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Listening for the Cry in a Consumer Culture

Antonio Eduardo Alonso

in Commodified Communion: Eucharist, Consumer Culture, and the Practice of Everyday Life

Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, this chapter develops a foundation from which to think theologically about consumer culture. An emphasis on cultural resistance in ... More

Informed by the work of Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin, this chapter develops a foundation from which to think theologically about consumer culture. An emphasis on cultural resistance in current theological literature on consumer culture uses Certeau’s notion of tactics to describe a mode of Christian resistance that can persist even without overthrowing the strategic grid of consumer culture. By situating tactics within the wider body of his work, this chapter argues that for Certeau tactics were not primarily signs of resistance but signs of absence: living realities that pulse within and against systems of strategies that can never quite contain them. Reading tactics through a hermeneutic of absence opens a space for a theological account of consumer culture that takes seriously the irreducibility of our experiences, even those on the contemporary marketplace. To extend Certeau’s insights into a consumer culture, this chapter further explores the commodity fetish, as Karl Marx first articulated it and as Walter Benjamin distinctively expanded it, to ground a theological account of consumer culture that recognizes not only its deceptions but also the traces of truth in its broken promises and fallen hopes.Less

Certeau’s Landscapes: What Can Images Do?

Patrick O’Donovan

in What Forms Can Do: The Work of Form in 20th- and 21st- Century French Literature and Thought

The chapter alternates between a reading of Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien centred on the practice and the issue of the image, and a wider theoretical reflection on the image’s agency vis-à-vis ... More

The chapter alternates between a reading of Certeau’s L’Invention du quotidien centred on the practice and the issue of the image, and a wider theoretical reflection on the image’s agency vis-à-vis analytical categories through which we engage with the real of modernity. The image possesses agency in that it brings about a ‘rectification’ of prevailing representations of the everyday, by means of a holistic and therapeutic rationale that is distinctive. The mobility of forms that is the basis of Certeau’s vindication of the image is compared with the work of several more recent anthropologists, namely Tim Ingold, Philippe Descola and Eduardo Kohn, in whose writings comparable figures are subsumed into what can be termed an anthropology of sustainability.Less

De Certeau and “Making Do”: The Case of Gay Men and Lesbians on a Jesuit Campus

David Gudelunas

in Jesuit and Feminist Education: Intersections in Teaching and Learning for the Twenty-first Century

This chapter reflects on the writings of French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau, an extremely influential cultural anthropologist of the twentieth century, whose dense and fascinating writings shed ... More

This chapter reflects on the writings of French Jesuit scholar Michel de Certeau, an extremely influential cultural anthropologist of the twentieth century, whose dense and fascinating writings shed light on what more modern scholars might simply label “coping strategies.” Central in de Certeau's work is his discussion of “strategies” and “tactics,” whereby he links strategies with institutions and structures of power, while tactics are utilized by individuals to create space for themselves in environments defined by strategies. The chapter explores the relevance of this theoretical framework of “everyday life” to understanding the contemporary position of feminists as well as gay men and lesbians who are creating space for their own communities within the structure of a Jesuit university. In particular, it explores how one group of students at a Jesuit university created a policy report as a tactical measure to document and make recommendations on how to best make life for gay men and lesbians on a Jesuit campus more welcoming.Less

  Therapy: No Creature Stands Alone before God

Michael Patrick Murphy

in A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination

Chapter 5 presents a reading of David Lodge's novel Therapy (1995) in light of Balthasar's Theo‐logic. Lodge does well to illustrate that the erasure of God that preoccupies postmodern consciousness ... More

Chapter 5 presents a reading of David Lodge's novel Therapy (1995) in light of Balthasar's Theo‐logic. Lodge does well to illustrate that the erasure of God that preoccupies postmodern consciousness significantly affects contemporary conceptions about “subject formation” and “people in relation.” Lodge develops these themes by constructing a narrative that mirrors both the theological trajectory of Balthasar's tripartite program and the existential progression identified by the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard—namely, the aesthetic, ethical, and religious “stages” of human experience. Importantly, a close consideration of Kierkegaard's stages reveals a direct analogy with the transcendentals, which, in turn, illuminates one of the many reasons why Balthasar admired Kierkegaard and why Lodge's novel is a fertile literary example of Balthasar's Theologic. By a close consideration of the triadic structure of being presented by a variety of sources, the chapter begins to discern how God's logic—how human logic—exists in a trinitarian dynamic.Less

