Debates Across the Board

Books and Ideas / La Vie des idées

Over the past few months, Books and Ideas has been running a series of interviews with leading contemporary scholars, who took the time to discuss their particular topics of research with us. For the Christmas season, we have put together a selection of seven discussions with intellectuals across the humanities and sciences: sociology, history, comparative literature, neuro-biology, anthropology and political science.

The Book: Its Past, Its Future

An interview with Roger Chartier

Ivan Jablonka

Roger Chartier, a professor at the Collège de France, examines upheavals in the light of history. The upheavals of the digital age now confront us with an unprecedented question about the future of the written text: in its electronic form, should a text be fixed and immutable like a printed book, or can it open up to the potentialities of anonymity and unbounded multiplicity? What is certain is that the multiplication of editorial media, of periodicals and screens is diversifying the reading and writing practices of a society which, contrary to what is often claimed, is reading more and more.

The Transformations of the Book

Books & Ideas: I’d like to talk to you about the way in which the book as a physical object is metamorphosing nowadays under the influence of Internet technologies (e-books, print on demand etc.). Can you go over some of the changes the book has undergone since the invention of the codex¹?

Roger Chartier: The first problem is: what is a book? This is a question Kant asked in the second part of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and he defined quite clearly what a book is. On the one hand, it’s an object produced by any kind of manufacturing process – manuscript copy, printing or even electronic production – and which belongs to whoever acquires it. At the same time, a book is also a work, a discourse. Kant says it’s a discourse that is addressed to a readership and that always remains the property of whoever composed it and can only be distributed under the mandate he gives to a bookseller or a publisher to put it in the realm of public circulation.

All the problems involved in thinking about it derive from this complex relationship between the book as a material object and the book as an intellectual or aesthetic work, because to this day that relationship has always been established between these two categories, between these two definitions: on the one hand, works that have a certain logic, a coherence, a completeness and, on the other, the material forms of their inscription, which in Antiquity and up to the 1st century AD were confined to the scroll. In this case, the work was very often disseminated by means of several different objects. Beginning with the invention of the codex (that is to say the book as we still know it, with notebooks, leaves and pages), the opposite situation arose: one and the same codex could – and this was actually the rule – contain several books in the sense of different works.

What’s new about the present day and age is that this nexus between types of object and types of discourse has been severed, since there is a textual continuity to be read on a screen, and the material inscription on this unlimited surface no longer corresponds to a specific type of object (the scrolls of Antiquity, manuscript codices or the printed book after Gutenberg). This now gives rise to disputes that may even have legal ramifications regarding copyright and ownership issues. How does one maintain categories of ownership in a work within a technology that no longer delimits the work the way an object like the ancient scroll or the codex used to do? This may also have consequences for the recognition of the status of scholarly authority. In the age of the codex, a hierarchy of objects could more or less indicate a hierarchy in terms of validity of discourse. There was an immediately perceivable difference between an encyclopedia, a book, a newspaper, a journal, a note sheet, a letter and so on, which were provided in material form to be read, regarded, physically handled, and which corresponded to registers of discourse that fell within this plurality of forms.

But today the sole object – and there’s one right here on this desk – is the computer, which holds every type of discourse, whatever it may be, and which renders the continuity between reading and writing absolutely immediate. So we can enter into contemporary considerations, while returning to this duality that we often forget. This brings up the problem of the electronic book, with a rematerialization in an order of objects like the e-book or the laptop computer, which are unique objects for every sort of text. So from here on, the relationship takes on new terms.

Books & Ideas: Michel de Certeau draws a distinction between the written trace, which is fixed and enduring, and reading, which is of a transient nature [1]. But texts on the Internet are constantly changing. To stretch the point a bit, one might say the Internet is a world of “plagiarized plagiarizers.” [2] Is this a major upheaval in your opinion, or would you say that over the course of history, and especially in the 17th century, the text has never been a stable form?

Roger Chartier: Yes. In his distinction, Michel de Certeau refers to the roving reader who constructs meaning based on constraints while concomitantly constructing meaning based on freedoms, that is to say he “poaches.” If we do poach, it’s because there is a domain that is set, protected and off limits. De Certeau often compares writing to tilling the soil and reading to traveling (or poaching). This is indeed a view that has inspired works on the history of reading or the sociology and anthropology of reading, from the moment that reading was no longer enclosed in the text, but was the product of a dynamic, dialectical relationship between a reader, the scope of his expectations, skills and interests, and the text he is coming to grips with.

But this constructive distinction can also obscure two aspects. The first is that the poaching reader himself is rather strictly determined by collective determinations that are shared by interpretative or reading communities, so this creative freedom, this consumption that is production, has its own limits; it is socially differential. Secondly, as you say, this textual domain is a more mobile terrain than a plot of land to the extent that this mobility actually did exist for any number of reasons. The technological conditions of text reproduction, for example the manuscript copy (a practice that endured till the 18th and 19th centuries), are amenable to this textual mobility from one copy to another. Apart from highly sacred texts, which have to be respected to the letter, all texts are open to interpretation, additions and alterations. In the first period of printing, that is to say between the mid-15th and early 19th century, print runs were still quite limited, for many reasons, to between 1,000 and 1,500 copies. From then on, the success of a work was ensured by multiple republications. And each new edition was a reinterpretation of the text, whether in terms of the letter of the text, which is modifiable, or even in terms of the physical aspects of its presentation, which are another form of variation. Supposing not even a comma is changed in a given text, changes in forms of publication – fonts, the presence or absence of illustrations, how the text is divided up etc. – create a mobility in the possibilities of appropriation.

So we have compelling reasons to assert this textual mobility. There are other, intellectual or aesthetic reasons, too: up to Romanticism, stories belonged to everyone and texts were written based on formulae that were already there. This malleability of stories, this plurality of resources available for writing, creates another form of movement, which is impossible to confine to the letter of a text that remains forever stable. We might even add that copyright only serves to reinforce this fact. Which is paradoxical, of course, since copyright recognizes that a work is always identical to itself. What then does copyright protect? In the 18th and 19th centuries, it protected every possible form of printed publication of a text and, in our day, every possible form of publication period, whether it be a motion picture adaptation, a television program or various editions. So we have a legal principle of unity that covers the indefinite plurality of successive or simultaneous states of the work.

I think we need to resituate contemporary mobility, with the electronic text, that polyphonic textual palimpsest, in a long-term conception of past textual mobilities. What remains of the question is the fact that there are constant attempts to reduce that mobility in the electronic world. This is the precondition for products to be saleable – the “opus mechanicum,” as Kant would have called it – and the precondition for proper nouns to be recognizable both as authors and as beneficiaries of their creative work. Hence the profound contradiction that Robert Darnton developed between this infinite mobility of electronic communication and the effort to enclose the electronic text in mental or intellectual categories, but also in material forms that fix it, define it, transforming it into a plot of land on which the reader might poach – but a plot with sufficiently stable boundaries, limits and contents. Herein lies the great challenge, which is to determine whether the electronic text ought to be subject to inherited concepts and therefore altered in its very materiality, that is permanently fixed with built-in safeguards, or whether, conversely, the potentialities of this anonymity, this multiplicity and endless mobility are going to dominate the uses of writing and reading. I think this is the focus of the contemporary discussion, uncertainties and vacillations.

Books & Ideas: To end this batch of questions about changes in the book as a physical object, I’d also like to ask you about changes in the place where this object is traditionally kept: namely the library. In its Google Books Library Project, Google has scanned the collections of 28 libraries, including those of Harvard, Stanford and Oxford. This project has its (critical) proponents like Darnton and its opponents like Jean-Noël Jeanneney. Do you think Google is going to give rise to a global library that is open to everyone?

Roger Chartier: Here again, underlying this project you’ll find myths or figures of Antiquity, specifically that of a library that contains every book in the world. That was the plan of the Ptolemys in Alexandria. Google has subscribed to this prospect of a library containing every existing book as well as the books that may yet be written. Technically and ideally speaking, there’s no reason to think that all the books that exist in one form or another couldn’t be digitized and included in a universal library.

But one of the primary limitations is that the Google project is handled by a capitalist enterprise. It is governed by an economic rationale, even if that is not readily apparent, and that rationale may also govern the advertisers and media of this gigantic corporation. Furthermore, this is a project which, even if it claims to be all-encompassing, clearly favors the English language. As an ex-governor of Texas [Translator’s note: Miriam Ferguson] once said, “If English was good enough for Jesus, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.” No doubt she’d read the Bible only in the King James translation and not the previous versions. The project is not presented along those lines, but still, given that the first five libraries chosen were Anglo-American, the bulk of the collections was inevitably in English.

So what are the possible responses? One suggestion was to reorganize national and European libraries in such a way as to come up with an alternative project. It was alternative in terms of language diversity and also because it was based more on public power and not on private enterprise. But presumably through these portions of universal libraries we could arrive at a universal library, even if it isn’t unified by a modern-day Ptolemy. And there’s no reason to think it couldn’t be accessible in electronic form.

The question that follows from there is not only that of languages and responsibility, but also whether this universal library, which wouldn’t need to be located anywhere insofar as anyone can access one book or another on his computer wherever he happens to be, won’t spell the demise of libraries as we knew them: a place where books are preserved, sorted and consultable. I think the answer is no, it won’t. The digitization process makes an even stronger case for retaining the traditional definition because we always come back to a fundamental point, which is, as Don McKenzie puts it, that forms affect meaning. The great danger in the digitization process is to suggest that a text is the same no matter what media it is carried on. As crucial as access to digitized texts may be, I find that this digitization nevertheless reinforces the importance of preserving our cultural heritage, the successive forms that texts have had for their successive readers. The task of preserving, cataloguing and consulting texts in the forms in which they were originally published becomes an absolutely fundamental requirement, which reinforces the importance of libraries in preserving our cultural heritage.

Any number of examples can be adduced in this regard. In the 19th century, the novel existed in multifarious physical forms: serialized in weekly or daily supplements in the papers, in the form of publication in installments, in the form of books for reading rooms, in the form of anthologies of a single or several authors, in the form of complete works and so on and so forth. Each form of publication involves different possibilities of appropriation, different waiting periods, a different temporal relation to the text in question. The need to reinforce this role in the preservation of written heritage is not only a good thing for scholars seeking to reconstruct the history of texts, but also for the relationship current-day societies have to their own past, that is to say to the successive forms that written culture has taken in the past.

This is the crux of the main debate over projects like Google’s, which were subsequently imitated by library consortiums. When they got wind of the Google Library Project, some librarians drew the conclusion that they’d be able to empty the stacks and assign the reading rooms to a different use. We also see this in the controversy raging in the United States over the destruction of 19th and 20th-century newspapers as soon as they were reproduced on a substitute medium, in this case microfilm; but the risk would be even greater with digitization. The libraries sold their collections, or they were destroyed in the course of the microfilming process. One American novelist, Nicholson Baker, wrote a book to denounce that policy, which was the policy of the Library of Congress and the British Library, and incidentally to try to save this written heritage himself: he actually put together a sort of archives of collections of American dailies from the 1850s to 1950.

What is reading?

Books & Ideas: Ever since the invention of writing, reading practices have changed continually. We read aloud in family circles in the evening, for example, or alone in silence. Can you talk about the different forms of reading down through history?

Roger Chartier: There are two dimensions: morphological and chronological. We can pinpoint moments in history at which the preconditions for reading underwent massive changes. In a very long-term medieval development, more and more readers were able to read the way we do, that is in silence and with their eyes, although oralized reading was both a normal way of sharing text among the literate and one of the conditions for textual comprehension. The cause and consequence of progress in silent visual reading were a new form of textual inscription, specifically the introduction of separations between words, which did not previously exist in most Latin texts. That was one of the major revolutions in reading.

We have been able to talk about a “new revolution” in reading in the 18th century, but this expression is debated. The objects that were read diversified: this was the age of the widespread circulation of periodicals, of growing quantities of lampoons and pamphlets, of increased book production throughout Europe. On the other hand, reading moved away somewhat from the respectful, obedient, sacred practices that still marked it heavily to become a more casual, critical and mobile practice. In the 18th century – and contemporaries really felt it, by the way – there was like a mania for reading, a reading craze. Another crucial transition occurred in the 19th century, an age of mounting tension between the reading norms imposed by school and the rampant spread of reading in ever-broader social milieux. This 19th-century proliferation of writing could be seen in cities on the walls, the public notices, the posters, in the press, which changed in nature during that period, and from the second half of the century in book collecting by the working class.

So it is possible to identify the changes, some of which were related to the morphology of reading (silent or oral), others to the tension between imposed norms of “how to read properly” and the wide range of unfettered everyday practices. Historians have debated the validity of each of these putative turning-points and whether they can be qualified as “revolutions in reading.” On the other hand, the plurality you mentioned is not just a morphological and chronological plurality: in each of these societies (medieval, Enlightenment, 19th century) we see a differentiation in what we might call “interpretive communities” or “reading communities,” based on the same skills, the same expectations in respect of writing and the same reading conventions. There’s a well-known article by Michel de Certeau on mystical Spanish and French communities of the late 16th and early 17th century united by a rapport with the book, by specific reading practices, by a gradual drift away from prayers. We have also tried to discern what might characterize “working-class reading,” that is reading as practiced by the least literate social strata or those accustomed to narrower textual repertoires. So there are efforts to identify this plurality, which is directly rooted in social and cultural differences. I think the way to parse these diverse ways of reading would consist in fusing these chronological and morphological dimensions with an identification of sociocultural differentiations.

