The Blasphemer's Art de Faire

Blasphemy appears unexpectedly toward the end of Michel de Certeau's last chapter in The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau sees a marked difference between the resistant residue of everyday practices and the modern, rationalistic technocracy. (His distinction has lost some of its pointedness in a latter day when scholarship itself now has daily recourse to technocracy's tools.) De Certeau is intent here on dismissing the bland language presumed to be spoken by calculating bureaucrats. Their patois—euphemism—he consigns to insignificance. By contrast, there is the vocabulary of actual material practices, spoken by what he calls the "resistance movement." It commands the lion's share of his interest and sympathy.

Conceptual engineers are familiar with this sort of movement, which they call "resistance" and which disturbs functionalist calculations (an elitist form of bureaucratic structures). They cannot not perceive the fictive character instilled in an order by its relationship to everyday reality. But they must not acknowledge this relationship. It would be a sort of lèse-majesté to talk ironically about this subject in offices, and the guilty person would be cashiered.... Leaving this functionalist rationality to the proliferation of its elegant euphemisms (euphemisms that persist everywhere in the discourse of administration and power), let us then return to the murmuring of everyday practices. ¹

It is de Certeau's short note to this remark about the unironic euphemisms spoken by office workers that brings up euphemism's veiled referent, blasphemy, in particular, blasphemous speech as analyzed by the linguist Émile Benveniste. "To blasphemy (which 'lets out' the secret and 'betrays' more than it reveals)," de Certeau explains,

Benveniste opposes "euphemism" ("Jiminy Christmas!" [the original has nom d'une pipe!] for "Jesus Christ!" [nom de Dieu!]) which "makes allusion to a linguistic profanation without actually carrying it out." ²

The note finds Benveniste's linguistic definition of euphemism "a welcome concept."

The implications of these admittedly cursory observations are intriguing, even though the politically charged historical moment that occasioned them (the early 1970s) has decidedly passed. We are asked to accept that officialdom is euphemistic and that every-day practices, by implication, are "blasphemous." A first consideration turns up some nuances in an otherwise persuasive conceptual polarization.

Yes, euphemistic speech continues to be recognizable in public discourse even a half century or more after Arbeit macht frei, "showers" in the death camps, and the functionalist military lingo of the Vietnam era. Countless verbal sanitations continue to skew and downplay death and atrocity for partisan reasons, and such phrases as "collateral damage" are as grating in themselves as they ever were, as technologized warfare aspires to fine-tune killing in ways unimaginable a generation ago—and is met with by killing that is no less despicable for being lower-tech. In other respects the contrast in de Certeau's passage may seem facile, indeed caricaturishly counterintuitive. Do office workers in France or elsewhere really feel intimidated bringing up nontechnocratic references to quotidian realities in conversation? Are government workers really incapable of irony? Are the "technocrats" quite as facelessly monstrous as they were portrayed in the early 1970s, their speech robotically evading the "resistances" of practical reality? Or are technocrats themselves not just as deeply immersed in daily practice as anyone else in the productions of working life? Is it not disingenuous to assume that within everyday practices themselves a certain euphemism—a necessary deference to convention, to optimism, to the delicacy of speech that may prove more effective not by offending but by putting the best face on things—doesn't prevail as the common coin of the realm? Does the language of daily life, by contrast, always erupt as a kind of blasphemy to ruffle the smooth surfaces and indirections of le bien-dire and puncture the hypocrisies of propriety?

To be fair, it is certainly arbitrary to seize on one passage as if it were de Certeau's final word on the modern logic of the functionary, whose elaborations one can...