Jean-François Lyotard is preoccupied with both “culture”
and “writing,” and he connects the two with his notion of “femininity.”
While he conceives of himself not as a writer but as a philosopher (because
he must necessarily always be conscious of “meaning” when he writes),
he nonetheless sees writing (in the expanded contemporary sense of the
term) as central to postmodern “openness” and resistance to certainty.
For Lyotard, true writing is the attempt to “resist the network of exchanges
in which cultural objects are commodities,” to resist “the simple and
naive exchangeability of things in our world.” His conception of writing
is in contradistinction to the traditional notion of writing as an activity
whose objective is to “master” a subject, to possess it, to pin it down.
It is precisely this phallocratic preoccupation with mastery, says Lyotard,
that has impelled philosophy as a mode of discourse into “such extreme
crisis today.” The compulsion to master by erecting huge systems of
answers, the “search for a constituting order that gives meaning to
the world,” makes the philosopher “a secret accomplice of the phallocrat.”
This is why he does not perceive his own writings to be “academic”;
academic discourse entails what Lacan called “the discourse of the master,”
and Lyotard is not about to set himself up as a master, “just a perpetual
student.” Instead, what is needed in philosophy, in the sciences, in
life is “perpetual displacement of questions” so that “answering is
never achieved.” Since questions always already carry within them their
own answers, are always “interested,” it is the act itself of questioning,
of remaining open, that is most useful to Lyotard. And so, an “answer”
is only interesting in so far as it is a new question.
Thus, for example,
philosophical inquiry about questions of gender is only useful when it is not
attempting to stabilize gender categories or provide answers; such questions
necessarily have no answers. In fact, Lyotard believes that our approach to
questions of gender should be “precisely like” how he conceives the act of
writing—as questions posed without attempts to answer or master: “Maybe that’s
the best homage we can give to the gender question—to write.” Thus, “the
differences between the sexes isn’t the most important problem,” and attempts
to associate masculinity with aggressiveness and femininity with passivity are
“very very stupid.” A more interesting issue is the relative “importance given
to the body as such by both sexes.” Philosophical—that is, male—discourse has
tended to repress and externalize a “bodily way of thinking,” to be suspicious
of those who acknowledge emotions and bodily states, whereas “women are more
sensitive” to these factors, according to Lyotard. What is needed, he suggests
here and elsewhere, is to move away from a discourse of mastery and abstract
cognition toward a way of being that recognizes affect, the body, and
openness—a posture he defines as “feminine.” Hence, Lyotard perceives “a strong
relationship” between “the ability to write in this sense and what I
could call ‘femininity’ because there is a sort of openness to something
unknown without any project to master it.” For Lyotard, the opposite of a
discourse of mastery is “passivity,” the “ability to wait for, not to look at,
but to wait for—for what, precisely, we don’t know.” It is this very “refusal
of the temptation to grasp, to master” that, says Lyotard, is “femininity to
me, real femininity.”
It
is perhaps somewhat curious that a former Marxist, someone who devoted fifteen
years of his life to socialist activism, could find writing and academic work
incompatible with social activism, especially during a time when many are
contending that the two are or should be integrally related. Yet, Lyotard
claims to have taken up writing and scholarly work as a kind of mourning” brought
on by the realization that “militant activity was no longer effective.” In
fact, he is highly skeptical of organized resistance in general. Resistance,
“in the usual sense of another policy or another politics,” is not a viable
alternative to the “system” because organized resistance, though sometimes
necessary for checks and balances, eventually becomes absorbed into the system.
True resistance, whether in educational reform or another kind of reform, is
“up to each of us,” to individuals. True resistance is much like “the capacity
for people. . . to ‘write’ in the sense we used just before.” For example,
those scientists and philosophers of science like Sandra Harding and Donna
Haraway who are interested in challenging the patriarchal domination of scientific
method and epistemology can resist by adopting the same kind of “feminine,”
“postmodern,” “writing” posture Lyotard describes throughout this interview.
Besides changing his
position on socialist activism, Lyotard has revised a number of his former positions.
He no longer uses Wittgenstein’s language game model, substituting for it his
own concept of “phrase making.” And despite numerous earlier works arguing that
capital is “the main problem in today’s society,” the “problem that overshadows
all the others,” he is quick to defend the capitalist system as “the only
solution.” For Lyotard, the capitalist system competed against and won out over
all other systems, demonstrating itself superior in a kind of
political/economic survival of the fittest. Preventing developing countries and
emerging democracies from embracing capitalism is misguided because people need
to be able “to eat, to work, to sleep, to have a home.” Only when a certain
degree of economic self-sufficiency emerges among the people can “real
resistance” occur. This position is in keeping with Lyotard’s general
privileging of “openness” and his suspicion of certainty because he sees
democracy as flexible and open, “a political system in which the connections
must adjust day by day, perpetually working to invent something new."
In
addition to his discussion of true writing as a kind of “feminine” openness and
passivity (what he terms “passibility”), Lyotard makes several comments about
feminism. While he agrees that feminism is a postmodernist discourse (or, as he
says, “postmodernism is feminist”), he has an uneasy relationship
with the French feminists. He claims to have been “horrified” by a certain
conference paper presented by Luce Irigaray but admires the work of Hélène
Cixous, seeing it as related to the writings of Gertrude Stein. And he is
adamant that competition is not a “male” trait, as some have posited; rather,
he views competition as central to all forms of life and social organization.
We may “hate” the fact that this is so, but we must realize nonetheless that
“we are in this condition.” For Lyotard, sexual difference is not merely a
matter of biology: “it’s something else, quite mysterious, which is
incorporated in each of us.” Disagreements over such issues have made him feel
that he has “no clear relationship with feminists,” even though he supports
various feminist causes.