Books & Ideas: There’s a very funny and savvy book by Pierre Bayard, Comment parler des livres que l’on n’a pas lus? [i.e. “How to talk about books you haven’t read”]. After all, it is often true that all we know of books is what the critics say or the filmmakers who adapt them. Would you say we do read books nowadays or that we only become acquainted with their by-products?

Roger Chartier: The question is whether there’s been any innovation around the idea that you can get to know books you haven’t read, in other words through different forms of mediation. This mediated knowledge has been reinforced by the development of places of mediation. But similar forms existed in the past as well. In this regard Don Quixote is probably the first text to usher in the modernity of reading, first of all because its main theme is the projection of the text onto the world and the presence of the world incorporated into the text, but also because a great many readers very soon got to know Don Quixote without having read it. References to Don Quixote circulated quite early on by dint of impersonations of the characters at courtly revels and at carnivals, the spread of iconographic representations of scenes from the novel, its adaptation for theatrical performances, though also the piecemeal reading of passages from the novel, which was made possible by its division into chapters. It cannot be inferred from all those references, however, that readers actually read the whole book, much less both parts when the second volume came out in 1615. So this represents the first matrix of these forms of access to a text through the mediation of either fragmentary readings or manifestations of the text outside the text. In my opinion this is a very important history: how characters and stories emerge from the page – on stage, at festivities, in discourse – to become realities that depend on and yet differ from the writing proper.

One might also consider the dominant technique in Humanism: that is the technique of commonplaces, that is to say the ability to reuse examples, maxims, models that serve in producing new discourse. This is a reading technique that dismembers texts and sometimes makes use of snippets cut out by others, since you can consult collections of commonplaces, where you’ll find rhetorical and stylistic resources for your own productions.

So this idea that one can know texts without having read them, that reading fragments is often an ersatz for reading the whole thing, is not new. What has no doubt amplified this phenomenon in modern-day society even more than the proliferation of printed reproductions of artworks is the multiplicity of audiovisual adaptations, first in the cinema and then on television, engendering a familiarity with literary works that people have never read. So it is the mode of impact that has changed.

Books & Ideas: In a recent article, Robert Darnton says it’s “important to get the feel of a book – the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding. […] Books also give off special smells.”² Allow me in closing to ask you a personal question: what is your particular way of loving books? How do you read?

Roger Chartier: “Le moi est haïssable [i.e. egoism is odious],” somebody [i.e. Pascal] once said somewhere. By the way, I think this question is a booby-trap if you bear in mind what Bourdieu says about the biographical illusion. This type of question presumes you will give an answer in which, even if unconsciously, you construct an image of yourself. The main thing, especially in the first part of his observation, is that Darnton is relaying his own work as an historian. In the 18th century, as a matter of fact, as he shows in copious correspondence, many buyers of books were keen on this physicality, the nature of the paper, the ink and so on. All these elements, which inform the nostalgia of those who believe the book is already dead, give pleasure to certain bibliophiles and readers. To my mind, they are not to be taken so much from their affective side, this world of printed pages that we’ve supposedly lost, but from their intellectual side: the forms of inscription of a given text delimit or prescribe its potential for appropriation. This starts with appropriations at the most economic level, since the retail price depends on these physical features. A paperback doesn’t cost as much as a hardback. Above and beyond the conditions of physical and economic appropriation, there are the conditions of the construction of meaning, which involve the choice of format, fonts, the division of the text, the use of illustrations and so on. So Darnton’s remark, which lies on the affective level of an intimate relationship to the object, can be converted into a tool of knowledge.

As to your second question, I think the only answer is the one we mentioned earlier. Nowadays everyone is developing this plurality of relations to the texts they read in accordance with their concerns and their pastimes, their activities and desires. From this point of view, we read intensively and extensively texts that deserve to be regarded as legitimate reading material, and we place the others outside of these categories. Sometimes we hear a diagnosis that says we’re reading less and less these days. That’s dead wrong: no society has ever read as much, or published as many books (even if the print runs are tending down). Never before has so much printed matter been available at kiosks and newsstands, and never before have people read as much – thanks to the omnipresence of screens.

So it’s completely wrong to claim that reading is on the wane. On the other hand, what’s at stake in this sort of observation is the fact that the ones asking and the ones fielding this question often don’t feel the same things are worth reading. Christian Baudelot has put out a book entitled Et pourtant, ils lisent [“And Yet They’re Reading”], in which he stresses the contrast between statements by teenagers, especially boys who don’t want by any means to be pegged as readers (because that carries connotations of “square” bookishness and a conventional mindset, a culture they reject), and their actual behavior: at school, they read; in front of the screen, they read; and those who say they never read actually read a wide range of written matter. We find the same type of analysis in historical studies using interviews of readers born in the early 20th century in working-class and rural milieux.

This points up the tensions between what people say about reading, which always refers to a norm of scholastic and cultural legitimacy, and actual practices, which are boundless, widespread and diverse, and which take up a wide range of printed and written matter over the course of a single day or a lifetime. Defining legitimacy, the connect between what we regard as reading proper and the infinite amount of low-quality practices, which are reading practices all the same, may well be the great challenge facing contemporary society. The multiplicity of widespread practices and appropriations of writing can be viewed as a telltale sign of the fault lines running through society and of the very different resources thanks to which individuals can know themselves better or know others better. This is not a matter of contending that all the texts we read are of equal value, but I don’t exempt myself from this tension between what we read for intellectual purposes or aesthetic pleasure and the countless low-quality texts we read over the course of a day in the press or on the web. This is an answer in which, it seems to me, the actual, individual case can help us think about practices of knowledge, which are what we have in common nowadays.

Interview by Ivan Jablonka

Transcribed by Émilie Boutin

Translation by Eric Rosencrantz, with the support of the Institut du Monde Contemporain.

Published by Books&Ideas, 14 October 2013. ©booksandideas.net

First published in laviedesidees.fr, 28 September 2008.

The Anti-Establishment Impact of Postcolonial Studies

An Interview with Jacques Pouchepadass

Jules Naudet

What are the challenges and limitations of postcolonial theory? The historian Jacques Pouchepadass reminds us that postcolonial studies do not constitute an academic discipline, but rather a critical school of thought, that calls on historians to stop celebrating the odyssey of Western modernity throughout the world.

Jacques Pouchepadass, a historian of modern and contemporary India, is an emeritus director of research at the CNRS. He has mainly worked at the Centre d’Études de l’Inde et de l’Asie du Sud (Centre for the Study of India and Southeast Asia) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. His initial research into peasants and the struggle for independence in colonial India led him, as early as the late 1970s, to build up a relationship with the founding collective of historians behind Subaltern Studies, with whom he conducted debates that were at once amicable and critical. Over the past ten years, he has published numerous articles and contributions about subaltern and postcolonial studies, on the topic of which he is currently preparing a book.

Books and Ideas: What is it that we call postcolonial studies?

Jacques Pouchepadass: Postcolonial studies are a field of critical thought that appeared in Anglo-Saxon universities during the 1980s, mainly in the United States. It arises out of a major, well-known work by Edward Said: Orientalism, which was published in 1978, and which had the aim of studying and criticising Western discourse on the Islamic Orient. The chronological period that was studied by Said in this book covered the entire period of the colonial relationship between the West and the rest of the world, in particular the period of the second major European expansion, from the 18th century to the middle of the 20th century. In carrying out this project, Edward Said was inspired by the ideas of Michel Foucault. His study took into consideration all of the academic production, but also the literary works, in particular novels, written in the West about the East, and he stated the principle that this set of texts constituted, or rather represented, what Michel Foucault referred to as a discursive formation. This refers to a kind of mental and intellectual universe that is expressed through the entire intertextuality of the period. Of course, this focus on textuality was connected to what is known as the linguistic turn, which was a major revolution in the intellectual life of this period. For this very reason, it was subsequently quite vigorously criticised, in the same way as postmodernism was criticised almost everywhere in the world, and particularly in France. Said’s Orientalism appeared as a complete innovation in academic discourse on the Orient and on the relationship between the West and its “others”, and, in the wake of this, a great number of intellectuals started to work along the same lines. Most of these were intellectuals who originated from countries in what was referred to at the time as the Third World, which we would tend to refer to today as Southern countries, and who were employed in Anglo-Saxon universities, in particular in the United States. The intellectual climate within which these intellectuals were living and working itself made them predisposed to adopt this position of reacting critically to the textuality of colonialism. Taking a contrasting stance to traditional anti-colonialism, which was more concerned with carrying out a political, economic and social criticism, they went into a more epistemic criticism, a criticism that was based on the textuality of colonialism. This is the genealogy that has led to the birth of what has since been known as postcolonial thought, as it is currently being developed in Anglo-Saxon and American universities, but also in many other places across the whole world.

Books and Ideas: What connections can we draw between postcolonial studies and subaltern studies?

Jacques Pouchepadass: Strictly speaking, Subaltern Studies is the title of a series of texts that were published in India from 1982, the twelfth and last of which was published in 2005. These texts were collective projects, collections of articles that were edited by a collective of young historians who gathered around them other historians working along the same lines, under the leadership of a much older Bengali Marxist historian, Ranajit Guha, who at the time was based in England. The perspective put forward by Guha and by his young comrades was inspired by the history from below of so-called “radical” English historians (the most famous of which is E. P. Thompson), who made the deliberate choice to focus on the “people” rather than on the elite. This is precisely what Guha and his disciples wanted to do: to change the dominant perspective in the historiography of colonial India, and to write a history from below of colonial India. The historiography that Guha was criticising was organised into two fields. On the one hand, you had colonial history in the classical sense of the term, a history that was largely English, and which consisted in establishing the history of English people in India, rather than the history of India during the colonial era. On the other hand, you had what one might call the official narrative of the genesis of the Indian nation, which could be found in all the textbooks used in Indian university teaching. This glorified the path taken by India’s nationalist elites during the struggle for independence, and showed how, following their example, the Indian masses had risen up and at last won their independence by following the directives of these elites rather than their own initiative.

Guha and his disciples took a completely different view. They intended to give back to the Indian people its dignity, its ability to take the initiative and to act, and its autonomy in relation to the elites, to show that in reality it was the people who should be thanked for having pushed the English out of India. The elites that the people had been forced to follow had taken hold of power at the end, by withholding the fruits of victory from the people. However, this approach involved, perhaps not quite errors in terms of its method, but at any rate some positions that were difficult to defend and that were quite quickly criticised: on the one hand, the fact that the people as an entity was to a certain extent essentialised, using general traits that did not allow for any distinctions to be made between the Indian popular masses; and on the other hand, and this was mainly a left-wing criticism, the fact that subaltern studies attributed all of the initiative to the people without acknowledging that it could not have done anything without an elite, an avant-garde, to provide a framework and directives. These were clearly powerful criticisms. As a result, the field of subaltern studies, or rather the team that was responsible for them, changed their focus somewhat. Instead of seeking to continue in the direction of establishing an apology for the people, they turned to criticising the discourse of the colonial and Indian elites. From this point onwards, the issue was therefore to draw up a history that criticised the textuality of the time. In doing so, the subalternists found themselves straying into the field of postcolonial studies, which at the time was in full boom. In addition, it so happens that these subalternist historians, several of which were particularly brilliant, were recruited by American universities, and found themselves in the very places where postcolonial studies were born. A kind of junction was established between the two, and the field of subaltern studies, which stopped appearing as a separate editorial project in 2005, merged into the intellectual nebula of postcolonialism. A certain number of authors connected to the Subaltern Studies series have become stars of postcolonial thought: these include Gayatri Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty and a few others, and the field of subaltern studies is now viewed as a part, perhaps not of the prehistory, but at any rate of the early history of postcolonialism.

Books and Ideas: Can we say that postcolonial studies are truly cross-disciplinary?

Jacques Pouchepadass: Postcolonial studies are not a discipline. They are a school of critical thought that we might describe as radical, and that has been defined from the start by the intellectual context within which it was born: that of poststructuralism, of postmodernism, of everything that was referred to at the time as French theory, because this philosophical attitude was largely drawn from the works of Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze etc. This critical position is aimed at all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, and calls on them to undergo a kind of decentring, a conversion of perspective, and this in turn has played a big part in leading them to work on themselves, to detach themselves from a way of thinking which places the European reference model at the centre of everything, and instead to grant equal dignity to non-European ways of thinking. Simultaneously, postcolonial studies considerably extend the field of each of these disciplines. It is true that they were born in the field of literary studies, and that most of the first heralds of this school of thought were all literature or comparative literature lecturers in Anglo-Saxon universities. But the questions and the decentring that they propose are aimed at all disciplines, in particular at history, which according to them should no longer be the tale of the odyssey of modernity throughout the world, of the impact of Western-born capitalism on the rest of the world, or the story of the vexed, chaotic progression of countries with non-Western cultures towards the development model offered to them by the West. History should, on the contrary, give space to everything which, within the perspective of traditional history, we refer to as marginal histories, the history of the peripheries, precisely by giving up on this idea of there being a centre or a margin. There are only histories of equivalent value, of equivalent dignity, of equivalent interest, which all follow their paths in a relationship of greater or lesser dependence on global conditions, but without being fated to be similar to each other or to tend towards predetermined models.

