25ff.
39 Certeau, Preface to Culture in the Plural, vii–viii; quotation from viii. Certeau might thus be aligned more with Deleuze and Guattari than with Lacan, and it would be interesting to consider how much the fundamentally unknowable Other of culture in his formulation of everyday life would be subsumed by their critique of lack as a transcendental category exemplified in the psychoanalytic structure of Oedipus. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is no lack in the body, in consciousness—or in desire: "Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject; there is no fixed subject unless there is repression" (Anti-Oedipus, 26).
40 Michel de Certeau, "The Imaginary of the City," in Culture in the Plural, 17–27; quotation from 24.
41 Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo; as quoted in Certeau, Heterologies, 5.
42 Michel de Certeau, "Conclusion: Spaces and Practices," in Culture in the Plural, 133–47; quotations from 133, 134.
43 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 39.
44 See, for example, Grossberg, "Cultural Studies, Modern Logics"; and Mark Poster, "The Question of Agency: Michel de Certeau and the History of Consumerism," diacritics 22 (1992): 94–107.
45 See Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977) [1966]：“Freud's discovery was that of the field of effects in the nature of man of his relations to the symbolic order and the tracing of their meaning right back to the most radical agencies of symbolization in being” (64).
46 Tom Conley, Introduction to Certeau, Writing of History, vii–xxiv; quotation from xv.
47 Certeau, Writing of History, 9.
48 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, xii.
49 Morris, "Banality in Cultural Studies," 41, 35; my emphasis.
50 Maurice Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," in Kaplan and Ross, Everyday Life, 11–20; quotation from 12.
51 Certeau cites Blanchot in Writing of History, 91.
52 I would concur, then, with Grossberg's desire for the discourse of "everyday life" to avoid "texts and audiences" approaches and for a repositioning, similar to the Foucaultian theory of effects and contexts, that Grossberg calls "articulation" ("Cultural Studies, Modern Logics", 18).
53 Blanchot, "Everyday Speech," 18.
54 Certeau, Practice of Everyday Life, 71.
55 Ibid., v.