It
can’t go without note that despite Lyotard’s campaign against mastery and
certitude he himself fails to escape such a discourse in this interview. He
uses strong declarative sentences and is very definite in his views. Words such
as precisely (which occurs nineteen times), impossible (fourteen
times), obvious, and exactly saturate his discourse. Often he
declares, “it’s true that,” and once he says, “There is no argument. There is
no doubt.” Such language is incommensurate with that of someone who insists
that we must escape traditional, patriarchal discourse. Yet, perhaps this
incongruity only underscores Lyotard’s own point that we constantly need to
invent new vocabularies so as not to remain trapped by those that already have
a hold on us. And despite Lyotard’s caution against stabilizing gender
categories (“it’s very very stupid”), he himself appears to have fairly fixed
notions of femininity and masculinity.
Nevertheless, Lyotard does provide
substantial insight into many concerns, and his views on culture, feminism,
postmodernism, and writing are potentially useful to many of us. His
redefinition of writing, whether or not we agree that it is “feminine,” seems a
sensible stance in the postmodern world.
Q. In Peregrinations you describe how at the age of fourteen you “began
to write poems, essays, short stories, and, later still, a novel” but immediately
gave up writing after “the only woman in whom I had confidence decided I was
not a true writer.” Despite this early disappointment, you’ve gone on to write
an impressive number of important books and essays. Do you now consider yourself
a writer?
A. No, I
don’t consider myself a writer. That’s a good question though because I’m
trying to find the appropriate term for the way I write in the general sense. A
writer is somebody like Claude Simon or Beckett. They are writers.
That’s to say, they are progressing in a space, a field (but it’s not a field)
in which they don’t know what they have to write. They are confronted with the
unknown, and that’s to say they are really confronted with language itself.
There is a sort of fight, a battle with and against words and sentences and
phrases, and that’s beautiful and terrible work in a sense, and I admire it.
But for my part, I remain a philosopher. Even if sometimes I write in this sense—trying
to grasp the word to express (I don’t like this expression: express), to
fix a certain word, a certain way of composing a phrase—nevertheless, I still
remain a philosopher. That is, I’m guided by meaning, and being guided by
meaning means maintaining a certain idea of mastering the material, which is
the old philosophical tradition. And it seems to me that this is a poverty and
a misery. So, I’m between these two ways of writing. I could say I write in a
certain way in which what is implied is necessarily the consciousness of what I
have to mean. I could use the term “reflexive writing,” though I have no
definition of it, but you know what I mean.
Q. In that same book you say that the idea that writing “pretends to be complete,”
that it presumes to “build a system of total knowledge” about something, “constitutespar
excellence the sin, the arrogance of the mind.” In a postmodern world,
how should we view the role of writing?
A. In the postmodern world, we have to separate writing as a cultural effect
and writing as writing. You can take a book as a cultural object and finally
test it as having a large audience or as being understandable—as being a poor
work or the opposite, a brilliant one. That’s the postmodern appreciation
of the works of mind (if I can use this term), of thought, but it seems to
me that writing is the opposite: writing is the capacity to resist the network
of exchanges in which cultural objects are commodities, and maybe to write
is precisely to avoid making a book (or even a small paper or article) a commodity,
but rather to oppose, to resist the simple and naive exchangeability of things
in our world. That’s to say, to write is necessarily to allude to something
else which is not easily communicated. It doesn’t mean that a work is difficult
to read; it could be very simple, but it alludes to something else.
Q. For fifteen years while
a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie, you gave up all writing except for
that devoted to this activist group. You comment that your return to “real (?)
writing in the mid-sixties was a sign that my militancy had passed and another
mode of legitimation was being searched for.” Do you find academic work to be
incompatible with social activism?
A. I
don’t know because I have no experience with academic work. That’s true; that’s
my fate or my destiny, my incapacity. This is so even when I started to write:
it was the book called Discours, figure, and though it was presented as
a dissertation, it wasn’t an academic book at all. Even the title was
considered bizarre to academic people. I remember two colleagues in the
university (it was Nanterre University at that time) looking at the pamphlet
announcing the book and saying, “What is this title? It’s impossible. This is a
dissertation, Discours, figure?” In a certain sense, I have no real
experience of the academy. I was always a teacher; even now (and I’m at
retirement age) I continue for personal reasons to teach, and I like it. In a
certain sense, I was very engaged in the direct relationship with young people,
with students. But the idea of creating an academic work is not mine because it
entails what Lacan called “the discourse of the master,” and I’m not about to
take myself as a master, just a perpetual student, a child.
Q. But do you find the work that you do engage in to be compatible with social
activism?
A. No,
it was impossible for me because my activism was a complete activism. It wasn’t
simply being a card-carrying member of the party. I was completely engaged
twenty-four hours a day because we had to do everything, not only to write but
to print, to distribute, to defend, to go to factory entrances in order to
distribute pamphlets, to manifest, to make public our meetings in order to
propose or to defend our ideas or our analysis about capitalist society and
Stalinist society. So it was continual work; it was impossible for me to engage
in real academic or even writing activity. When I turned to the book Discours,
figure, it was a break in my life in a certain sense. Or, rather, this
break was what made me capable of having a different life. That is, my writing
started, around the middle of the sixties, as the giving up of a political
perspective. I realized at that moment that the basis of my political
perspective—that is, an alternative to the dominance of capitalist arrangement
or organization of things—was impossible, and that there was not another
subject, a real and authentic subject. What was called “the proletariat” by
Marx didn’t exist finally—except as an idea, and the idea was linked to a
general metaphysics, the modern metaphysics which makes or made political life
in Western countries a sort of tragedy, a battle, a fight between the false
subject, capital, and the real one, the proletariat. So, I started to write as
a sort of mourning, as a despair, the necessity to come back to these stupid
activities because, finally, militant activity was no longer effective.
Q. You suggest in The Postmodern Condition that in postindustrial society
“disciplines disappear,” “universities lose their function,” “the speculative
hierarchy of learning gives way,” and the death knell of “the age of the Professor”
is sounded. How should the postmodern academy be reconstituted? What should
its objectives be?
