From Word To Word

In the introduction to The Practise of Everyday Life,  Michel de Certeau argues that a certain kind of visuality has come to dominate our perception.  “Our society,” he says, “is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown, and transmuting communication into a visual journey.  It is a sort of epic of the eye and of the impulse to read.”  It is not vision itself that is the problem here, but a cancer of the vision, not the eye itself, but the eye grown epic.  The problem is the demand that everything be shown to the eye in order that everything might be read, a demand that automatically reduces all communication to mere spectacle.  The problem is that things are understood to have value only insofar as they can be measured and consumed by the eye.

For this reason, de Certeau argues for a particular kind of reading.  In this kind of reading, “the reader insinuates into another person’s text the ruses of pleasure and appropriation.”  The reader “poaches on the text, is transported into it, pluralizng himself in it like the rumbling of one’s body.”  The reader thus produces the book rather than merely consuming it as a visuality, producing it as something to be remembered rather than merely read.  Using “ruse, metaphor, arrangement,” de Certeau argues, “this production is also an invention of memory.  Words become the outlet or product of silent histories. The readable transforms itself into the memorable.”  The text that has been only a readable object for the consuming eye, becomes a memorable invention of the productive mind, dislocating the reader from mere consumption and the text from mere visuality.

A few pages later, in the beginning of the book proper, de Certeau begins to speak of a writing that also disrupts consumption of the text through the figure of the anonymous man, the everyman, the one who is everybody and nobody at once, arguing that “the straying of writing outside of its own place is traced by this anonymous man.”  Here de Certeau describes a writing to parallel the kind of reading that he has just been discussing in his introduction, a writing that invites its readers to reproduce it, to rewrite it, to remember it, rather than merely to consume it.

This kind of writing offers the reader the opportunity to identify with the anonymous man as “the metaphor and drift of the doubt that haunts writing,” as “the phantom of its vanity,” as “the enigmatic figure of the relation that writing entertains with all people, with the loss of its exemption, and with its own death.”  The image here is of the ghost or the phantom, the reminder and the remainder of death, that haunts the house, that makes it enigmatic, that becomes the source of stories and legends, that makes of the house more than can be seen and measured.   This is the function of the anonymous man also, to haunt the text, to remind us of our relation to the everyman who is both tragic and farcical, both ghostly and material, both dying and surviving.

This figure, the one with whom I am invited to identify, opens the text to a reading that is memorable, that is related to my own history and my own memory.  It is no longer a text that allows me to see it at a distance, but one that invites me participate in it, to produce it, to remember it.  The anonymous man, to play a little on this idea, is presented to me as one who is dismembered but in whom I can nevertheless recognize myself, despite or even because his dismemberment has made him anonymous, and this figure requires of me that I remember it, that I suture its limbs together so that I can see myself in it.  I am forced to make something of it, to actively create something that never was and never could be presented to my eye, something that escapes a mere passive and consumptive visuality.

In this sense, I would like my writing to be haunted, to be monstrous, to be uncanny.  I want it to stray out of its place.  I want it to be the habitation of things that neither I nor you can wholly see or understand, but that therefore confront us with ourselves, and with each other, and with our limit.