Likewise, ethnology, a discipline which was for a long time, and is perhaps still, grappling with the taint of having originally been associated with the colonial project, has received a lot of input from, or at least has been substantially affected by postcolonial questions. Its aim is to write culture, and not history: but in reality, the problem is fundamentally the same. Literary studies, which were the starting point for postcolonial studies, were also profoundly shaken up. The canon of classic works that was at the centre of teaching programmes has considerably changed. To it was added, alongside classic European texts, works coming out of the literatures of formerly colonised countries. Traditional literary studies were seriously shaken up by this entirely new relationship to theory initiated by postcolonial literary criticism, and by its conceptual and methodological tools. Most of the postcolonial studies departments in Anglo-Saxon universities were originally literature departments. But in reality, if we examine their teaching programmes, and the original disciplines from which their teaching staff is taken, we realise that these are departments where the social sciences are all more or less represented and where traditional aesthetic preoccupations are sometimes completely pushed into the background. There is a fundamentally cross-disciplinary aspect to postcolonial studies, and this is part of what constitutes their power both of destabilisation and of renewal in the social sciences and humanities.

Books and Ideas: What are the limitations of such a vast project?

Jacques Pouchepadass: Postcolonial studies have been greatly criticised, partly in proportion to the criticism which they have themselves directed at the disciplines concerned. We can perhaps make a distinction between two types of criticism, which also point to two major limitations of postcolonial theory. The first one is the fact that postcolonial studies mainly work on textuality. They were therefore very quickly criticised from a materialist perspective, often by Marxist intellectuals. Their idealism was held against them: staying within the bounds of textual criticism was viewed as a way of deserting the field of real social struggles, and also of betraying the poor and deprived people which the postcolonial intellectuals were claiming to speak on behalf of, since these people continue to fight every day for their survival or against oppressive regimes, and remain extremely dependent on the living conditions that are created for them. They are therefore far from indifferent – quite the opposite, in fact – to the struggle for modernisation, for progress, for real liberties etc., struggles for which textual criticism has nothing to offer them. Another aspect of the same criticism is that by criticising formerly colonised societies exclusively from the angle of what influence the West continues to wield over them, we do not mention, or we ignore the internal inequalities of these societies, the types of oppression whose origin is to be found within these societies themselves. Essentially, this textualist idealism of postcolonial studies supposedly has as a consequence that the oppressed masses are abandoned to their sorry material fate in favour of benefits that are purely of a cultural nature. This materialist criticism of the idealism of postcolonial studies has very often gone hand in hand with an indictment of the postcolonial intellectuals themselves. Many have said: “Look at these authors who live very comfortably in Anglo-Saxon universities, in Northern countries that pay a handsome wage. Their living conditions have absolutely nothing to do with those of the people that they claim to be defending.” This criticism seems to me not to be very admissible, in that it reflects a certain form of anti-intellectualism, however unconscious this may be. It implies the idea that only workers, for example, may validly talk about workers – a position which is not very Marxist, by the way, since Marxism has always put an emphasis on the collaboration between intellectuals and the masses. Marxism itself could be considered as null and void from this point of view, since Marx was a petty bourgeois, and not a worker, and Engels was the son of a major textile manufacturer!

The other major set of criticisms, and therefore of limitations that are acknowledged in or attributed to postcolonialism, is related to the way in which postcolonialists consider history. Historians have often criticised them for breaking with empiricism. Their obsession with textuality supposedly prevents them from seeing things as they are. Above all, they are accused of having a tendency to talk about colonial regimes as though they all had a uniform and unchanging style of domination all over the planet, and from the origins of European expansion. In reality, the colonial regimes were different from each other, and colonial power was never monolithic and omnipotent. On the contrary, it was riven with contradictions, forced to constantly negotiate with indigenous societies, and also changed depending on external conditions. This criticism is absolutely valid. Very often, history as the postcolonialists seem to want to write it does not really take into account historical developments. This fault probably comes partly from the fact that postcolonial studies have a literary origin. Having said that, I believe this is a new expression of the constant tension in the relationship between literature and history. History is reluctant to take literature into account because it is fictional; but at the same time, it refuses to look at itself and to acknowledge that it too is fundamentally, both in terms of the imagination and of the writing that it involves, a literary discipline. It finds it hard to admit that it is a never-finished enterprise, whose works must always be reviewed and rewritten. The truth of history is itself a truth which I would not say is comparable to the truth that arises out of fictional works, but nevertheless is a fragile truth, and a truth that is also marked by textuality.

What is more, historians are not the only people criticising postcolonialism for its errors in terms of method. I would say that most of this type of criticism that has been directed at postcolonial theory by history has been taken into account by the postcolonialists themselves. There is no such thing as a fixed, immobile postcolonial theory that we might be able to criticise as a kind of doctrine or system. It is in a state of constant evolution. Postcolonialists in fact often talk about how tired they are of this kind of constant self-questioning, which comes in particular from their own ranks. What remains an unavoidable fact is that the questions raised by the postcolonialists about history are questions which everyone is asking and which everyone will continue to ask: is it acceptable that history always refers to the history of modernity and of the progression of the West? Is this progression the necessary model for the history of all people on the planet? Is capitalism really an exclusively European invention?

Books and Ideas: To continue on the subject of the criticism of postcolonialism, we saw recently that postcolonial theory has provoked some quite lively debates in France. Do these seem to you to measure up to the questions that are raised by this school of theory? What can postcolonial studies add to the French scientific debate?

Jacques Pouchepadass: It would be worth first asking ourselves why postcolonial studies only broke through into the French public debate such a long time after they had been launched in the Anglo-Saxon world, around twenty-five years after the publication of Orientalism. Why such a long time lag? I see several possible reasons for this: one of them is certainly that France is a country where the idealism of Republican integration, which ignores ethnic and cultural differences in order to put its whole emphasis on the internal unity of the political body, is part of the basic culture of its citizens. This frame of mind leaves people ill-prepared to take on the kinds of questions that are put forward by postcolonial studies. There is another possible explanation, which has to do with the intellectual world. Postcolonial studies were from the start associated, either closely or more distantly, to postmodern schools of thought, and in France, postmodernism was very quickly, not quite reduced, but at any rate labelled with a very high level of scepticism by most intellectuals. This was what was dubbed “68 thought”. Postcolonial studies were not taken seriously for a very long time. There may also be a third reason, which is that people in France may have had a sense of déjà-vu when postcolonial studies came along. We had Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Sartre and Albert Memmi, Georges Balandier, all of these authors who were writing in the 1950s and 60s, and some of which continued to write until much later still. These authors were celebrated as icons or great forerunners by postcolonial intellectuals. People may therefore have thought, quite mistakenly, that we had already gone through this process in France and that there was no longer any need to go back over it. This is a fundamental error, since all of these francophone authors, while they are indeed quoted in postcolonial studies, are very often reinterpreted by the authors of the studies. To take one example: Frantz Fanon is recast by postcolonial studies specialists as a Lacanian working on the relationship to the other, when he was fundamentally a Third-Worldist activist, an ally of Algerian nationalism. Many of these authors were, like him, Third-Worldists who were in favour of supporting the modernist nationalist movements of the time, but also Marxists; all of these are characteristics that completely disassociate them from postcolonial theory.

What opened the door to postcolonialism in France was the crisis of the French model of integration, which exploded onto the public space in 2005, during the famous crisis of the banlieues. At the time, a certain number of legislative initiatives on the part of the French government were making some serious waves with regard to the question of the memory of colonisation. It was in this extremely stormy climate, with for example the statements of the “Indigènes de la République” (“Aborigines of the Republic”), that suddenly people started talking about postcolonial studies in France. The conditions were not at all right for a peaceful debate and dispassionate thought. The “postcolonial” label has been appropriated in a summary manner, and often inappropriately. I would say that this was above all the case with two categories of people. On the one hand, representatives of protest movements coming from a background of what we term, using a typically French euphemism, “diversity”, representatives of the “visible minorities”, who declared that they were postcolonial by saying: “What we experience today is a direct inheritance of colonisation. The ghettoisation and discriminations of which we are the victims reproduce what happened during the colonial period.” No historian can reasonably accept this use of the term. This is an exploitation of postcolonial ideas by minorities which are indeed experiencing very difficult conditions, but which are French populations, and not subaltern people in formerly colonised countries. They are perfectly legitimately using a symbolic capital connected to victimhood in order to defend their place within a democratic debate, but we are dealing here with a configuration that has absolutely nothing to do with what postcolonialism really is. Postcolonialism, in stark contrast, has had extremely lengthy debates about the meaning of the “post” in its title, out of which it has emerged that the “post” in question should precisely not be taken as meaning a chronological “after”, but rather an epistemological “beyond”. It does indeed involve criticising what remains of the ways of seeing and of thinking that prevailed during the colonial period in the social sciences today, and maybe in some common attitudes in our ways of considering people coming from other places. But it navigates the field of epistemology, not of contemporary sociology.

The other “pirating”, if I can call it that, of the postcolonial label, has been carried out by historians of colonisation who have defined themselves as postcolonial in order to “rebrand” what in reality is just the old leftist history of colonisation. This is a perfectly respectable way of viewing the history of French expansion, and one which I largely agree with; but it is a type of history that often stays within the register of denunciation, of scandal, of culpability, which is light years away from the highly refined and sophisticated questions asked by postcolonial studies.

So do postcolonial studies have something to contribute to the French debate? Yes, I am convinced they do. I believe we in France need to engage in some thorough rethinking, with the aim of redesigning our social contract and of examining whether French society is affected by a failure to analyse the colonial past that is eating it from the inside. We need these kinds of debates, these theoretical subtleties. The great experience that postcolonial studies have of the intellectual debate on these issues could help us. We should at all costs avoid simplifying them, reducing and instrumentalising them in debates with which they have almost nothing to do, as has often been the case up until now.

Books and Ideas: Fifty years after the end of the colonial empires, do postcolonial studies still have a future?

Jacques Pouchepadass: If we work on the basis that postcolonial studies are strictly articulated around a specific historical fact, meaning the colonial past of the Western world, then of course there is no future for postcolonial studies. However, if we acknowledge what they really are, namely a critical approach for calling into question the social sciences and humanities; if, above all, we see to what extent they never stop renewing themselves according to the spirit of the age or to any new questions that arise, then I think the answer is different. One of the big debates that took place within and around postcolonial studies in Anglo-Saxon countries during the 2000s was the question of whether the critical potential and the intellectual output of postcolonial studies would be able to survive globalisation, this considerable restructuring of power relationships all over the planet, which makes it seem as though the colonial relationship is no longer relevant. A certain number of postcolonialists themselves noted this, and predicted that the questions posed by postcolonialism were on the way to becoming extinct, and that they would soon give way to something else. We must understand that this perspective implies the idea that what we call globalisation is a radically new phenomenon. But the debate regarding this question is far from resolved. Many analysts highlight the similarities between colonisation, or rather the era of colonial dominations, and the globalisation we see today. For some, globalisation (I am using the English term for it³) is nothing more than the extreme continuation of the imperialism of the colonial era. There is no doubt that we still have a lot of work to do to understand the world which we are living in today using the tools that we used to have to explain the order of the world as it was a century ago. But here again, the debate has not been resolved. Postcolonial studies are in the process of integrating a great number of studies (which are in reality profoundly connected to what postcolonial studies have been from the start) that take into account very contemporary phenomena. A certain number of postcolonial studies departments have changed their names, with postcolonial being replaced with transcolonial. It seems that we are moving from questions that focus on the issue of domination towards questions that are more concerned with the facts of circulation, of exchange, of coexistence, of flows. We are on the way towards a sort of fusion of these two fields: postcolonial studies and globalisation studies. In this shifting situation, we might think that postcolonial studies are in the process of mutating in a direction that will give them an unlimited, or at least a very long-term lease of life. The issue now is to establish whether we can still mark out the limits of a field of study that fluctuates so much. It is true that postcolonial studies have, from the start, developed in a cross-disciplinary climate and in a context of constant debate, and that they have always had the ambition of being the location for asking transversal questions aimed at investing disciplines from within, opening them up, removing them from their usual frameworks. Something similar has happened with gender studies. We can view them as being a particular field of study, but we can also take the view that the issue of gender applies to all disciplines, and that this is, in each discipline, a mode of questioning that calls into question the entirety of the field in question. We must acknowledge that, for their part, postcolonial studies mutate in yet another way that pushes at the limits of what is reasonable: we now see postcolonial studies being applied to areas of the planet which have never undergone colonisation, such as the Chinese or Japanese Far East. There is even a journal that has been launched in Stockholm University entitled Postcolonial Europe. It covers Central and Eastern Europe, and applies postcolonial studies to periods of history that are completely off topic. We now have postcolonial studies that are applied to Antiquity, and to areas that no longer have any identifiable relationship with the initial premise, such as postcolonial Biblical studies. We have postcolonialism in visual studies and in media studies. In this context, postcolonial studies have all the future they can wish for!