A. I
don’t know. That’s an enormous question. What happened is that the modern
academy was conceived at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
Berlin—which is the general pattern for every university in the world except in
England and France, presumably for different reasons; but elsewhere that’s the
pattern, the Berlin Academy, built in 1810—and this institution was built in
the spirit that one could cover all knowledge with a hierarchy of disciplines,
and at that time the top of the mountain was philology. The institution was
created in order to produce enlightened citizens, according to the goal of the
Aufklarung [Enlightenment]. Today, this is no longer the point. The point
is to produce people able to work in the system and to produce good work,
effective work, to gain competence in their part of the general field. That’s
to say, there’s a sort of sophistication of the capacity to work and to give
the system what it needs. The evidence doesn’t necessarily demonstrate that the
people are enlightened at all. You can be an excellent physicist or computer
engineer without any general ideal. “Enlightenment” doesn’t matter; it’s not
relevant in this way. So, there is a sort of disbalance between the old ideal
of the academy and the real task it has to do now, and I don’t know if it is
possible to reform it. It seems tome that this is one of the effects of the
so-called postmodern situation, the fact that the purpose of knowledge has
completely changed.
Q. In “Endurance and the Profession” and in an interview in Diacritics,
you suggest that the alternative to the grand Enlightenment narrative
of education as emancipation is education as resistance—resistance against
the academic genres of discourse, against the great narratives themselves,
and “against every object of thought which is given to be grasped through
some ‘obvious’ delimitation, method, or end.” Given the intense pressures
in postindustrial society in the postmodern age to commodify knowledge and
to transform universities into servants of the technocracy, how can such resistance
be fostered successfully?
A. It’s up to each of us. Resistance is not an alternative, properly speaking,
in the usual sense of another policy or another politics. It is impossible
to base politics on the notion of resistance. It could be very dangerous in
that that’s the old tradition. What was Marxism in the nineteenth century?
It was a politics of resistance. Now we know the effects of such politics
because it is politics; that’s all. A political approach to this problem of
resistance is completely wrong. It’s impossible to make a front of a resistance
party. There is no resistance party because if it is a party, it is no longer
resistant; it is a part of the system and in concert with the system. And
that’s good. I’ve nothing against it because it is necessary to have at least
two parties in order to correct the system itself. Today in all developing
societies, that’s the general situation: to have two parties in order to balance
the correction of arrangements or fitness of the system itself. Maybe we can
imagine resistance in terms of the capacity for people (I don’t know if it’s
for all people; I’m not so “rousseauist”) to “write” in the sense we used
just before: to advance or want something that is not clear, and to discover
a means of giving testimony of that which is precisely not yet included in
the circulation of commodities; it is not yet known. It seems to me that this
is active resistance, not in the sense of a resistance armée but in
the sense of to wait for, to be passive. It seems to me that the job is to
write toward something appealing but to be honorable enough to specify what
kind of thing this thing is appealing to—that is, to resist the already done,
the already written, the already thought, that’s to say precisely commodities,
even in the philosophical world or literary field.
Q. You’ve commented, “Eclecticism is the degree zero of contemporary general
culture: one listens to reggae, watches a western, eats McDonald’s food for
lunch and local cuisine for dinner, wears Paris perfume in Tokyo and ‘retro’
clothes in Hong Kong; knowledge is a matter for TV games.” It is clear from
your work that you don’t share the fears of those who predict that such “fragmentation”
will erode social bonds to such an extent that there is no longer any recognizable
cultural coherence; however, do you believe that such eclecticism can actually
serve to strengthen social bonds in the postmodern age?
A. This eclecticism can completely change the nature of social bonds. That’s
the point. Yesterday we were entertaining a candidate for an assistant professor
position, and we had a long discussion about cultures and cultural multiplicity.
(You know, that’s an American academic topic now. I don’t know why because
you are the country of multicultural status par excellence. It
could be a problem for a French man or woman, but for an American, it’s obvious
that there is something like multiculturalism here. Okay, that’s your privilege.
And I like it.) What is changing is the fact that in a certain sense, cultural
difference—that is, a certain formation, organization, shaping of traditional
social relationships—is suddenly broken up by this enormous system and at
the same time is recognized by it. “That’s Japanese food, and so on.” But
it is recognized precisely as something already pushed out, already gone.
There’s sort of a perverse (not perverse but a traditional) pleasure in tasting
these cultural differences precisely as something coming from the past but
that are still there though about to disappear, more or less, to be integrated
into the system of commodities in the system. The notion of what was called
one people as such is disappearing, it seems to me. Instead of different peoples,
we are moving to a general notion of “the population,” which is completely
different. This population is not nothing. It’s really quite interesting,
but it means that there are a lot of common traits, common features in the
ways of living and in ways of thinking. For example, this highway out the
window in Atlanta is the same as in Frankfurt or Tokyo, exactly the same,
and that’s interesting. So, the minimal bond is given by the system itself
as the necessity to exchange. It’s impossible to maintain the system without
each person, each singularity, having something to give and something to take—to
give to others, to take from others. You can imagine this as a salary, an
honorarium, whatever; that’s a minimal bond. This is a remarkable bond in
a certain sense because this necessity to exchange is precisely inscribed
in speech itself. Speech includes the notion of a “you” and an “I,” and what
the system makes with this structure is to develop or to enlarge or to extend
it in the sense that this move back and forth can be symbolized by money.
Money tends to be a symbolic representation of the bond. It gives the system
enormous flexibility. Finally, in a certain sense, what you have to say to
me or what I have to say to you isn’t relevant; what is relevant is the fact
of the pragmatic relationship. That’s the minimal bond, but presumably there
is persistent need for closer or more affective sentimental feeling felt
by the relationship. The question is about affects, feelings; but that’s another
question.