Cultural Democracy: Representation, Institutions and Experimentation

in Intellectuals, Culture and Public Policy in France: Approaches from the Left

This chapter focuses on two intellectuals who brought the ideal of cultural democracy in the late 1960s and 1970s: Francis Jeanson and Michel de Certeau. First, it discusses Jeanson's role in the ... More

This chapter focuses on two intellectuals who brought the ideal of cultural democracy in the late 1960s and 1970s: Francis Jeanson and Michel de Certeau. First, it discusses Jeanson's role in the Chalon House of Culture and his contributions in the development and implementation of national cultural policy. It then explores Certeuau's cultural policy thinking and his impact on the cultural policy circles in the 1970s.Less

The Clamor of Voices

Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin

in The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

This essayistic introduction to The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality begins in part one by explaining the Lacanian foundations of voice studies as manifested in the writings of ... More

This essayistic introduction to The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality begins in part one by explaining the Lacanian foundations of voice studies as manifested in the writings of Mladen Dolar. From there, it goes on to consider how voice studies have confronted issues of materiality through embodiment, language, sonic disturbance, postcolonial encounter, the mechanical, and the technological, as well as through race and difference, with further attention to the writings of Roland Barthes, Michel De Certeau, Carolyn Abbate, Gary Tomlinson, Fred Moten, Daphne Brooks, and Josh Kun, among others. The essay ends by exploring thematic and theoretical connections among the various contributions in the volume, with synoptic accounts of each, looping back to issues raised in the opening part of the essay.Less

Can the Pentecostal Subaltern Speak?

Daniel Ramírez

in Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century

The concluding discussion joins the current deconstruction—offered by several theorists of migration, religion, and culture—of the notion of apolitical Pentecostals and rural-to-urban migrants on ... More

The concluding discussion joins the current deconstruction—offered by several theorists of migration, religion, and culture—of the notion of apolitical Pentecostals and rural-to-urban migrants on "social strike" in urban religious haciendas (Lalive D'Epinay). The recovered data from the early to mid-twentieth century demonstrates that folks can remain at once both Pentecostal and socially engaged or migratory and politically active—and politically active in unexpected ways. This historical awareness can help nuance the study of religion and politics in Latin America and Latino USA. In terms of culture viewed through theoretical lenses of habitus and everyday practice (Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau), the Pentecostal subaltern now appears to have been busily at work—adapting, poaching, and reassembling evangelicalismo's offerings—in the first six decades of the twentieth century. The Pentecostal subaltern's voice, it turns out, was never silent, but rather redacted out of the historical record. No longer.Less

Naming and Social Exclusion: The Outcast and the Outsider

Aloka Parasher-Sen

in Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE

This chapter discusses the terms “outcast” and “outsider” as well as naming and social exclusion and begins with quotes from Michel de Certeau and B. R. Ambedkar. Social exclusion has been much ... More

This chapter discusses the terms “outcast” and “outsider” as well as naming and social exclusion and begins with quotes from Michel de Certeau and B. R. Ambedkar. Social exclusion has been much written about in the past, but not in the context of how naming as a process interjected to define linkage between those who named and those who were named. Looking critically at naming in the present context provides space for understanding the multiple nodes of social exclusion, each in turn, throwing up a series of other names apparently synonymous to each other, yet different in their localization in time and space. This sort of flowering out from a strong linear stem enables the chapter to pattern and map the complex relationship between hierarchy and diversity in the social landscape of the subcontinent during a period of some of the most critical centuries in its evolution that has been defined as the period “between the empires.”Less

The Body Wishes to Walk

David Greenstein

in Roads to Utopia: The Walking Stories of the Zohar

While the Zohar acknowledges the metaphorical meanings of walking, it also portrays walking in its silent, primal form--as freedom of movement through space, unburdened with prior significances. It ... More

