The humanities as a "tactic". Reflections through Michel de Certeau

Abstract

 This essay seeks to offer a critical reflection on the place and power of the humanities in the contemporary world, based on the approaches of Michel de Certeau. Faced with a landscape dominated by technocracy, the management of useful knowledge, and the logic of productivity, it is proposed that the humanities can be understood as a “tactic” in the Certeauian sense: a minor, mobile, and situated practice that operates within the devices of power without being entirely subject to them. Based on certain Certoian ideas, this essay argues that humanistic knowledge practices—in their forms of reading, writing, listening, and interpretation—embody alternative modes of explanation, problematization, and positioning that seek to transcend the dominant ideas about what is “valuable” and “necessary” for a society. Rather than defending an essence of the humanities, this text advocates thinking of them as a “way of doing”: as an art of deviation, of drifting and of rewriting the given.