Q. Along these lines, you point out that with the commodification of knowledge,
“increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access” to information
and the machines that generate and store it. Thus, for example, in the language
games of science, “whoever is wealthiest has the best chance of being right.”
Do you believe the Clinton administration’s planned “information superhighway”
will help democratize access to information or further limit access to an
elite group of technocrats?
A. I’m
not aware of the specifics of Clinton’s information superhighway, but I have
read about it. It seems to me that my answer could be both. To democratize, to
give access to easier communication for everybody, is a remarkable ideal;
that’s exactly what I mean about the system; that’s confirmation of this poor
hypothesis which is now obvious to everybody. At the same time, this new
highway’s network necessarily must be controlled by hypertechnocrats,
necessarily. You can represent them in terms of technicians, but at the same
time everybody knows that these technicians are political. They are not
completely neutral. Nevertheless, it can work in this way, and I think that
finally there is not an alternative between the two hypotheses, the two
answers, democratic or technocratic, because what we call “democratic” today
necessarily is technocratic.
Q. In The Postmodern Condition you claim that as we increasingly become
an information society, the nature of knowledge is radically transformed,
becoming principally an “informational commodity.” Are there any advantages
to the commodification of knowledge, or will this process simply continue
to serve the state and the military-industrial complex?
A. It’s not only the state and the
military-industrial complex. The state is different today because it’s the
servant of the system. What’s the political class now? Just the community of
people having certain ideas, promoting certain ideas, about the way the system
must be adjusted in order to bring about more performance, in order to optimize
results, the output. The state is not so important in a certain sense. That’s
very strange, but the notion of the state (and the military-industrial complex)
is in a certain sense going to be obsolete it seems to me (I mean the old
national state) because even the boundaries of nations are more and more
obstacles to the development of the system. That’s to say, the state linked
with nations is too ridiculously small. And the second answer to your question,
which is quite difficult in a certain sense, is that presumably it’s too rapid
to characterize the nature of knowledge now in terms of informational
commodity. It’s true for a lot of scientific results, and you can see on
television the exhibition of these commodities and their aftereffects on
everyday life; they’re important. That’s okay. But at the same time, science is
science. That’s to say, first there are rules in order to assume that certain
effects are established. It’s impossible to say whatever proposition you can
invent. And second, there is a particularly strong system of discourse with
rules for forming propositions, for establishing evidence in this so-called
reality, and for speaking a language understandable to other members of the
community. It’s a sort of special community with its rules and its habits. And
also, and more important, science is science in the sense that sometimes
something happens—an event, invention, discovery; it doesn’t matter what terms
we use in order to signify the fact that there are sometimes big changes in
science, what Kuhn called paradigm shifts—and in this sense science escapes the
condition of just making informational commodities because the new paradigm,
the new way of representing a part of the world, is immediately obscure for the
scientific community because it’s a new language and it takes time for the
community to integrate it. Remember, for example, Einstein’s first small
article about relativity, published in a very small review in Zurich. It was
completely ignored by the scientific community, but that was the departure
point of a new way of speaking of the cosmos. This aspect is more or less
analogous to invention in the arts. To answer the final question, are there any
advantages? Yes, of course. The advantage is enormous, and the evidence is that
this system is the most performative system in the history of humanity. And
that’s the final cause; it won against all challenges. It’s due to the fact
that scientific results were spread out over the community.
Q. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s language games, you characterize the communication
process as falling within “the domain of a general agonistics,” and in numerous
places you develop this idea using such language as “playing to win,” “a feeling
of success won at the expense of an adversary,” and so on. Even though you
have since abandoned the language game model for one of “phrase making,” this
theme of agonistics still permeates your work. How do you respond to criticism
that in its emphasis on competition an agonistic conception of communication
is a distinctly male model and as such may not account for how the
process works with all individuals?
A. That’s quite strange to me because such a question presupposes certain assumptions
I do not share. First, the agonistics I was referring to was not agonistic
between people. That’s a general mistake about this question of the différend:
it’s not agonistic between people; it’s agonistic between language games
or genres of discourse. I prefer to use the term differend because
the term game is equivocal to me. It’s impossible to translate as the
connection of a series of phrases organized in order to produce a move in
the audience. For example, a tragic dialogue is impossible to translate in
an informational way of writing, in terms of cognitive discourse, because
the way sentences or phrases are organized in the tragic play precisely makes
certain effects, produces certain products, so that the so-called translation
in terms of an informational paper or cognitive discourse necessarily loses
the specifically tragic effect. There is a real dzfférend. There is
no language game or genre or discourse which is able to encompass all the
different discourses or genres, and there is a real dtfférend in which
no court or tribunal is able to decide what is best because there is no best
way. You can prefer informational or cognitive discourse over tragic discourse,
but it’s undecided. So, that’s the way I understand the dtfferend. It’s
not a dtfferend between people because each of us is able to produce
different ways of discoursing, of speaking, of writing, more or less. The
différend is internal to any subjectivity.
Second, competition is not competition
between different groups in a cultural reality. Not at all. The notion of
competition as a “male” model is a notion I reject, maybe because I am a male,
but, in fact, because there is not any other way to understand the domination
of the competitive pattern in our society. I mean, this system has competed
against all other systems, all the other ways of organizing human communities. And
we can consider human history not as a
linear succession with a sort of causality between each segment of this line,
but as the opposite, as the contingent and different ways in which human
communities have tried to organize—exactly in the same terms that so-called
life has fortuitously produced different forms of living beings. And between these different entities—animals,
vegetables, human beings, or human communities—competition was necessarily
open. They are all open systems; they need to grasp energy from outside in
order to maintain themselves, and if they have to grasp energy from outside, they
are competitive with other systems. That’s true for animals, even vegetables,
and for human communities. And that’s how our system, now, won against other
ways that communities have tried to organize themselves, and it has
internalized competition itself in order to continue to be able to grasp
outside and inside energies as much as possible. It’s not a male idea; there is
no argument against it. There is no doubt: it’s not a male idea. And I’m sure
women are perfectly able to understand this, even if they hate it; so do I. But
we are in this condition.
