In other words, understanding history entails understanding how it was written. In history everything begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting together, of transforming certain classified objects into 'documents'. This new cultural distribution is the first task. In reality it consists in producing such documents by dint of copying, transcribing, or photographing these objects, simultaneously changing their locus and status. Principally, from the perspective of methodology, his quarrel is with the selection of documents.
Selection involves an act of isolation, demarcating the present from the past.
This enables a new understanding, or intelligibility, of the past to be constructed and it is in interrogating this new understanding that de Certeau's most important concerns come to the fore. His reading is poaching. This represents a very serious charge against the practice of historians. Paradoxically, it is also something of a backhanded compliment. In de Certeau's terms, poaching is the means by which we all survive, it is our way of operating, in short it is his term for consumption.