Published by Books&Ideas, 2013. ©booksandideas.net

First Published in laviedesidees.fr, on16 September 2011

“Bacteria can think too”

Interview with Alain Prochiantz

Ariane Poulantzas

Alain Prochiantz, a professor in the Morphogenetics Department at the Collège de France, retraces the twists and turns – what he calls “accidents” – in his scientific career. One such “accident,” a major unexpected discovery, has redrawn the theoretical contours of his discipline and paved the way for new therapeutic approaches. Prochiantz speaks here as a scientist, but also as a philosopher of science and as an artist, all of which he feels are mutually complementary pursuits.

Books & Ideas: Alain Prochiantz, you’ve been a professor at the Collège de France since 2007. You hold the Chair of Morphogenetics and you also work in a laboratory at the École Normale Supérieure on the evolution of the nervous system. Can you tell us about your career path and, most importantly, the turning-point in your career?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, there were plenty of twists and turns because I actually began in 1971, working on vegetable viruses, especially the one in turnips. I know that sounds funny but it’s a very interesting virus. And then after that I decided to go into neuroscience in 1976.

Books & Ideas: You went from turnips to neuroscience without any transition?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, people generally go from the brain to the turnip, but I decided to go in the opposite direction. At the time I was working in a Collège de France laboratory, by the way, on the development of the nervous system before leaving for the United States. I think the turning-point you’re referring to is the one that occurred 30 years ago, when I came across a phenomenon that I was not expecting, that nobody was expecting. We realized that certain molecules that are supposed to remain inside the cell cross its membranes and invade other cells. It was so unexpected that the scientific community, including myself, felt there was every reason to believe it was an artifact⁴. But it turned out it wasn’t. And that was to decide the rest of my scientific career.

Books & Ideas: Do you remember the moment you made this discovery, when you came across this perplexing fact? What did you say to yourself? Did you redo the experiment several times? What did your colleagues say?

Alain Proschiantz: I said to myself that it wasn’t possible. But at the same time I immediately considered the theoretical consequences that had to be drawn from this observation if it was true. That happened very fast in my head. What we were observing was of course an astounding phenomenon. But there were nine chances out of ten that it was what we call an “artifact.”

Books & Ideas: There’s a line by Claude Bernard that you quote in your book The Darwin Variations. I’ll read it aloud because it seems a very apt description of your own story: “When you come across a fact that conflicts with a reigning theory, you have to accept the fact and abandon the theory even if the theory is defended by big names in the field and generally accepted.” To which you add: “The worst thing would be to see only what matches and dispense with whatever might derail the paradigm. Science gets stuck in its initial algorithm. Accidents become impossible.”

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, I think we had an accident. In fact, I myself am a casualty of science, just as there are casualties of road accidents, but I survived!

Books & Ideas: In your inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, you also said the fact that you had observed and defended this paradoxical finding probably had to do with your being so young at the time.

Alain Prochiantz: Actually I was already 40. I’d begun in 1971 and that was in 1987. So I already had 16 years of scientific work under my belt. But I was young within this particular field. When you change fields (and that happened to me several times: plant biology, neuroscience, developmental biology), you see things with eyes that are not blinkered by the reigning received ideas quite simply because you don’t know them. At the time I didn’t realize the extent to which this observation might rock the boat. But I went right ahead – a bit too much, I must admit, and in a pretty provocative style. We did serious work though.

Books & Ideas: Has this discovery shifted – or actually exploded – the established paradigm?

Alain Prochiantz: I think this discovery wrong-footed several paradigms. First of all, the transcription factors (which are in the cellular nuclei and regulate the expression of genes) are not supposed to wander between cells. It was all the more surprising at the time as we thought these factors didn’t have the sequences needed to leave a cell or to penetrate another, that is to say to cross membranes. Everyone thought membranes could not be permeable to proteins. So all of a sudden I think I got on the wrong side of a certain number of dogmas of cellular and developmental biology.

Books & Ideas: Were you the first to observe these transcription factors leave the cell?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, I think so. It seems to me it had been suggested by someone working on an HIV virus transcription factor, who had showed that this transmission factor could cross membranes. It was an interesting experiment, but it was never taken to its logical conclusions. You know, you make an observation and then you transform that observation into a discovery. The observation takes a few weeks and the transformation a few years. The beginning is easy, the rest a lot harder.…

Books & Ideas: And nowadays no-one challenges this theorized fact?

Alain Prochiantz: I don’t know everybody. There may be people who call it into question, people are skeptical in any case. I know a few myself. Let them do the experiment and then they’ll be convinced.

Books & Ideas: How did your peers react at the time?

Alain Prochiantz: That depends. The reactions were pretty mixed. Some said “this isn’t possible,” others “this is interesting if it’s true.” Still others backed me up and helped me out.

Books & Ideas: You say one of the problems is precisely that when you happen upon a fact like this which isn’t generally accepted, “you’re putting yourself in an awkward position vis-à-vis the reigning theory – a theory so widely accepted that even questioning a detail elicits disproportionate reactions from the scientific community, from the whole papal enclave? and other guardians of the temple.”

Alain Prochiantz: Because it’s disconcerting to us scientists, you know, in a sort of paradigm that is relatively comfortable. Suddenly some “ninny” shows up and tells you “no, that’s not the way it works.” That’s downright nerve-racking. We touched a pretty interesting nerve here because scientists are conservative by nature, which is perfectly normal, because we’re better off being conservative. I’m conservative too. The problem is that at some point something just doesn’t make sense anymore. And at that point, we have to be able to accept the fact that it doesn’t make sense.

Books & Ideas: You’re better off being conservative because otherwise it would be too easy to challenge the prevailing theory?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes. In fact, I’m quite respectful towards the peer review process. The more bizarre something is, the more you need to come up with solid proof. And this conservatism in the scientific community forces us to come up with proof and more proof…. At the end of the day, that actually shores up the discovery.

Books & Ideas: In your inaugural lecture you also talk about the initial skepticism of scientific journals, which in a certain sense forced you to refine your arguments.

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, of course, but scientific journals are the scientists themselves.

Books & Ideas: And are you still working on that discovery today?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, I am, because the fact itself has never been questioned. It has even led to the creation of new tools, new vectors. I think people accepted the fact very quickly. Now, at the physiological level, that’s something else. Once you’ve demonstrated that transcription factors can penetrate certain cells, that doesn’t mean they necessarily do that in an animal or in a plant. Hence the need to show it actually does happen like that in an animal. Then we need to understand what purpose that serves: why, what is the function of this process? And so once we’d demonstrated that it’s possible, which we did pretty fast, it still took us twenty years to find some physiological functions. We did that in collaboration with other laboratories.

Books & Ideas: Can you tell us a little more about that?

Alain Prochiantz: These transcription factors, these molecules, which are normally on the nucleus, are position markers. Imagine I take any cell from your brain or elsewhere: if I knew the combination of these factors in your brain and the quantity of each of these factors in that cell, I could tell you exactly where that cell is in your brain. It’s as if you had a little flag saying “I’m a cell from Strasbourg,” for example. When you walk around, when you migrate, for example to go to Paris, you can change transcription factors the whole way there. That’s called “guidance.” It’s a very important phenomenon in guiding axons⁵, especially during the development of the nervous system. I’m also sure that all this could give rise to applications in certain pathologies.

Books & Ideas: Yes, because you do basic research, but this basic research will most probably have practical applications soon. You mentioned pathologies, could you tell us a little more about that?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, I do basic research, but there isn’t one physics for building bridges and another physics for bridges that collapse. It’s the same science. So from the moment you discover a new mechanism for the transmission of signals (which is what happened), that necessarily has a physiopathological counterpart. So yes, I think there are pathologies that are associated with defects in this signaling through the transfer of proteins, which we called messenger proteins. Especially pathologies of the nervous system that are linked to what is called the “critical period,” that of learning in particular.

Books & Ideas: Which occurs at what age?

Alain Prochiantz: That depends. For binocular vision, for example, it’s at the age of 4. For languages, or motor system development, it’s a different age too. All of this is accompanied by changes in the system. And if those changes don’t go well, that is if the brain doesn’t adapt to its environment, you are left dysfunctional. My colleagues and I think this transfer of transcription factors plays a big part in controlling this period in which one is capable of learning. So thanks to these transcription factors, we’re trying to open up periods of cerebral plasticity again in adults and thereby cure certain pathologies linked to defective acquisition during the so-called critical period.

Books & Ideas: What types of pathologies are you working on?

Alain Prochiantz: For the time being, we’re working on binocular vision in mice…. I don’t work on humans, I’m not a doctor. I work on chickens, zebrafish, mice, which have lots of things in common with Homo sapiens, of course.

Books & Ideas: In your various books you talk a lot about the scientific revolution ushered in by the discovery of development genes. What are development genes?

Alain Prochiantz: If you dissect my hand, you’ll get the same cells you would if you dissected my foot. And yet as you can see, the shape of the hand is not at all the same as that of the foot. Development genes are the genes that make the same cells join forces to make a shape A, the hand, in one part of the body and another shape B, the foot, in another. And that goes for all the organs, too. This is morphogenesis. I’m a morphogeneticist. So development genes are basically the genes that decide the shape according to the position.

Books & Ideas: You do some awful experiments on flies in this regard. They have eyes all over, they’ve got wings instead of eyes…

Alain Prochiantz: Yes. You can force a fly to have a wing in lieu of eyes, legs in lieu of antennae, eyes at the tips of their antennae or at the ends of their legs.

Books & Ideas: So could these development genes be said to be more essential than many other genes?

Alain Prochiantz: All genes are important, but there are genes and there are genes, that’s for sure. A gene that decides whether you have blue or black eyes, curly or straight hair, is important for certain people, but that’s not the same thing as whether you have an ear in the “right” place, for example. So yes, there are two categories of genes. Transcription factors, including this family that wanders from cell to cell, are products of development genes. So they’re a type of gene that is particularly important if we want to understand what shape is, that is to say development as well as evolution. Evolution is also the creation of new shapes. So yes, these are very essential genes.

Books & Ideas: In what way do development genes shed new light on evolution?

Alain Prochiantz: These development genes were discovered quite recently: the first development gene was cloned in 1984. That was a milestone in the history of biology because this type of gene made it possible to connect up genetics, development and evolution. In fact mutations of these genes permit huge morphological changes in living beings. This is the basis of evolution. Consequently, development genes are the key to understanding both ontogeny and phylogeny. Thanks to them, a new discipline called “evo-devo” was born. And we find ourselves faced with what could be called a real theory of life. This theory cannot be reduced to a physical theory, even though we are made of matter. We are made of matter. From the moment you take an interest in development, in reproduction and evolution, you need concepts that are specific to your object of study: that is basic physiology. The discovery of these genes is, in my opinion, a milestone in the history of our discipline.

Books & Ideas: Are development genes fundamental to understanding what is special about human beings? You insist a great deal on the specificity of human beings vis-à-vis other living species.

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, because you aren’t talking to a monkey. And you’re not a monkey either. You’re capable of reading a book. I know that nowadays there’s a crazy notion that we are a branch of monkeys. That’s completely wrong. It’s an accounting exercise that produces this illusion. It has been found that there is a 1.23 percent difference between the genomes of chimpanzees and those of Homo sapiens. But that means nothing because living beings for the most part all have the same genes: we’re 80 percent mouse. In cerebral terms we’re very different from monkeys. While a monkey has 400 cm³ of cortex, we have on average 1400. That’s 1,000 cm³ too much. And it is that excess 1,000 cm³ that makes us sapiens. What’s what makes for poets, suicides, scientists and scholars….

Books & Ideas: Getting back to genetic considerations, you talk a lot about the importance of epigenesis in human beings, the fact that in the human being the phenotype is far less restricted by the genotype than in other animal species.

Alain Prochiantz: First of all, epigenesis is important in all animal and plant species, that is to say: for a given genome you have an infinite number of possible phenotypes because living beings are incredible machines when it comes to adapting to the environment. Now there are different ways of adapting. When you look at invertebrates, the approach is I’d say rather clonal: they reproduce very fast. If you are such a creature, you make a thousand others within the space of a few days, a few hours. Over the course of evolution, what ultimately happens is you reproduce less and less. Now we come to us, Homo sapiens: we couple up and produce two more of our kind. That takes us forty years. Now at this rate natural selection is going to be complicated even if we keep on evolving, which is indeed the case, genetically speaking. The strategies employed, the ones genetically selected, are strategies that permit adaptation at the individual level, what is known as individuation. As it turns out, I think we’ve reached the peak of this ability to adapt through individuation. This phenomenon whereby it isn’t so much the individual who adapts to the environment as the environment that makes, that fashions, the individual, is epigenesis.