Q. Speaking of competition, if we adopt a vigilance against master narratives,
won’t we run the risk of erasing the narratives of marginalized groups, such
as African Americans, in their own struggles for emancipation?
A. If we
are vigilant against master narratives, it means precisely that we try to
consider the small narratives of specific groups. It seems to me that what was
so impressive in the development of anthropology in Western countries, for
example, is the discovery that there are a lot of grand narratives; even if
these grand narratives were grand narratives for small communities, they still
were grand narratives—mythologies, religions, beliefs, and so on. And that was
precisely one of the reasons for destroying or at least disturbing our own
belief in the grand narrative of emancipation, or even redemption in the
Christian tradition. It seems to me that there is now a sort of comprehension
of the so-called multiple ways of understanding the meaning of communities in
Africa, South America, North America, India, Russia, or Asia, and so to be
vigilant against grand narratives is precisely to be prudent and aware of the
capacity for human communities to have different ways of narrating their
stories. It’s not destroying these narratives, and it’s not necessarily
protecting them; it’s just respecting them.
Q. You express concern in “Universal History and Cultural Differences” that
some of your earlier works, including The Postmodern Condition, might
appear to privilege narrative over other discursive genres even while it is
useful to examine certain “great questions” in historical—that is, narrative—terms.
You also caution that it is “tempting to lend credence to the great narrative
of the decline of great narratives.” Do you believe the vocabulary of narratives
has outlived its explanatory usefulness and that what is needed is a new vocabulary
(in the Rortian sense)?
A. We need new vocabularies all the time, forever. It’s a part of the way
the system is developing. It needs new vocabularies. It’s very eager
to grasp new vocabularies. Even the resistant work of writers or artists is
grasped or memorized by the system because, in short, maybe it can be used.
So we need new vocabulary. But as to the question of narrative itself, in
my earlier works, yes, I presumably give a sort of privilege to the narrative
way of speaking and writing with the sense that that’s the basis of any entrance
into language. For me, narrative is a childish way, the first way. I have
a son who is eight years old (that’s already old), and I remember the way
in which he grasped information and immediately put it into a small narrative.
It’s a sort of immediate “composition” (as you would say) of the meaning.
Finding the relation between two meaning units is spontaneously a narrative
way. And is it possible to overcome? Is it necessary to overcome? No. I think
that is very interesting; that’s something very mysterious in a certain sense.
Take, for example, writers such as James Joyce or even Gertrude Stein or Claude
Simon. They are considered to be trying to destroy traditional narratives
or a narrative way of writing. That’s true in a certain sense; but at the
same time, there is a complex, complexifie and perverted submission to narrative
itself, making narrative more important than it is in the traditional
fable. It seems to me that there is a resistance of narrative presumably linked
with our childhood, with infancy, the space/time during which we were unable
to speak but during which we were already capable of having narrative without
speaking, if I can say that. (That’s my hypothesis, if you’ll excuse me.)
Q. In Cultural Critique and elsewhere you propose that “the main problem
in today’s society,” the “problem that overshadows all the others,” is not
the contemporary state but capital. In light of the turn to market economies
by China, Russia, Eastern Block nations, and, now, even Cuba to a certain
extent, how do we resist capitalism and its corrosive effect on the social
fabric?
A. Impossible.
And we have no reason to resist because all these people are looking to
capitalism as a solution to their problems. I was in Petersburg last spring,
and it was horrible to see all these people—very nice people—without work,
without money, and they are just waiting for capitalist investment in order to
make things supportable. There is obviously no other solution, except the
ridiculous and dangerous solution proposed by this crazy man, this neo-nazi,
Zhirinovsky. Capitalism is the only solution. Obviously, the same is true in
China with a different way to manage the entrance into capitalism. No, no. This
system has no competition, and to resist it is not to make impediments against
it, as in the old tradition. No, no. It’s to make the people able to eat, to
work, to sleep, to have a home, and so on. And in these conditions, real
resistance can appear.
Q. You’ve written, “Capital seems to actualize the ideal of reproduction of
men by themselves.... Women disappear into the male cycle, integrated either
as workers into the production of commodities, or as mothers into the reproduction
of labour power, or again as commodities themselves (cover-girls, prostitutes
of mass-media, hostesses of human relations), or even as administrators
of capital (managerial functions).” Although capitalism colludes with and
is coextensive with patriarchy, isn’t it patriarchy itself with its phallocratic
order that is the primary operating force in the subjugation of women? That
is, do you think it is possible to envision a non-patriarchal or even feminist
capitalist society?
A. Presumably patriarchy is in fact the way the system started. It’s not
so simple historically speaking. Patriarchy is clearly the basis of the Roman
theory of the law, which is the basis of our society, even if these rules
have changed. And it was clearly patriarchal. But if you consider the communities
of north Europe—Scandinavia, Germany—it was not the case, and there was not
so much patriarchy, and women are in a completely different place and have
a completely different status in these communities: they’re more important,
very important. And the rules of family, relatives, relationships with relatives,
are completely different. But that’s not relevant. Your question assumes that
women are in possession of a feminine principle and that men are inhabited
exclusively by a male way of thinking and doing. This is a prejudice. That’s
why I have no clear relationship with feminists. It seems to me after having
read Freud, and not only Freud but also feminist psychoanalytic writers, that
sex difference is not only biological difference, nor social studies difference;
it’s something else, quite mysterious, which is incorporated in each of us,
women or men, a difference which is internal, a capacity. I will give you
a simple example. Women are able to be managers in the system; they are capable
of being turned into commodities in the system, as you say. Men are too: for
example, a great baseball player is turned into a commodity, obviously—or
even a president. So, it is not the plight of women as such to be changed
into consumable commodities. Returning to the idea of writing in a general
sense and to resisting by writing, I think that there is a strong relationship,
an obscure relationship, between the ability to write in this sense
and what I could call “femininity” because there is a sort of openness to
something unknown without any project to master it, but, rather, the opposite:
to work on it. As a male, I represent this attitude as feminine. And I’m sure
it’s not a job of “composition” (if you’ll excuse me), because in composition
there is a sort of mastering, of putting things together so as to order them.