While the Zohar acknowledges the metaphorical meanings of walking, it also portrays walking in its silent, primal form--as freedom of movement through space, unburdened with prior significances. It developed this image in historical and geographic contexts that both challenged and influenced it. This was a time of pilgrimage and Crusades, movements of people whose diverse and often mundane motivations were subsumed under religious goals. Jewish space was limited and enclosed, and mobility was restricted and risky. The walking motif imagines a liberation from such constrictions. In de Certeau's phrase, it is a “tactic” that breaks through officially constructed spaces to discover new spaces. This also applies to the Jewish religious and intellectual panopticon represented by the beit midrash (house of study). The Zohar presents its teachings as orally transmitted and situates them outside any “absolute space” (Lefebvre's term), as free expressions of embodied individuals.Less

Techniques: French Urban Dance in Intellectual Context

Felicia McCarren

in French Moves: The Cultural Politics of le hip hop

Chapter 6 puts hip hop and its pedagogy into the context of this French theory of practice, considering how a climate created by French intellectuals focusing on practice and understanding bodies as ... More

Chapter 6 puts hip hop and its pedagogy into the context of this French theory of practice, considering how a climate created by French intellectuals focusing on practice and understanding bodies as sites of cultural production and knowledge allowed hip hop to be taken seriously by ministers of culture and a left-wing elite. Reading the work of Leroi-Gourhan, Bourdieu and De Certeau anticipating and accompanying a shift to an idea of culture as practice, using dance as a subject, an example or a metaphor, provides here a context for the appreciation of the counter-cultural form and an explanation of its “recuperation” by state agencies for social purposes, and in particular the institutionalization of its transmission or pedagogy. Chapter 6 also documents how hip hop dance technique is learned, complementing these theories of practice, and the concept of mimesis is discussed in the transmission of hip hop moves. The use of the mirror in the dance studio allows a double reflection on the aestheticization of the form in class training and the constitution of a community in performance.Less

What Makes a Belief Believable?

Graham Ward

in How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I

This chapter develops the distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in terms of an examination of the processes whereby a belief becomes or is made believable, and accepted. It roots ‘belief’ within ... More

This chapter develops the distinction between ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in terms of an examination of the processes whereby a belief becomes or is made believable, and accepted. It roots ‘belief’ within primary human interactions with the environment that operate at biological and neurological levels. This understanding of belief and how something becomes a belief and believable extends what I call the synchronic axis of believing (as distinct from the diachronic axis of believing as it changes over time). ‘Faith’ is a conscious negotiation with primordial sets of inchoate and conflicting beliefs. The chapter contends that the nature of understanding believing is evidently undergoing a major shift in contemporary culture, which impacts upon the way Christian faith seeks its understanding today.Less

Michel de Certeau: Anthropological Spaces

in Spatial Ecologies: Urban Sites, State and World-Space in French Cultural Theory

This chapter describes Michel de Certeau's anthropology of mixed and indeterminate space. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His ... More

This chapter describes Michel de Certeau's anthropology of mixed and indeterminate space. Certeau writes a cultural anthropology that discerns the unconscious religious tenor of everyday life. His The Practice of Everyday Life develops a different concept of the body, closer to language and psychoanalysis. He believes that Azouz Begag's immigrant experience can be strongly associated to the experience of space and time. For Certeau and Begag, space is less produced than developed through dynamic movement and practice among ordinary people who reinvent the everyday to ‘make’ the city from heteroclite ways of living and from the encounter between immigrants and natives.Less

Teen Noir: The Suburb as Lived Space

Timotheus Vermeulen

in Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television

The fifth chapter looks at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick (Johnson, 2004), Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) and Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005) – engage with the suburban environment. The ... More

The fifth chapter looks at the ways in which three teen suburban noirs – Brick (Johnson, 2004), Alpha Dog (Cassavetes, 2006) and Chumscrubber (Posin, 2005) – engage with the suburban environment. The chapter pays attention to the ways which the teenagers – and their parents – (are able to) navigate space: where do they go, how do they move, how can they interact in space? Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau as well as close textual analysis of dialogue and composition, it argues that these films, each in their own way, present the suburb not as a static, depthless non-place, but on the contrary as a space that can be experienced, extended and appropriated – in short, as a lived space.Less