Books & Ideas: This is where you came up with the concept of “anatural” man.

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, in a book you can’t find anymore because the publisher refuses to reprint my writings.

Books & Ideas: Well, while we’re at it, at least tell us the title.

Alain Prochiantz: La biologie dans le boudoir [“Biology in the Boudoir”], published by Odile Jacob. Yes, I put forth the concept of man’s “anature” (with a privative “a”). An “anature” by nature. It’s not a religious concept at all. I’m a staunch atheist. It is precisely by nature that man is “anatural.” It is due to the very nature of our development genes and the way evrything was designed that we have, in a manner of speaking, left nature. And that’s a fact: we are technological animals. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.

Books & Ideas: And in saying that, you are also asserting the mutual independence of the various scientific disciplines. You are a staunch advocate of non-reductionism as well, of whatever form it may take: whether it’s a matter of attempting to humanize the natural sciences or to biologize anthropology, which brings to mind sociobiology and E.O. [that’s what everybody calls him in America!] Wilson’s book Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge.

Alain Proschiantz: Yes, but I don’t confuse the object in and of itself and the scientific object. These are two different things. A scientific object is an object more than a theory. So I can think about you. Your brain can very well be an object of study in physics. I can take your brain, fling it around the room and calculate its trajectory as a function of its convolutions, of its drag.... After that, I might approach the brain from another point of view, as a biological object. It must be borne in mind that a scientific object is the object plus the theory that takes into account what we’re going to study about that object. From this point of view, I am indeed a staunch advocate of the independence of the disciplines. That doesn’t mean things can’t shift, that there is no interaction, that one cannot take an interdisciplinary approach. Precisely because these theories are not objects in and of themselves, they are fragile objects that shift, that evolve as well. That is precisely why there are interactions and things are not frozen in place. But if I study man from a sociologist’s viewpoint, I’m not going to have the same body of theoretical knowledge as an anthropologist or a biologist or a physicist….

Books & Ideas: We always aspire to cover everything through our own particular discipline, to encompass all the other approaches, to do life science using a physico-chemical approach, or sociology or psychology using biology.

Alain Prochiantz: Nothing is off limits in science. I think everything’s possible. But theories are things that exist and have a history. They are human constructs, of course, they don’t just appear out of the blue. They may be wrong, there may be room for improvement. But for the time being, physics and chemistry are, to my mind, tools – tools we need for our study of living beings. But on the theoretical level, an organism is alive insofar as it is a living object and is subsumed as such under a theory of living beings. On this head, I am very loyal to Claude Bernard, whom I’ve read and admired a great deal. If I go into nature with my friend Philippe Descola, who’s an anthropologist, he’ll look at the animals and Homo sapiens differently from the way I do. When an Indian says this panther is my sister, this is not at all the same way a biologist would say it.

Books & Ideas: Don’t sociobiologists have not only a tendency to co-opt objects of study, but also a way of saying things about them that goes beyond a purely biological approach?

Alain Prochiantz: But of course, some biologists exhibit a certain imperialism towards the humanities, similar to the imperialism of physics towards biology, and mathematics towards physics. We don’t have to approve.

Books & Ideas: And that’s precisely it, I was trying to elicit your disapproval.

Alain Prochiantz: Well I don’t approve at all. I can’t conjecture about what’s going to happen in five, ten or thirty years. But today I don’t think economics, for example, is a science based on the nervous system. One can try to find out what’s going on in a nervous system at the moment an economist is about to make a decision, which becomes neurobiology, but that no longer has anything to do with the science of economics. And yet that doesn’t mean there is no science of economics.

Books & Ideas: You have a very special definition of thinking in which you stick to your place as a biologist.

Alain Prochiantz: In other words, I never, or almost never, leave my discipline.

Books & Ideas: So what is thinking for a biologist?

Alain Prochiantz: For me, it is the ability to adapt at the individual level and at the level of the species. It is the relationship that obtains between myself, for example, and the environment. There you go, that’s what thinking is. So this is a very biological definition. But it means that everything thinks: bacteria think, plants think. Even if it isn’t thinking at the same level of complexity, of course. This is a biological definition, which differs from any other definition of thinking that may come from another discipline and is completely justified in its theoretical domain. As a biologist, I think that bacteria think, in their tiny way.

Books & Ideas: You’ve taken a lot of interest in Alan Turing’s work?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, a lot. I have great admiration for this great 20th-century poet.

Books & Ideas: You talk about thinking. And yet your approach to thinking differs a great deal from his.

Alain Prochiantz: From his approach in his first writings, yes, but not those at the end. At the outset he thought the brain was a logical machine. He was a very great mathematician who solved some very hard problems in mathematics. He was a great computer scientist, too, who was after all, in a certain sense, the inventor of computer science and computers. He was also a very great philosopher. I think the article [“Computing Machinery and Intelligence”] he wrote in the [British academic] journal Mind, opening with the words “Can machines think?,” is one of the key articles in philosophy. Plus he was a very great biologist, who invented the concept of the morphogen. I am a morphogeneticist. And his book was very useful to me, by the way, in understanding what I was doing myself. In fact, I think we discovered something that is related to Turing’s theory in biology. He wrote three or four articles. But every one of them was a success – a success in three different disciplines. Nowadays, people write 500, 800 articles and nobody will remember them in ten years’ time. He wrote three and we’re still discussing them. I’m sure we’ll still be discussing them in fifty years.

At the end of his article “Can Machines Think?” he says we need to understand how a child’s brain is able to form over the course of its development to ultimately apprehend its environment. In a certain sense, he abandoned that idea of a mechanical brain. He thought human beings would be able to come up with an answer, later on, to how to design machines that think. But I have never said anything different; that is to say, there is a machine that thinks: the brain. Yet we need to give up on computer models that are a bit asinine and can’t account for human thinking. And that is how Turing became a biologist, and came to pursue morphogenetics, that is to say the development of forms. That is how he laid the foundations for a theory of morphogenetics and morphogens that is, in my opinion, crucial.

Books & Ideas: How did you discover Turing?

Alain Prochiantz: I had read a lot about him when I was a “kid,” that is between 1974 and 1980. I rediscovered him in some drama work – which was a pleasure by the way – I did with my friend Jean-François Peyret. Jean-François had put on two beautiful productions about Turing. At the time I wasn’t working directly with him yet, in other words I wasn’t writing directly with him. At the time he had this mania for inviting scientists to talk to actors. The way Peyret works is quite interesting: he has a text he calls “Score No. 1,” on which the actors improvise. And then in the evening he rewrites. Through this process, he undertakes a sort of natural selection of the text. To help the actors understand what it’s all about, he invites people to a round-table discussion with the actors. And when he did his work on Turing, he knew I was pretty interested. So he asked me to come and talk. Consequently, I was obliged to re-read Turing. He forced me to re-read, and in really re-reading Turing, not as a student but as someone who wants to understand, I realized that what I was doing collided head-on with his theory of morphogens.

Books & Ideas: Did that help you move forward in your theoretical work?

Alain Prochiantz: Naturally, that really gave me some ideas. Not long ago we published a totally Turingian article in the Journal of Theoretical Biology. It’s what I call “nocturnal science.” Yes, I think you’ve got to take time out to do that sort of thing. Reading the thinkers of old is never a waste of time. You know, science is a conversation between friends, with people who are, fortunately, alive, of course, but also with people who are dead. And it’s a conversation that keeps going. When you read Darwin nowadays, you learn all sorts of stuff.

Books & Ideas: Do you still work with Jean-François Peyret?

Alain Prochiantz: We’re going to. At any rate, we still get together, we talk about it.

Books & Ideas: So have you done plays with him?

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, I wouldn’t put it that way, let’s say Jean-François and I fashioned some slightly bizarre objects that were performed in Avignon at the TNS [Théâtre National de Strasbourg] in Strasbourg, Chaillot, Caen and Toulouse.

Books & Ideas: And if we wanted to read these strange objects, these booklike objects?

Alain Prochiantz: La génisse et le pythagoricien [“The Heifer and the Pythagorean”], Les variations Darwin [“The Darwin Variations”], which were published by Odile Jacob and which demonstrate a bit of my conception of science. For at the outset the idea wasn’t to do theater, but science, a different way of doing science. I think it’s indispensable if you really want to understand.

Books & Ideas: You’re 60 years old and yet you’re quite young.

Alain Prochiantz: Yes, well, that depends. You haven’t seen the engine.

Books & Ideas: I haven’t seen the engine, but I see what it produces.

Alain Prochiantz: My days are numbered now.

Books & Ideas: So how do you intend to use the time you have left?

Alain Prochiantz: To pursue my work, I have about ten years in the laboratory ahead of me, if I live that long. You can do a lot of things in ten years in the lab. I’m going to try to do the best I can. It goes fast.

Books & Ideas: Shall we get together again in ten years?

Alain Prochiantz: Maybe…. Let’s hope so.

Interview by Ariane Poulantzas. Translated by Eric Rosencrantz, with the support of the Institut du Monde Contemporain.

Published by Books&Ideas, 28th October 2013. ©booksandideas.net

First published in La Vie des Idées, June 5th, 2009.

In Praise of Social Sciences

Philippe Descola

Should we expect the social sciences in general, and anthropology in particular, to enlighten us about society’s problems and how they might be solved? According to Philippe Descola, it is rather by requiring us to consider the multiplicity of ways of being that the social sciences can help change the world.

It is perfectly normal for human beings to demand accountability from sciences that study human beings. It is reasonable to hope that such sciences will enlighten human beings about what makes their species so unique, offering greater insight into their behavior and how it might be conceptualized, the ways that human beings in the past and present have interacted with their environment, and the problems arising from the inherently collective nature of human existence. In short, far more than mathematicians, astronomers, or botanists, we are expected to help people understand the immediate world in which they live—and perhaps even to change it. There are, however, two opposing attitudes regarding the practical implications of the social sciences: a utilitarian attitude, which is pervasive outside the social sciences themselves, and a critical attitude, which prevails among its practitioners.

The utilitarian point of view sees the cultural and social sciences as a body of knowledge that can diagnose social dysfunction and perhaps offer solutions. They should, in any case, improve our understanding of why technological, scientific, and social innovations are accepted or rejected. Thinking like social engineers, these utilitarians expect researchers to be vigilantly on the lookout for symptoms of crisis or anomie and to prescribe cures for any diseases they detect. Unlike our colleagues who specialize in quantum physics or embryogenesis, who are drawn to the phenomena they study because they believe they can explain them, social scientists are commonly asked to elucidate phenomena first suggested to them by others—such as the media or pressure groups—and which they are reluctant to regard as legitimate research topics. When called upon to solve “social” issues, such as identifying a “threshold of tolerance” for immigrants or the ideal family structure, social sciences can only admit their impotence. I would not go so far as to say of these unusual sciences, that, as Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, “the true way to let them exist is to give them much but, above all, to ask nothing of them.”⁶ Yet it must be forcefully reiterated that true science decides for itself which phenomena it will study, so it is illusory to believe that social scientists could offer serious answers to questions they did not formulate. This does not, of course, mean that anthropologists and sociologists are indifferent to the obvious effects of inequality or domination in the contemporary world, pervasive anxieties, or the perpetuation of prejudices of all kinds. Their way of problematizing these trends, however, only rarely overlaps with the views of public opinion, politicians, or the business community.

By contrast, the critical approach relies on analyses that emerge from deep within the social sciences. They seek to shed light on the hidden mechanisms that shape the objects of our study and, through this unmasking, to make society more just and connected. Faithful to the Enlightenment, in which this tradition is rooted, and steeped in the emancipatory ideals of the founders of the social sciences who, from Marx to Durkheim, by way of Weber and Boas, never distinguished their theoretical reflections from their political goals, the critical approach nevertheless has the disadvantage of creating a considerable disconnect between, on the one hand, the learned scholar illuminating, with the torch of science, the path to a future that has been cleansed of all the present’s imperfections, and, on the other, the masses who remain ignorant of the motivations and rules that guide their behavior. In anthropology this kind of academic prophecy-making can take the form of a reformist teleology: to purge modernity of its epistemological errors and moral failures, an indigenous philosophy is proposed as a counter-model, canonically reconstructed according to a system of concepts that are oddly analogous to those the West long specialized in producing. One might, for instance, show how a “hunter-gatherer epistemology” provides a superior account of the body’s relationship to its surroundings because it rejects the subject/object distinction. In this way, both the utilitarian and the critical approaches strike me as missing the point of what the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular can contribute to the absolutely essential goal of changing our present way of life.

The Distant Gaze

One such contribution is so obvious that it should not even have to be mentioned. Still, it is often overlooked. It is, quite simply, the imperative of knowledge itself. Neither the description of an Australian language, an annotated edition of a Tibetan manuscript, nor the ethnography of an African initiation rite has practical, immediate effects. Yet by providing us with the materials to study the multiple ways of being human, such documents are absolutely central to understanding who we are. Yes: erudition, specialized knowledge, linguistic and technical mastery in obscure fields—all these competencies acquired through years of hard work and self-denial are still the backbone of research in these disciplines and must be preserved at all costs.