It seems to me that the opposite is the ability to be weak, a good weakness,
so-called passivity. I don’t mind this term, though I tried to propose the
term passibility. In this certain representation we can have the way
of thinking in Zen Buddhism or certain Eastern philosophies or religions:
the ability to wait for, not to look at, but to wait for—for what, precisely,
we don’t know. That’s my ideological representation of the necessary attitude
for writing. When somebody like Flaubert said, “I am Madame Bovary,”
it was not a joke; it was recognizing that he had not only to be the
character, but to be a woman in order to write. The same with Proust.
I know a lot of painters—some of them are very great artists—and I recognize
their refusal of the temptation to grasp, to master, but the opposite, their
acceptance not to know as the event they need in order to paint.
It’s an event not to know. It’s good; there’s no prejudice. That’s femininity
to me, real femininity. There’s presumably unbalanced repetition of this femininity
with masculinity in women and men, but I know women who are more male than
I am.
Q. But if that’s true, if this principle about refusing to try to grasp is a
feminine principle, if you want to call it that, perhaps feminism and capitalism
are incompatible because the capitalist way is to grasp—in very real
terms.
A. Maybe. But at the same time, capitalism as a
system has the function, and nobody says why, to optimize its performances. And
if we continue to represent the question in terms of input and output (because
performance is that: a certain rate of energy input in the system, a rate of
energy output), the question is already closed: the question is to grasp. But
if you consider the internal arrangement, the internal management of the
system, which is something very very complex, the condition for optimizing
performance is to complexify the relationship, the general enormous network
inside the system, and at that moment maybe it’s important for the system to
renounce the need to grasp and to master, to open blank fields, blank places,
empty spaces, in order to let events happen. For example, coming back to a
previous question, what is marvelous in the university is precisely that when
the university is good, it leaves open certain parts, renouncing the need to
program everything, saying, “Okay, I’ll give you three hours a week and you can
program for yourself. You have a certain idea? Go and try to invent something else;
let the unknown come and try to make it written” (as is your case). And it
seems to me that the system is less and less strong and rigid and with
complexification. It needs a certain flexibility, and this flexibility is sort
of a play between parts of the system and necessarily implies empty places in
which the connections are not already made. Finally, we continue to call
democracy “democracy” because it is precisely a political system in which the
connections must adjust day by day, perpetually working to invent something
new. I’m not claiming that democracy is a way of writing, but there is a
certain relationship between the flexibility of the two. And it seems to me
that in this sense, there is a chance for femininity.
Q. In “One Thing at Stake in Women’s Struggles,” you posit that “the philosopher,
as philosopher, is a secret accomplice of the phallocrat” because philosophy
is “the search for a constituting order that gives meaning to the world.”
Thus, when philosophers specifically consider the question of men’s
relationship to women, philosophy sends them in search of “an answers’; and,
furthermore, the answer itself is “preceded by the constitution, itself
a regulated elaboration, of this relationship.” Certainly you don’t mean to
suggest that because philosophy “is already the language of masculinity”
we should not interrogate gender. How can we escape this problematic and produce
useful inquiry about gender and gender relations?
A. Yes, I was right. No, I think that’s very
important because finally the phallocratic master is not really capital itself,
which is something more complex and perverse. The master was the philosopher in
the traditional culture of Western countries, and that’s to say, in the term I
used, is able “to answer.” I ask a question, and reason, the logos, whatever
you can imagine, is able to answer. There is something like this in the
sciences in the beginning of their history, but now scientists are more timid
and prudent in the matter of questions and answers. They are more complex in
the way questions are asked and answers can be given to questions. There’s sort
of a sense now in the sciences that there is perpetual displacement of
questions and that answering is never achieved. That’s good, and intelligent.
But in traditional philosophy this wasn’t the case. The people there have the
idea that they should build an enormous system of questioning and answering in
order to find a system of answers. This is mastering, to make language
work exclusively for answering, which is a very perverse notion of language. Or
even if they were able to answer because they were very intelligent—Plato or
Aristotle or even Spinoza—even if they gave a large space to answering a
question, the question was asked in the way it had to be answered. That is, the
general structure, the form, the start of the use of language was under the
edges of this question and its answers. That’s the reason I don’t like the term
agonistic. At the end of a lecture is the moment of Q and A. It
seems to me dangerous and ridiculous in a certain sense, though necessary.
Going back to your question, one of the reasons philosophy properly speaking is
in such extreme crisis today (I mean philosophy as a way of discourse) is
precisely the fact that certain of the so-called philosophers (maybe Rorty,
maybe Davidson, not only the so-called continental philosophers but some of the
American philosophers) are asking the question, “Is it right to reduce
thinking to a game of questioning and answering with the idea that an answer is
possible?” I remember a text by Franz Kafka in which he explains that what is
so marvelous is the fact that generally speaking a question is in fact already
an answer; it implies in it an answer. A question is not naive; it comes from
the previous answer. And what is called “the answer” is only interesting as far
as it is a question. That is a good description of what it is to write, as
Gertrude Stein has said.
Q.Solo produce useful inquiry about gender, then, one should still question
but not with the objective of necessarily producing an answer about gender
and gender relations?
A. I
think that it’s impossible. The enormous, extreme, huge importance of the
question of gender is precisely that this question has no answer, and that’s
the only way we can continue to think about it: I try to elaborate, to place
femininity and masculinity, but I already know that my answer is a bad one.