Epilogue

Jon Mee

in Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community 1762 to 1830

This chapter develops a contrast between Hazlitt and Coleridge to offer some thoughts on the relation between these different ideas of conversation for the understanding of ‘the conversation of ... More

This chapter develops a contrast between Hazlitt and Coleridge to offer some thoughts on the relation between these different ideas of conversation for the understanding of ‘the conversation of culture’ today, especially in relation to pedagogy in the university and the pressure towards the smooth ‘flow’ of information as the hegemonic form of education.Less

Little Manila: The Other Central of Hong Kong

Daisy Tam

in Messy Urbanism: Understanding the "Other" Cities of Asia

The Central district in Hong Kong is a scene of wealth and prosperity, a glamorous picture of the vivacious city and those who live within it. Against this overwhelming cityscape, a striking ... More

The Central district in Hong Kong is a scene of wealth and prosperity, a glamorous picture of the vivacious city and those who live within it. Against this overwhelming cityscape, a striking transformation takes place every Sunday. Picnic rugs and vibrant dresses bring colour to the usual sea of dark suits of the week; while music and lively banter replace the dull march of heels on marbled surfaces. Underneath the imposing government and office towers, thousands of domestic workers from the Philippines congregate on their day off. Beneath the arches of Norman Foster’s HSBC building, on the overhead walkways that connect office towers, Statue Square and Chater garden, passageways become destinations. This chapter first traces the various geographies of Little Manila, bringing the lenses to examine the activities, economies and exchanges that take place through Michel de Certeau’s work on The Practice of Everyday Life. The second section looks at the Filipino population and its relation to Hong Kong, engaging with Michel Serres’ work on The Parasite as a new theoretical tool that could offer an alternative perspective of the fluid relations between places, people and relationships at different junctures.Less

The Text of the World and the Comprehensiveness of Wisdom

Paul S. Fiddes

in Seeing the World and Knowing God: Hebrew Wisdom and Christian Doctrine in a Late-Modern Context

Through reflection on ‘space’ and ‘place’ in the thought of Michel de Certeau, this chapter begins by asking whether it is possible to bring together a celebration of the open text of the world with ... More

Through reflection on ‘space’ and ‘place’ in the thought of Michel de Certeau, this chapter begins by asking whether it is possible to bring together a celebration of the open text of the world with the privileging of a particular sacred text as repository of wisdom (‘canon’). In Hebrew thinking, wisdom is identified with Torah as a contraction of inexhaustible wisdom to an accessible span. Thus, we cannot distinguish absolutely between a sacred text and all other texts: a canon into which wisdom is contracted requires us to read the text in relation to what lies adjacent to its boundary, namely all texts in the world. The whole world-text can be conceived as the body of God, its signs formed through being held in the interweaving relations of the Trinity; there is, however, a unique contraction of wisdom in the body of Christ because the pattern of his life fits exactly into the movements of self-giving in God.Less

Paradigm Resets: Real-Life and Virtual Reconnections

M. I. Franklin

in Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance, and the Internet

This chapter brings mid-twentieth century debates on society, culture, and politics to bear on twenty-first century preoccupations, and vice versa—debates that have developed under the aegis of the ... More

This chapter brings mid-twentieth century debates on society, culture, and politics to bear on twenty-first century preoccupations, and vice versa—debates that have developed under the aegis of the rise, fall, and rise again of the nation-state along with its respective discontents and miscreants as the container-term of these (post)modern times. It focuses on social and cultural theorist, Michel de Certeau, whose contributions to mid-twentieth-century critical thought tends to be overshadowed by the institutionalized privileging of his contemporaries Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Henri Lefebvre. The chapter concludes that technologies are products of sociocultural and political economic forces that are also undergoing historical change. The world and these media and technologies are intricately connected even though this interconnection is not a fait accompli.Less