Another, more specifically anthropological contribution is that researchers in my field have, over the years, accumulated experience from every corner of the earth of forms of collective life based on premises that are quite different from our own. Though the reasons for this experience are contingent—and tied to Europe’s colonial expansion and the resulting need to understand colonized populations—it has provided anthropologists with an “off-center” point of view. This, in turn, allowed them to examine their own society, at least partially, from the perspective of the societies they studied, which demonstrated the relative nature of ways of seeing and acting that were the fruit of two and a half millennia of Western self-reflection. By restoring the “vision of the vanquished,” to borrow the phrase Nathan Wachtel used to describe the Indians of the Andes⁷, anthropologists are not simply giving greater recognition to the contributions that peoples subject to internal as well external colonialism have made to the common human heritage, they are also providing an initiation into the distant gaze that allows them to consider their own world from a point of view that is free of the present’s illusions. This perspective could certainly be called “critical,” but it seems to me to go much further, as it implies a genuine plurality of modes of being. It is not the same as the idea, which has fortunately became commonplace, that the world can be considered from several different perspectives, that all cultures are equally deserving in dignity and must interact with one another in a cosmopolitan dialogue. Rather, it means that the premises on the basis of which we, as human beings, formulate our judgments, aggregate phenomena, and integrate into our environment objects endowed with unusual properties vary considerably depending on the milieus in which we are socialized. Consequently, a massive amount of work is required if we are to understand the conditions under which these premises might become compatible with one another or contribute to new configurations in which none would have special privileges.

The pluralistic anthropology that I advocate does not consider other peoples’ consciousness of their forms of life as ideologies whose principles must be made explicit, nor as alternative cosmologies that should be embraced because they explain reality more accurately than our own, but rather as the result of predicative operations that are accessible to all, but which tend to stabilize themselves selectively within a community of practices, in such a way that, within the collectivities constituted by these operations, specific patterns of thought and action emerge which infuse communal life with observable coherence. These operations can be seen as a kind of ontological sifting of the world’s qualities that affects many dimensions of the human experience: how entities are distributed into categories; the kinds of agency that are attributed to these entities and the types of relations they can form; the ways in which collectivities are constituted and how they interact with other collectivities; how one defines “agents” and “patients”; how a legitimate or efficient action occurs; the conditions under which a proposition can be considered true and a form of knowledge authentic; and the kinds of metaphysical and epistemological problems human beings face and the procedures they use to resolve them. All these fundamental characteristics of human existence—and many others—are established through distinct modalities that are a function of the qualities and relations which the habits acquired from within a particular collectivity have helped us to perceive or ignore.

In this way, a pluralistic anthropology does not consist in contrasting an elusive West to an undefined Rest. Rather, it places different ways of ordering the world’s diversity on an equal footing, developing a descriptive and analytical language that can account for forms which, while highly diverse, are not infinite and group together entities, qualities, processes, and relations without drawing on the tools that were used to conceptualize these functions in our own cultural tradition. If concepts like “society,” “nature,” “history, “economics,” “religion,” or “subjectivity” played significant roles in the self-reflective work through which Europeans created modernity and, in the same process, established a distinctive space of positivity in which the human and social sciences could emerge, these concepts are nonetheless indicative of ways of objectifying phenomena that are characteristic of historical trajectories that not all societies have followed. They must be treated not as universals, but as the local expression of a particular way of arranging the world’s components—and one, moreover, that has known many different modalities. My plea is thus for a universalism that is both real and realistic—one that, in other words, refuses to universalize the relative concepts that make us think that we can use terms borrowed from the cosmology of modernization to describe peripheral cosmologies; a universalism that seeks, rather, to devise analytical tools that are less dependent on an anthropocentric conception of the relationship between humans and non-humans that naturalism has created.

Universalizing Particulars

The paradox of a revamped universalism of this kind is that it is the result of lessons anthropologists have learned from circumstances that seem so unique as to be immune from any effort to draw general conclusions from them. Indeed, when I look back at the findings of my ethnographic work with the Achuar Indians of the upper Amazon, I realize that each one of them challenged concepts and values whose universal validity I would never dreamed of contesting before. The first and perhaps most important of these lessons is that nature does not exist everywhere and in all periods; or, more precisely, that the radical split the West posits between the natural and the human world has little meaning to other peoples, who bestow upon plants and animals all the attributes of social life, see them as subject rather than objects, and are thus incapable of relegating them to an autonomous realm governed exclusively by scientific and technological laws. This is why saying the Indians are “close to nature” is a total fallacy: in attributing to the beings that populate it dignity that is equal to their own, the Indians do not really treat them any differently than they treat one another. To be close to nature, nature has to exist—an exceptional arrangement of which only moderns have proved capable, a fact that without question makes our cosmology more enigmatic than all those that have preceded us.

The Achuar people also taught me that one can live one’s life without divine or historical transcendence, the two sides of the coin between which many contemporary societies continue to hesitate. In the latter, isolated individuals are not determined by a superior and external principle, they are not in the grips of collective movements of which they are unaware, they are not defined by their place in a social hierarchy, and the meaning of their lives does not depend on the position into which they were born. Rather, they exist only by virtue of the fact that everyone has the capacity to affirm themselves through actions according to a generally accepted scale of desirable goals. Another lesson I learned from the Achuar people is that one can have a collective identity without being bogged down by a national consciousness. Unlike the movements for popular emancipation that, beginning in late eighteenth-century Europe, founded their demands for political autonomy on shared cultural or linguistic traditions, the Achuar do not conceive of their ethnicity as a list of distinctive traits that makes their shared destiny ontological and eternal. The meaning of their communal existence is not to be found in a language, a religion, or the past; it draws on a common way of experiencing the social bond and relationships with neighboring peoples, be they human or otherwise. This way of establishing a collective existence offers valuable evidence in support of the view that ethnic nationalism is less a legacy of pre-modern societies than a consequence of the contamination of earlier forms of communal organization by modern doctrines of state hegemony.

Each of these lessons, like all those that anthropologists have drawn from their ethnographic studies, constitutes a promising alternative experience. Overcoming the frenetic exploitation of nature achieved by pillaging the living conditions of future generations; ending blind nationalism and the predator arrogance of nation states and some multinational firms; eradicating unbearable inequalities in access to resources, particularly those that should be held in common; the need to provide the various non-humans with whom our fate is invariably bound with some sort of public representation: all of these are concrete challenges faced by modernity, which could usefully be considered as analogous to the way peoples studied by ethnologists establish their own relationship to the world. Not that we could adopt their practices as such, since historical experiences cannot be easily transposed, even if it were desirable. What anthropologists can do, however, is to provide evidence that other paths are possible, since, improbable though it might seem, they have been explored in other times and places. Anthropologists can show, in other words, that the future is not simply a linear prolongation of the present, that it is full of amazing potentialities whose realization we must imagine if we are to build, as soon as possible, a truly common home—one that is actually livable, less exclusive, and more fraternal.

Published by Books&Ideas, 21st October 2013. ©booksandideas.net

“The Political Test”

An Interview with Claude Lefort

Pierre Rosanvallon

This interview was recorded in May 2009 at the République des Idées forum on “Reinventing Democracy” in Grenoble.

Pierre Rosanvallon: This conversation will be an opportunity for Claude Lefort and me, by considering the questions we have chosen together, to revisit some of the major themes of his work, in addition to exploring a number of questions he has been thinking about more recently. To present Lefort is, I think, to present a set of unique traits. His thought and its relationship to society are characterized, I believe, by a number of singularities and particularities. First, Lefort’s work must be considered as that of an involved philosopher. He has never thought that philosophy, to put it crassly, means to work by yourself in your room. He has always thought, to the contrary, that being a philosopher means working together. It is work that always entails interpretation and an engagement with events. He believes that the political philosopher must read everyone whose work is required to understand the present. For if Lefort turned to Machiavelli, if he turned to the thinkers of the American and French Revolutions, if he turned to the great writers of the Wars of Religion, like La Boétie, if he has turned more recently to the great nineteenth-century liberals, it is because the philosophy of these authors was nurtured on the interpretation of the political, social, and religious problems they faced. Lefort’s thought seems invariably preoccupied with and tied to events.

Lefort’s thought is also a sustained reflection on emancipation. For many philosophers of his generation, the critique of capitalism was the only horizon against which they could see the world. While acknowledging the connections between his thought and Marxism, Lefort always believed that emancipation should not be limited to the critique of capitalism and exploitation, and that the institution of individuals, the constitution of their dignity, and the forms through which the collective is established must be considered in all their autonomy.

A third trait of Lefort’s thought is that it was forged through confrontations with abyss and cowardice. It confronted the abyss in that most of his oeuvre is dedicated to thinking about the question of democracy from the standpoint of its opposite, its absolute negation: totalitarianism. But his thought also drew strength from a ruthless critique of cowardice, of feeble-minded thinking. While he never ceased to identify with our country’s left, he has always been a merciless critic of the left’s simplistic frameworks and tacit disavowals.

I also think that Lefort’s work is characterized by the kind of position—I would say “posture,” if the word were not ambiguous—that his work represents. His thought is lucid without ever being disenchanted; it is radically lucid without ever making blind commitments. In this demanding thought, two imperatives have always been connected: to resist easy solutions while always emphasizing the importance of imagination. His work, as I see it, is simultaneously a form of writing, a style, and a method. One of the books Lefort published in the 1990s is an essay collection, Writing: The Political Test. In the book’s preface, he emphasizes how close the writer’s task is to the philosopher’s. What connects them, in his view, is the fact that writing must not be engulfed by an ocean of opinion nor blinded by the impact of events. Writing is thus inseparable from a particular relationship to reality, which risks degenerating into a simplistic idea, a form of ideology. It is always open to that which presents itself as a questioning, a problem, as something that remains open-ended.

We will end this brief introduction with a few sentences from the preface to Writing: The Political Test. The political philosopher, Lefort writes, “doesn’t wish to furnish arguments to persons whom he holds to be adversaries, imbeciles, or devotees of a doctrine, nor does he wish to seduce others who are in a rush to grasp one or another of his formulas, and, without understanding him, hasten to make themselves his supporters while making him the hero of a cause. For him, quite particularly,” Lefort continues, “writing is therefore facing up to a risk [l’épreuve d’un risque]; and the risky test he faces offers him the resources for a singular form of speech that is set in motion by the exigency that he spring the traps of belief and escape from the grips of ideology, bringing himself always beyond the place where one expects him via a series of zig-zag movements that disappoint by turns the various sections of his public.”⁸ I believe that in this difference, this prudence in relation to his critical as much as his enthusiastic readers, thought is truly exercised.

Without further ado, I would like to thank Claude Lefort for accepting the invitation of the République des Idées forum on “Reinventing Democracy.” We will begin our conversation by thinking about the origins of democracy. An entire branch of Lefort’s work is devoted to reflecting on the nature of democracy, but this reflection is inseparable from his work on the history, origins, and what one might call the foundational experiences of democracy. There are three positive and negative experiences that seem to me to have particularly captured his attention. He explored the first kind quite recently, notably in an article published in the journal Esprit in 2002, I believe, which considers the invention or the advent of the modern city. It is no accident that much of his work deals with Machiavelli, for Machiavelli’s work is inseparable from Florence’s life and organizational difficulties, just as Rousseau’s cannot be separated from Geneva or Spinoza’s from Amsterdam. Secondly, we will consider another experience that was fundamental for Lefort, his work on the revolutionary experience in France and the United States. Finally and thirdly—this is perhaps the aspect of his work that is best known—we have the negative and destructive experience that goes by the name “totalitarianism.” Going in chronological order, I think that we can begin by examining together the first point, the way in which you understand the experience of the first European and Italian cities as experiences that are constitutive of “being-together” and which thus, one might say, set the stage for the very concept of a democratic political community.

Claude Lefort: First, I would like to think you for this generous—too generous—introduction, which I find intimidating. I hope our conversation will be fruitful. It is true that I have recently examined the origins of democracy and we know that, for Tocqueville, the origin of democracy is the equality of conditions. We all know that universal suffrage, popular sovereignty, and the separation of powers are democracy’s constitutive principles, but for some time I have been obsessed with one question: where does the equality of conditions come from? How did it begin? In short, Tocqueville betrays his sociological instincts by not limiting himself to defining democracy as a regime, since he immediately advances the social concept of the equality of conditions. Yet such equality, I believe, could only have occurred in a specific kind of milieu, which must be defined. Both you and I have said that democracy is not only a political regime; it is also a form of society. How does the equality of conditions originate in a certain kind of society?

