Translation: Michel de Certeau Vocal Citations

The Little Mermaid, Copenhagen, by Edvard Eriksen, 1913

This is Bora Mici's original translation from French to English of Vocal Citations from Michel de Certeau's theoretical work, The Invention of Everyday Life, L'invention du quotidien. In this text, Certeau distinguishes strategies from tactics, with strategies belonging to an institutional authoritative and closed framework, while tactics are the unpredictable moves that individuals effect within these prescribed systems, individualizing their experience of them and turning them upside down on their heads. The translated passage discusses the evanescence of vocal interventions within a codified system of language and writing by taking inspiration from Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and the protagonist's first encounter with Friday. Whose voices are we going to hear? This argument is especially pertinent in the current social-media- commentary-dominated landscape where anyone can create their own glose but an invisible algorithm chooses which ones become prevalent.   

Citations de voix, Michel de Certeau by Bora Mici

Vocal Citations

Robinson Crusoe indicates himself how a fault was introduced into his scriptural empire. In fact, for a period of time, his enterprise was interrupted and haunted by an absence that returns to the island’s shores, a man’s naked footprint on the beach. The border line cedes to the stranger: the instability of the marker. On the margins of the page, the trace of an invisible fantom (an apparition) comes to upset the order built by a capitalizing and methodical labor. It makes Robinson experience “fluttering thoughts, whimsies, and a terror.” The bourgeois conquerer is transformed into a man who is “beside himself,” becoming a savage himself by way of this “wild” index that reveals nothing. He dreams and his dreams are nightmares. He loses his certainty in a world governed by the great clockmaker. His reason abandons him. Ousted from the productive asceticism that stood for meaning, he experiences diabolical days on end, possessed by the cannibalistic desire to devour the stranger or by the fear of being devoured himself.

So a stain appears on the written page—like the scribble of a child on the book that represents the authority of a place. A lapsus insinuates itself into language. The appropriated territory is altered by the trace of something that is missing and is placeless (like the myth). Robinson will reassume the power of dominion when he has the ability to see, that is to say to substitute the index of a lack with a tangible being, a visible object, Friday. Then he will find himself within his order again. The disorder is due to the index of a past and passing thing, to the “near nothing” of a passage. The violence that oscillates between the impulse to devour and the fear of being eaten, according to Hadewijch d’Anvers, is born out of our ability to name “the presence of an absence.” Here, the other does not constitute a system that is hidden below the one written by Robinson. The island is not a palimpsest where it is possible to reveal, decrypt or decode a system covered by an order superimposed upon it, but that’s of the same type. The passing trace does not have its own text. We cannot enunciate it other than through the discourse of a proprietor, and it does not live anywhere else but in his space. The only language of difference is Robinson’s own interpretive delirium—dreams and “whimsies.”

The novel dating from 1719 already points to the non-place (a trace that eats away at the edges) and a fantastic modality (an interpretive insanity) of that which will interject as a voice in the field of writing, even though Daniel Defoe deals with the silent marking of the text by a body part (a naked foot), and not the voice itself, which represents language marked by the body. A name is already given to this form and these modalities: they speak, says Robinson, of something “wild.” The naming, here like everywhere else, is not a mere depiction of reality: it’s a performative act that organizes what it pronounces. It means in the same way that we mean for someone to go away. It does what it says, and constitutes the savageness that it declares. Since we excommunicate by naming, the name “savage” simultaneously creates and defines that which the scriptural economy situates outside of itself. And its essential predicate immediately comes to affect it: the savage is evanescent; he is marked (by stains, lapsus, etc.) but he cannot be written. He changes a place (he upsets it), but he does not establish one.

In such a way, the “theoretical fiction” invented by Daniel Defoe points to a form of alterity as it relates to writing, a form that will also impose its identity upon the voice, since, later, when he appears, Friday will be faced with an alternative due to a long history: either cry out (a “wild” outbreak that calls for the interpretation or the corrective action of a pedagogical or psychiatric “treatment”) or turn his body into an instrument of the dominant language (by becoming “his master’s voice,” a docile body that implements the order, embodies a reason and obtains the status of being the substitute of enunciation, no longer the act but the doing of another’s “saying.”) As for the voice, it will also insinuate itself as a trace in the text, as an effect or a metonymy of the body, a fleeting citation like the “nymph” of G. Cossart—Nympha fugax, a passing fugitive, an indiscreet revenant, a “pagan” or “wild” reminiscence in the scriptural economy, an unnerving noise from another tradition, and supplying a reason for the production of interminable interpretations.

We still need to define some of the historic forms imposed upon orality as they relate to its ousting. Because of this exclusion, for reasons relating to neatness and economic efficiency, the voice essentially appears as the figure of citation, which is analogous, in the field of writing to the trace of the naked foot on Robinson’s island. In the scriptural culture, the citation unites effects of interpretation (it allows for the production of a text) with effects of alteration (it disturbs the text). It plays between these two poles that, in turn, characterize these two extreme figures: on the one hand, the pre-text-citation, that serves to produce text (a presumed commentary or analysis) from relics chosen from an oral tradition that functions as an authority; on the other hand, the reminiscence-citation that traces within language the unusual and fragmented return (like a breaking voice) of structuring oral relationships but which are suppressed by writing. It would seem these are borderline cases outside of which we can no longer speak of the voice. In the first case, citations become the means of the proliferation of the discourse; in the second case, they escape it and cut it up.

If we were to only keep in mind these two options, I would call one of them the “science of the fable” (from the name that has so often been attributed to it during the 18th century), and the other “returns and turns of the voice” (since its returns, like swallows in springtime, are accompanied by subtle modalities and procedures, in the same way as the turns and tropes of rhetoric, and can be translated into paths that squat in unoccupied places, into “movies for voices” says Marguerite Duras, into ephemeral tours—“a little walk and then we’ll go.”) The sketch of these two figures can act as an introduction to the examination of oral practices, while specifying some of the aspects of the framework that allows for voices to still speak.