It’s certainly false. It’s immediately suspect. And that’s good; that’s the way
we have to approach this question. But this question is enormous; it’s a
paramount question for somebody who wishes not only to live and to exist but
also to think or to write. In a certain sense, you can imagine writing as precisely
like how this question of gender is posed and never answered. Maybe that’s the
best homage we can give to the gender question—to write.
Q. You claim in “One Thing at Stake in Women’s Struggles” that safeguarding
sexual difference, or even emphasizing it as some feminists attempt, is not
a useful strategy for bringing about a less sexist culture because “the ‘difference
between the sexes’ is no more exempt from masculine imperialism than its
opposite.” You suggest instead a scenario in which “another sexual space could
be substituted, a topology of erotic potentialities” in which “differences
traverse individual bodies rather than opposing a ‘woman’s’ body to ‘man’s.”’
Would you elaborate on this scenario?
A. In a
certain way, I already answered this question. The difference between sexes
isn’t the most important problem, and we can see that today with the
development of homosexual claims. I mean by this that the problem isn’t, “I’m a
male and you’re a female or the reverse,” but that we should consider that
maybe as a biological or social male I’m also a female. And what does this
mean? That’s the question. If I have to elaborate this scenario, the question
is, “What does it mean?” Is it an opposition as I suggested? Which is very
wrong in a certain sense. Does it mean that a male is aggressive and active and
a female is passive? No, I think that’s very very stupid. An interesting
question could be the importance given to the body as such by both sexes. It
seems clear, obvious, that in the sexist, phallocratic way of thinking what is
remarkable is the absence of the body as such. Philosophical discourse, for
example, but also entrepreneurial discourse, is exempted from any inference of
bodily states. It’s forbidden, it’s a shame, it’s trouble, and there’s
suspicion against people, males often, precisely when the bodily states, bodily
gestures, emotions, cries, laughter, affective expressions are present. It
seems that the relation femininity has with the body is completely different. I
remember a question my second daughter asked me (she is a philosopher): “Why is
there no female philosopher in the Western tradition? There are female writers,
artists, and so on, but not philosophers.” That’s an interesting point. It
seems to me the answer is because in philosophy there is a repression of the
bodily way of thinking. By “bodily way of thinking” I mean the old difference
between anima and animus. Anima is a way of thinking, but in
which aesthetical impressions are taken into account; and animus, the opposite,
is probably a discourse, a language, sustaining itself by itself with no
external reference to the body. There is a sort of externalization of the body
implied in philosophical discourse. But if you consider our real way of being,
the body is here not as an organism but as an addresser of phrases,
unarticulated phrases, but as an addresser. And it’s impossible not to listen
to it; it’s sometimes oppressive. It seems tome that women are more sensitive
to that. That’s their privilege.
Q. Sandra Harding and other scholars interested in feminist epistemology
have argued that since knowledge is socially situated, the traditional methods,
values, and objectives of science are biased according to class, race, and
gender. She argues that beginning scientific research from women’s experience
enables feminism “to produce empirically more accurate descriptions and theoretically
richer explanations than does conventional research.” What are your thoughts
about this “feminist standpoint theory”?
A. I have to read Sandra
Harding. I think it’s interesting; I have nothing against it. I can’t easily
imagine what she means by introducing women’s experiences into the theory of
sciences. The question becomes, “Is it starting with women’s experience by
women scholars in a scientific community, or is it starting with women’s
experiences in terms of general experience?” Returning to what we were just
talking about, it means something which is precisely the introduction into
scientific research of a certain capacity to “write” in the general sense. A
certain “passiblity,” a certain way of coming to what is unknown, a sort
of patience with the necessity to answer, rejecting the necessity to have
results immediately or as soon as possible. That’s to say, not the competitive
way. If it is in this way that she’s writing of women’s experience and feminist
standpoint theory, consider the case of Einstein, for example. The most
important part of his life was devoted to the violin, which was a feminine
experience. And the result was marvelous. I just remarked that in scientific
work we have to mentally separate the need to just answer questions and produce
cognitive commodities—which is one thing, a necessary thing—and the ability to
reform and refound new representations of a field, maybe a very small part of
one field, maybe an enormous part. This is the capacity to let ourselves say,
“But the question is not well asked; let me receive another question through
the question which was asked.” Say you, a member of my scientific community,
male or female, ask me a question, or the field is asking me a question, and
maybe this question is bad because it belongs to a certain representation of
this field. Perhaps that’s the representation to be changed, in which
case I have to wait for, not elaborate but diselaborate.
Q. Sandra Harding says in our interview with her that in her view “feminism
is a postmodernism,” while African American feminist bell hooks has
criticized postmodern thought for exclusionary strategies, despite its ostensible
commitment to difference, otherness, and the “deconstruction of ‘master narratives.”’
What is your view of the relationship of feminism to postmodern thought?
A. She said feminism is a postmodernism? She is right. I understand what she
means. The African American feminist said the opposite? Why? Because postmodernism
is an equivocal term. It can signify the exaggeration of modernism in
a sort of male aggravation of the domination of the discourse and of mastering
things; that’s what we said about the system. But at the same time, as far
as this system has to be complexified, and let open certain zones, in this
way feminism can grow inside the system as a way for the system to understand
that another way of thinking and operating is possible, and more flexible.
In this sense, postmodernism is feminist—can be feminist, in
the good sense of this term.
Q. Except for occasional references to Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, you
rarely mention the work of the French feminists in your own work. Do you not
find French feminist thought useful to your own lines of inquiry?
A. Useful, certainly. Cixous must be; it must be. In fact, I’ve known
both of them for a longtime. I admire certain books written by Hélène. And
I had a strong discussion, even dispute, with Luce at an international conference
in France at Cerisy. She gave a paper, and I was horrified. The paper was
truly feminist, but in a sense I can’t accept at all, and we had a strong
dispute—a friendly dispute, but strong. Generally speaking, I have good relations
with them as persons, but it’s true that I’ve not made real use of their works.