I could have addressed this much earlier since, after all, I was born in Paris and have spent my entire life in Paris. I am a child of the city. I believe that in European cities, new relationships were formed that completely broke as much with the Roman or Athenian republics as with the hierarchical system, founded on the distinction between the great and the common, that was feudal society. In the work of Marc Bloch, one of the great historians of our age—a historian, but also a sociologist and a philosopher—particularly his great book on feudal society,⁹ I discovered the idea that the city marks a radical break with the period’s hierarchical system. Cities, he goes so far as to say, are places that makes you free. He analyzes the development of the medieval commune, the creation of communal government, and shows their distinguishing traits: the communal oath, for instance, is an oath of equality. He shows what makes the form of “being-together” found in cities radically distinct. By cities, he means, as can be seen from a few important examples, Anvers, Amsterdam at various periods, Florence, and Geneva—places that at various epochs would become world metropolises and, in particular, major immigration destinations and commercial capitals. They were places where equality certainly did not prevail, but where everyone was in contact with everyone else. In one of his books, Le Goff says something amusing: the city is where “the priest crosses paths with the prostitute and where the merchant crosses path with …” This mixture, this “entanglement” [intrication], as Tocqueville calls it, of conditions is characteristic of the modern city and which flourished at various periods. These cities had a kind of genuine international aspiration, as one sees in Spinoza’s Amsterdam—and it is no coincidence that Spinoza was one of democracy’s first philosophers. And then there is Florence, which has long interested me, since my discovery long ago, of an oeuvre that at first troubled me, which struck me as strange and contradictory—Machiavelli’s. Machiavelli, incidentally, was an eminent figure in Florence without ever having held any title other than that of Secretary of the Chancery, despite the fact that he was actually an ambassador, sent several times to France, that he took decisions, and advised the gonfalonier on major issues during times of tension with Florence. Yet Machiavelli is the thinker of social division. He was the first to propose, with great clarity, the idea that the people share a national identity, as well as the idea of a distinction between the people and the powerful, and the idea that great politics, as well as the Prince’s politics, were fundamentally dependent on the people’s actions. The city was a place where the people are free, where the people was alive and could exert pressure on power. When power does not depend on the people, we are living in a tyranny. Machiavelli’s two books, one on Livy’s Discourses and the other on the prince, obey the same mechanism. If the prince wants to assert himself and to preserve (for example) the state, he must turn to the people rather than to the powerful. The republic is fundamentally the regime that accepts social division.

Let me return to cities. Beginning with Machiavelli, I studied Florence’s history. It is an extraordinary city which did not, at its origins, lock itself into a kind of oligarchy, as did Venice. There, the great were the powerful families that had divided the council among themselves once and for all. Florence was a milieu in which conflict developed and where, moreover, there was extensive immigration of so-called novi cives—“new citizens” who, through their social condition and openness created new kinds of relationships in Florentine society. This is one of the main reasons—it is important to remind ourselves of it—for Florentine capitalism, for the extraordinary commercial expansion of a city known throughout Europe. In Florence, we clearly see not democracy—Machiavelli cannot be called a democrat, nor can Florence be described as the first democratic city—but a city where hierarchy did not exist. It was a city where there was a mixture of conditions, which, on this basis, flourished in all respects, intellectually, socially…

Pierre Rosanvallon: Was it a multicultural society, to use contemporary terminology?

Claude Lefort: Yes, it was a multicultural society.

Pierre Rosanvallon: And was it capitalistic?

Claude Lefort: Yes, Florence was a multicultural society, to use contemporary terminology, and it was indeed capitalistic. And again, it was a beacon, which attracted many immigrants. It was a place where new citizens lived alongside very wealthy patricians. And yet, despite such difference, a new kind of social experiment played out. This is why it interests me. But the same could be said about Amsterdam—I won’t go into it—where Descartes lived for twenty years. For him, Amsterdam was the city of Spinoza, the first philosopher of democracy. Perhaps more than Florence at a certain period, Amsterdam became the center of global commerce. In this way, the world of the city allows us to reconsider a question that is traditionally tied to the birth of popular sovereignty.

Pierre Rosanvallon: You are saying that the origin of democracy lies not only in the creation of a completely new regime, opposed to the old monarchies or autocracies, but in the emergence of a particular type of society. That is your claim.

Claude Lefort: Exactly.

Pierre Rosanvallon: I understand this claim very well, as it applies perfectly to your examples: the commercial and—let’s use the contemporary term—multicultural cities of fifteenth-century Italy and of northern Europe through to the seventeenth century. Yet modern democracy was not, ultimately, born in these cities, which gave birth, I would say, to civic humanism. Modern democracy’s foundational revolutions were, rather, the French and American Revolutions. In other words, these cities were an important moment in the process of learning how to be free and in creating a new society, but, at the same time, these experiences did not result in modern democratic regimes. The question I wonder about is this: in both the American and the French Revolutions, the civic ideal was very cut off from multiculturalism, as well as the commercial outlook. To the contrary, in eighteenth-century France, republican virtue was always critical of luxury—in other words, of political economy. Ultimately, the American anti-Federalists also believed that modern democracy should be based on small artisans and farmers, not at all on the modern world. Does this mean that there were, if I can put it this way, two paths to democratic modernity? There was the path of civic humanism, which is undeniable and which you have taught us about, and, on the other—we’ll return to it shortly, as it’s one of your topics—there was the path of more explicitly political revolutions.

Claude Lefort: This is indeed a very difficult question. I can’t decide. I would simply draw your attention to the fact that a lot of time passed before American democracy was proclaimed. In itself, this model demands much reflection. It’s not true to say that it consisted of nothing more than small landowners living side by side. In The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution,¹⁰ the historian Bernard Bailyn examined a large number of pamphlets—by pamphlets, I mean what we call a pamphlet, but also letters and all kinds of circulating publications—that attest to urban life. Bailyn shows that before democracy asserted itself, ideas and individuals were circulating in new ways. Landowners assembled at town meetings and argued with one another. This is an element that Tocqueville leads us to overlook. Democracy and equality of conditions don’t come out of nowhere. Here, too, we can speak of milieus. There is not one milieu called the city. There are milieus here and milieus there which enter into contact with one another. Assemblies are the result. It’s more complicated.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Let’s return to one of the key idea that you have explored, that democracy’s social conditions existed prior to democracy’s actual political birth—in other words, prior to popular sovereignty. In Florence, the people existed as a force that had to be reconciled. The prince learned that, to be powerful, he had to show himself to be conciliatory or even obedient to the people. These two powers needed to learn to tame one another. There is what some would call a cynical interpretation of this taming, and a democratic interpretation. The cynical view is that taming the people meant knowing how to manipulate them, and the democratic interpretation holds that it meant ensuring that popular pressure constrained those in power. The entire history of Machiavelli interpretation oscillates between these two interpretations. In the people’s relationship with power, was it power that was manipulating the people or the people that placed limits on power? At present, one can say that those who govern us need, in the midst of an election campaign need to reconcile themselves with the people and, at the same time, if not later, to find the means to manipulate or at least to cajole it—to seduce it and, by controlled means, to seduce it through directed goals, to curry its favor.

Claude Lefort: When Machiavelli wrote The Prince, he was supposedly addressing a prince. The regime had changed, having become a monarchy. But he was also addressing an audience of young republicans. Machiavelli writes that if the prince relied on the powerful people to whom he owed his throne, he would fail. He would only have freedom of action in his military initiatives if he relied on the people and respected the powerful. You spoke of a ruse and, in a way, he sees the prince’s action as a ruse. A popular prince is one who has not absurdly rested his power on an aristocracy, but one who is clever enough to preserve his freedom of action by relying on the people. In this case, the powerful, to put it simply, abase themselves. Furthermore, there is also the republic, which is something altogether different: for Machiavelli, the people, through their ability to resist, are not only a positive and productive factor, as in The Prince. The people do not hold power, but by making demands, by asserting themselves, and by growing through immigration nevertheless become the decisive factor in shaping the republic’s politics and foreign policy.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Perhaps even an indirect factor.

Claude Lefort: Absolutely. Machiavelli says so in one book after another: the people want not to be oppressed, while the powerful want to oppress. It’s that radical and simple: the people do not want to be oppressed, so they must be able to fight oppression.

Pierre Rosanvallon: So what we have here is an emancipatory vision.

Claude Lefort: It’s an emancipatory vision that is completely free of any conception of popular sovereignty. In other words, for Machiavelli, democracy cannot be defined as popular sovereignty: in the beginning, there is conflict, and the progressive force is the people, who are born from their ability to exert pressure.

Pierre Rosanvallon: The people must not become a negative power; in other words, the people must not become a rebellious power. Ultimately, the political philosophy of that time says that to win over the people is simply to ensure their consent. Their will is their consent, the fact that they don’t rebel. So one might say that it’s a vision…

Claude Lefort: No, I don’t agree with your way of putting it. Machiavelli believes that the people must exert pressure, the people must be active. What matters is not that the people are oppressed, but the fact that they fight oppression.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Today, we would say that the people are counter-democrats.

Claude Lefort: Precisely.

Pierre Rosanvallon: The second democratic experience consists of the foundational revolutions, the American and French Revolutions. In these cases, we not only find the people acting as a counter-democratic power, but the positive idea of popular sovereignty. And this idea of the people’s positive sovereignty will identify its central institution: universal suffrage. How do you analyze the shift from the people as a counter-democratic force to popular sovereignty, to the people as a positive force?

Claude Lefort: Your question is one that interests me greatly. We might think that popular sovereignty, the establishment of the principle of popular sovereignty, implies a conception or image of the “people united.” The “people” no longer means society’s lowest ranks, below the powerful; it now encompasses all conditions. Yet through universal suffrage, the “people united” are periodically interrogated. Their very mobility is asked to express itself. This means that the people are united, but that one must always return to them to determine what their unity is. But what is universal suffrage’s function? Its function—if not its principle—is to mobilize society. It’s an important moment in which each individual is summoned to find an outlet for his opinion. As a result, it’s a society into the midst of which associations and party organizations are thrown, which become so many decision-making centers. In this way, the “people united,” the sovereign people become a people whose identity is unclear. Furthermore, because of regular voting, those who are in power today are not in power tomorrow, just as what we call the people today is not necessarily what we’ll call it tomorrow.

Pierre Rosanvallon: In support of what you’re saying, I would point out that it is striking that the question of how to represent the people was posed in the iconography of the French and American Revolutions. Painters and engravers were unable to represent the people. Ultimately, they reached an agreement of sorts: near the bridge at the tip of the Ile de la Cité, they built an enormous plaster colossus with a banner that read “the people,” in order to show that the people was something massive, something that dominated society. They want to create an image of its grandeur. Representing the people was a crucial question in the history of democracies.

Claude Lefort: Of course, since the people cannot be represented [infigurable]. This point, if you will, allows me to connect two ideas. The first, which I have explored for many years, is that democracy is a society in which power is not incorporated into the social. This is easy to understand: in monarchies and aristocracies, power appeared to be rooted in nature (that is, “nature” in quotation marks).

Pierre Rosanvallon: It was felt to be divine.

Claude Lefort: Exactly. However, the people are also a social level, those who are “below.” Suddenly, the “people united” must be explored so that it can reveal itself in all its sovereignty; and to be explored, it must be mobilized. Once again, political parties exist because of universal suffrage. Every institution, as well as exercised power—government, authority—must be periodically put back into play. Power, in other words, belongs to no one—an idea I have explored for some time.

Pierre Rosanvallon: This is your famous idea of power as an “empty space,” which is the core of your thought.

Claude Lefort: Yes. There is an empty space. Because in every society in which power exists, power has a space—if not the hands of men, in the hands of god. So power cannot be incarnated, it cannot be incorporated into society. Power can, however, be exercised; it lives…

Pierre Rosanvallon: There are lots of candidates to occupy the emptiness. That is the problem…

Claude Lefort: Yes, we agree. But the two things I want to connect are, on the one hand, the people, who are composite, multiple, and conflictual, and, on the other, power, which belongs to no one. These are the two things that we must understand, I believe, to grasp democracy’s nature.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Your thought deals with people and democracy, but politicians who have represented the people have rarely embraced your definition of democracy and this is a historical problem, too.

Claude Lefort: It’s not in their interest to do so.

Pierre Rosanvallon: You could say that there is entire tradition that led to this idea. For instance, during the French Revolution, Condorcet was not far off from the idea that no one can occupy power and that only an array of partial occupations can offer an approximate image of it. For Condorcet, the people cannot be represented, but, like an animated image, one can offer an approximate image of the people by superimposing several different images. A number of nineteenth-century liberals also come close to this idea. But it is seen rather as a way of discrediting the idea of sovereignty rather than as a means for building democracy. Herein lies the problem.

Claude Lefort: I would say—but these terms obviously require definition—that we need to distinguish between the symbolic and the real. Power has shifted from one to the other. Whatever the majority opinion might be, whether it brings such-and-such a government or individual to power, whether it is is a de facto power—this doesn’t mean that there isn’t another, essential dimension to power, which I call the symbolic dimension. This power can thus not be realized, which is why I speak, more simply, of a power belonging to no one. Moreover, the connection between universal suffrage and the idea of an excavation of society strikes me as very interesting.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Universal suffrage really has two dimensions. The first consists in the consecration of equality: in other words, all voices and arguments are equally valid; the wise and futile, those who have thought deeply and those who vote impulsively or emotionally are of equal value, as no one can be the judge of what constitutes a good argument. One dimension of universal suffrage is thus this way in which it constructs equality, and, in this sense, a very radical equality. At the same time, universal suffrage is also a result, i.e., a vote count. While the egalitarian dimension produces a form of society—for to say that the principle of equality is constitutive is to posit a radical equivalence—with vote counts, each time the results are announced, we see what I would call popular cacophony, revealing the people’s divisions and problematic character.

