Page 70 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

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De Certeau,Michel (1925–1986) French writer Michel De Certeau trained as a Jesuit
priest at the University of Lyons and continued his studies at the Sorbonne before
becoming a Professor at the Catholic Institute of Paris and the Universty of Paris-
vii. He also worked at the University of San Diego, California. His writings about
power, resistance and everyday life, which carry the mark of Foucault, have been
influential within cultural studies. De Certeau argues that there are no ‘margins’
outside of power from which to lay an assault on it or from which to claim
authenticity so that the poetic and resistant practices of everyday life are always
already in the space of power. De Certeau makes the distinction between the
strategies of power by which power marks out a space for itself distinct from its
environs and the resistive tactics of the poacher operating within a terrain organized
by the law of a foreign power.
• Associated concepts Cultural politics, cultural populism, popular culture, power,
resistance.
• Tradition(s) Poststructuralism, psychoanalysis.
• Reading De Certeau, M. (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.

Deconstruction This concept is associated with the work of Derrida and his ‘undoing’
of the binaries of Western philosophy as well as its extension into the fields of
literature (for example, De Man) and postcolonial theory (for example, Spivak). To
deconstruct is to take apart, to undo, in order to seek out and display the
assumptions of a text. In particular, deconstruction involves the dismantling of
hierarchical binary conceptual oppositions such as man/woman, black/white,
reality/appearance, nature/culture, reason/madness etc. that serve to guarantee the
status and power of truth-claims by excluding and devaluing the ‘inferior’ part of
the binary.
The purpose of deconstruction is not simply to reverse the order of binaries but
to show how they are implicated in each other. Deconstruction seeks to expose the
blind spots of texts, the unacknowledged assumptions upon which they operate.
This includes the places where a text’s rhetorical strategies work against the logic of
a text’s stated arguments. That is, deconstructionism highlights the tension between
what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean.
One of the central problems of deconstruction is that it must use the very
conceptual language it seeks to undo. For example, to deconstruct Western
philosophy is to use the very language of Western philosophy. To mark this tension,
Derrida places his concepts ‘under erasure’. The use ‘under erasure’ of accustomed
and known concepts is intended to de-stabilize the familiar, marking it as useful,

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