I don’t know why, frankly. Perhaps it was too late for me, I don’t know. I
have a stronger relationship with the work of Gertrude Stein. My question
to you could be, “Does a feminist woman or man consider Gertrude Stein to
be a feminist writer?” This seems to me a real question because in a certain
sense I consider some works written by Hélène to be very close to Gertrude
Stein’s papers or books. It seems to me that the way Gertrude is working through
the traditional phrasing of discourse, which is more or less the same way
Hdlène does, is in a certain sense, properly speaking, feminist—in the sense
that we’ve been talking about. Ifyou open the Différend (which is a
terrible book, a horrible book), there are “notices” on Kant and Levinas and
Plato and Aristotle disseminated throughout the book, and there is a notice
on Gertrude Stein—a montage of quotations and two or three questions at the
end of this very brief notice. In particular, I asked the question, “Is this
what they call feminist writing?” I think it is.
Q. In a recent interviewand in some of his publishedwritings, British
logician Stephen Toulmin says that “Lyotard and such people are really rejecting
Descartes for Cartesian reasons,” that “in the postmodern age we don’t need
to replace ‘rationality’ with ‘absurdity.”’ What is your response to this
comment?
A. Are the two sentences compatible? If I’m rejecting Descartes for Cartesian
reasons, it isn’t to replace rationality with absurdity; it’s to replace rationality
with another rationality. That’s a Cartesian reason. If it is to replace rationality
with absurdity, my reasons would not be Cartesian. That’s just his mauvaise
humeur [bad mood]. The fear of replacing rationality with some kind of
absurdity was the objection made by Habermas, for example, in the old days,
but now he’s changing because he is starting to understand what we are doing.
I consider myself a completely rational thinker. Excuse me for this horrible
flaw. I like the sciences. I try to read and open my ears to what is coming
from the sciences. And I have a way of thinking that is completely rational—too
much so. You know, I struggle against my rationality. So I insist on what
is escaping any rational discourse precisely in order to open a space for
writing, but at the same time it is because this rational discourse impresses
a weight on me that’s in fact enormous. I’m very comfortable with the opportunity
to work with scientists. I was in the biology laboratory at the Institut
Pasteur in the old days when the scientists were working on DNA. It was
beautiful. I understood the job of building a discourse of knowledge. It was
fascinating. Presumably my first orientation could have been in this direction.
Okay, that’s of no importance, but you can take this notion of absurdity in
a very different way than Toulmin is: absurdity not only as the opposite of
rationality but also as the significance of the world and life. You can take
absurdity as the nonsensical and as inconsistency in terms of cognitive discourse,
but you can also take it in terms of the lack of meaning in life—absurdity
in the sense introduced by Nietzsche, for example: the death of god. And it’s
true that we are in such a situation: god is dead and the point is how is
it possible to continue to build rational, consistent representation of the
world, human beings, and life and death without the authorization of a god,
of the witness of justice and truth. In this sense this is true, and some
of us are impressed by this modern or postmodern break in Western thought—not
really thought, history. But such absurdities are perfectly compatible with
scientific rationality, and maybe they are closely tied together, because
in a certain sense scientific rationality has to liberate from certain impossibilities
the belief that the first mathematician is god and that it’s impossible to
have something other than the regular natural numbers in the arithmetic theory
of numbers. The same with physics. At the end of the nineteenth century, some
assumptions were proposed and finally more or less assumed, and they are transgressing
the traditional notion of mathematics coming from Plato and even Descartes.
That was the condition of rationality to break with finally. At first it can
appear to be absurdity. So, we have to distinguish between absurdity and absurdity.
Q. While your work has gained the admiration of many readers across the world,
it has been criticized by some. Are there any criticisms or misunderstandings
of your work that you’d care to address at this time?
A.First, one misunderstanding is that some people take me to be a “theorist.”
I worked in several texts against this idea. I remember in the sixties when
structuralist ideology was dominant in France and elsewhere I resisted this
way of thinking. It was with a sort of pride (or arrogance) on my part to
observe that finally a book like Discours, figure—which was completely
ignored at the time because it was explicitly against structuralism, not
only in terms of linguistic structuralism but even Lacanian structuralism
because at that time the Lacanian reading of Freud was similar to Althusser
on Marxism—has gained acceptance. I was against this way of thinking, and
I am pleased that now readers have discovered this book. I was waiting thirty
years—no problem. The point is that I’m not a theorist. Please, don’t take
the notion of postmodernity as theory. I never used the term postmodernism,
only “the postmodern” or “postmodernity”—it’s not an ism. The major
misunderstanding is to transform into an ism what wasn’t at all an
ism. I hate isms because I’m not a theorist.
The second thing I have to say is that unavoidably and inevitably the
way a work is introduced into an alien country is necessarily linked with
certain mistakes, and I assume this. I have no protestation against this.
Finally,
if I’m not comfortable, I have to stay in my country, and that’s all. So
there’s a problem in the immigration of a way of thinking, and necessarily the
reception is strange. For example, here in the United States I was received as
the theoretician of postmodernity and as the postmodernist—oh, my god! For me The
Postmodern Condition is the worst
book lever wrote, but it was the only one having a certain reception. I don’t know
why; I can’t explain why. My wish is that those people who have the generosity
to give some attention to my work would please read other things than this
horrible book, because it was just a passage for me. But even so, I was obliged
to come back to this question in a second book, The Postmodern
Explained to Children, and I just
published a third book called Postmodern Moralities. I’m obliged to do this in order to maintain
or to find certain directions in the use of this word. So, I’m ready to be open
to a discussion about this question, and I don’t want to negate it. But, nevertheless,
it’s not my real question. I think that the questions you asked, particularly
at the beginning of this interview, were closer to my concerns.