Claude Lefort: Voting is indeed about numbers, but this doesn’t necessarily mean, as one might say, from a Tocquevillian perspective, that one counts individuals. No, it’s more complicated than that: there are the numbers, but, at the same time, there is also the sudden revelation of social plurality. People vote because their hearts makes them lean a certain way, because they’re on the left or the right, or because they think some little fellow is really nice, no matter how ugly he might be. And there is something else: opinions are conduits for unions, parties, associations, and neighborhoods. At a given moment, all of this emerges.

Pierre Rosanvallon: That’s very clear, but at the same time, it took a while to arrive at the idea that voting revealed diversity or division. For a long time, it was believed that a good democracy was one that expressed the people’s unity. Until the end of the Second Empire, there were villages that voted almost unanimously, as if the expression of a dissident voice or the existence of concurrent groups were an act of aggression against the social body itself.

Claude Lefort: Yes, that was true of agricultural regions. But at the same, there were political parties and social division emerged: the workers’ movement, the proletariat, the bourgeoisie…

Pierre Rosanvallon: You’re right about that. You could say that the ideal of unanimity had a strong presence in traditional territorial communities, but was weak in cities. Cities were always places were division was in fact accepted.

To move forward, let’s start over again with the fundamental concept of the empty space. Can’t one understand—I think this is the point of your approach—totalitarianism in its relationship to the empty space? Totalitarianism is a forced and even fanatical effort to fill the empty space. Can you summarize how this idea developed in your thought?

Claude Lefort: How it came to me? That’s simple! I thought you were talking about its development through history. History is more difficult.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Tonight, history is Lefort!

Claude Lefort: I can answer that easily, since, at an early age, I was a Marxist. I discovered Marx when I was eighteen. The class struggle, the proletariat—I was dazzled, and this lasted some time. But I joined a party on the extreme left, i.e., a Trotskyist party. On that basis, as a radical anti-communist, I began to think about this new regime, totalitarianism. In 1981, I wrote a book entitled L’invention démocratique [Democratic Invention]. It’s a collection of essays and—surprise, surprise—only one was about democracy. The rest dealt with totalitarianism, because for me, as a young Marxist who was detached from the CP, totalitarianism was the enigma. I realized that this regime was not, contrary to what the Trotskyists believed, a degenerated workers’ state. I wasn’t a total idiot and I found Trotskyist activism pretty Marxist. There was also their unconditional defense of the Soviet Union—unconditional because the Trotskyists believed you had to distinguish the good base (the abolition of capitalism and property) from the bad superstructure (Stalin and the Communist Party). Fortunately I was sharp enough to realize quite quickly that this was absurd. Next, I met Castoriadis who, like me, was absolutely critical of the Soviet Union and who accepted the idea that the Soviet system was state capitalism. In short, we remained within a Marxist framework—capitalism was the enemy, but the means of production had been taken over by the state. It took me some time, but not too long, to realize that this was absurd, that the USSR’s power system could not be reduced to state capitalism. In fact, the great novelty was power’s capacity, via the single party, to be omnipresent. I say single party, but it was much more than a single party, as its tentacles extended throughout the social body. Stalin’s importance as an individual is well known. But at the same time, this power circulated through society’s every channel.

A little while ago I alluded to Kravchenko’s 1948 book, I Chose Freedom, which immediately provoked the indignation of the left, or a large majority of the left, including the intellectual left, notably many people I was very close to. In 1948, Merleau-Ponty let me write an article for Les temps modernes, in which I said the Kravchenko’s book was incredibly revealing, but he added a note saying that this was Lefort’s personal opinion. For Sartre, political books didn’t exist, he didn’t know what they were… Kravchenko upset the entire left. I still recommend reading it today because it’s not at all a theoretical critique of the Soviet regime, it’s his own story—the story of a clever worker’s son who, rising in the social hierarchy, became an engineer and lived in a world of informers. The party was everywhere, so spies were everywhere, without even going into what was known then and now about the great purges of the thirties, in which the peasantry was killed by the hundreds of thousands. The Red Terror had a mythical quality. There’s still an abundant literature about it. What I wanted to explain was that the party didn’t only give execution orders from above—thousands of people were executed. It was also a rotten society where, because someone hated you or was jealous of you, you risked suddenly being called an anti-communist or an enemy of the people. You know that there were millions in Soviet concentration camps; many had done nothing more than say something they shouldn’t have said. It must be that the vast majority of these people were purely and simply innocent.

Pierre Rosanvallon: At the same time, this analysis of totalitarianism emphasizes the fact that this oppressive power, this destructive power, is a society-power, which imposes itself on society, but which enjoys some degree of consent. It is a power that is both internal and external. It grabs and holds onto the pincers.

Claude Lefort: You’re absolutely right. You can’t omit this kind of acquiescence or complicity on the part of the population. It is terrible to say, even if it’s true, because it means that the population was mostly corrupt. Not only because it consisted of informers, because it consisted of people who were passive and respected power.

Pierre Rosanvallon: It was a society that never experienced equal conditions, a radically anti-democratic society. To move the discussion forward, let’s consider your analysis of totalitarianism, which you developed beginning in the late forties. It became visible in the seventies, with the publication of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago and one of your most influential books, Un homme en trop [A Man Too Many], which is a commentary on The Gulag Archipelago. At the time there were a few of us who were reading your work, who were inspired by it. Your work became, in a sense, the philosophical reference point for what became known as the “anti-totalitarian left.” During these years, how did you understand the extraordinary reticence of the left—and not only the communists—to accept totalitarianism and define what I would call an anti-totalitarian democratic socialism? The struggle was very difficult and there was very powerful resistance to these analyses of totalitarianism. There were even moments when people we assumed to be moderate socialisms lost their temper over Solzhenitsyn. How did you experience all this? How did you interpret it?

Claude Lefort: Solzhenitsyn fascinated me and I had not the slightest doubt about the truth of his account. It was very different from Kravchenko, since Kravchenko was a Soviet bureaucrat, which was not at all the case with Solzhenitsyn, who had been in a concentration camp. His testimony was indisputable. Yet even by then—this was 1973—much of the left saw Solzhenitsyn as a religious and conservative figure, who on top of everything was an idealist. Resistance to Solzhenitsyn in those years was very strange.

Pierre Rosanvallon: What’s your analysis of this strangeness? How do you explain it?

Claude Lefort: The Socialist Party had an alliance with the Communist Party. The socialists never understood anything about the communists.

Pierre Rosanvallon: No, they were anti-Soviet.

Claude Lefort: They were anti-Soviet. But in 1936 they were duped, they were betrayed by the communists in 1936, despite the fact that population was experiencing a great egalitarian élan. They learned nothing. Mitterrand still found a way to ally himself with the communists. He did not understand the USSR.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Yes, at the very moment you published Un homme en trop, Mitterrand was visiting Hungary and marveled at the regime’s success. You write a famous article about this incident. For my generation, your significance was twofold. First, of course, there was your analysis of totalitarianism. But your point was not simply to criticize a regime, but to make a fresh start in thinking about democracy. The strength of your analysis consists in showing that understanding totalitarianism was a necessary condition for democratic enrichment and that democracy could only flourish if one grasped the inner workings of its pathologies and its most terrible negation.

Claude Lefort: Yes, certainly. For me, rediscovering democracy did not for one moment mean downplaying inequalities or idealizing it. It meant being aware that we live in a society in which there are opportunities for development, in which there is social mobility, which continues to exist despite unemployment. We must seem democracy as a space of conflict, a space in which one must known how to make objections. At present, you are at the cutting edge of ideas about associating against inequality. This is absolutely essential. But whatever these criticisms, however sharp they might be, we cannot detach ourselves from this regime and treat it as a regime like any other. Either we will manage to change democracy from inside through the power of spontaneous mobilization, or it will die. This is another issue that it is too late to speak about. The fact of the matter is that there is reason to fear the recent disappearance of great social conflicts. The polarization of society was important for preserving its vitality. Now, industrial society has been transformed, capitalism still exists, but there is no longer what could be circumscribed as the inequality’s malevolent agents. Things have grown much more complicated.

Pierre Rosanvallon: They can’t be personalized in the same way. There was a lot of discussion, in the workshop on capitalism, of all the mechanisms that the financial economy has developed, such as securitization: it’s not simply a social group, it’s a mechanism of abstraction, one might say, which severs society and produces the dramatic inequalities with which we are all familiar. The mode of production of inequalities has changed character, because these days it is increasingly expressed, from what can see these days in many places in France, including Grenoble, in test communities at certain critical moments. It is also experienced much more in the form of shared trajectories than in a generalized, routine, and daily membership in something known as the working class. It is embodied in moments, experiences, in trajectories, in similar histories, in solidarity. It thus takes on very different faces and forms.

Claude Lefort: In a sense, that’s very positive. But in another sense, one might fear that society could demobilize itself, perhaps due to an erosion of opposition. We should fear a power that puts society to sleep, a power that does not consult people and makes reforms in certain areas—education, the judicial system—without any mobilization on the part of concerned parties. We should fear a society that allows itself to be modeled by an authority that, previously, would have been inconceivable.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Indeed, this path is completely apparent. But don’t we, as the producers of ideas, as intellectuals, have a responsibility? We must make these problems and mechanisms more visible, more palpable, for the phenomena of apathy can in part be explained by the sense that we have no handle on reality, a sense of opacity, a sense of not understanding, a sense that the world is falling away from us. To understand the world is already, from a certain perspective, to change it. The relationship between interpretation and action, as you well know, is an idea that neither one of us invented; it’s one of the great issues in Marxism. So, Claude, are you making a plea that we return to Marxism?

Claude Lefort: How insincere of you!

Pierre Rosanvallon: I know of a definition that is maximally sympathetic to Marxism: social critique’s radical effort to understand. Can you handle that?

Claude Lefort: In that case, yes, without reservation.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Very good. I would like to conclude, Claude, with a final question. For my generation, you were the anti-totalitarian philosopher, but you were also a very active philosopher, one who was closely tied to May ’68. During this time, there developed a utopian idea, in the positive sense of the term, the idea that one could think differently, the idea that new possibilities could be unlocked—a utopia of unlocked possibilities. It has often seemed to me that you regret that the critique of Marxism and communism has led some to content themselves with a cautious liberalism and to overlook this utopian dimension.

Claude Lefort: ’68 was extraordinary year because, as you know, it began with students, an unprecedented collective mobilization. I am surprised every time ’68 is presented as ridiculous episode, a moment of weakness. I was a professor at the University of Caen. I’ve told this story before, the events at Caen began—my students included—the evening before the events at Nanterre began. To witness this sudden liberation of speech, of sovereign speech, was in itself an extraordinary event. It was a new form of socialization, a kind of wild socialization, which could not last. I never hoped for a revolution in ’68; some imbeciles have said I did. However, at the time, I did, not quite break, but disagree with Raymond Aron, who saw ’68 as an attack on the integrity of the university, adults, Fathers, and so on—everything was thrown into question. In this savage democracy, there was a kind of liberty that, for me, I admit, was extremely precious. Today we caricature ’68, either by saying that it was initiated by communists, despite the fact that the communists played no role in it and tried to catch up with the communist youth movement, or that it was an anarchist movement, even though it had no doctrine and was a curious movement which, in a single blow, destabilized a traditional relationships based on authority and hierarchy. ’68 was not the caricaturized version of it that is often presented. It was not simply chaos.

Pierre Rosanvallon: Let us then continue, with you, the task of teaching liberty!

First published by Laviedesidees.fr, 15 October 2010. Translated by Michael Behrent and published by Books&Ideas.net, 16 October 2013. 

©booksandideas.net

¹ I.e. “books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll.” R. Darnton, “The Library in the New Age”, The New York Review of Books, Vol. 55, No. 10, June 12, 2008. – Translator’s note

² Ibid.

³ Translator’s Note: Pouchedepass does indeed use the English term “globalisation” in French, instead of the more commonly-used “mondialisation”.

⁴ I.e. “a spurious observation or result arising from preparatory procedures” (Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary) – Translator’s note

⁵ An axon is the long threadlike extension of a nerve cell that conducts nerve impulses from the cell body (Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, HarperCollins Publishers 2003) – Translator’s note

⁶ Claude Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie structurale II, Paris, Plon, 1973, 343.

⁷ Nathan Wachtel, La Vision des vaincus. Les Indiens du Pérou devant la conquête espagnole, Paris, Gallimard, 1971.

⁸ Claude Lefort, “Author’s Preface,” in Writing: The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), xli.

⁹ La Société féodale, 2 vol., 1939-1940 (dernière réédition chez Albin Michel, en un seul volume, en 1998)

¹⁰ Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press