[Nettime-bold] Grass/Bourdieu: Speaking Up.

[David Hudson <dwh@snafu.de>]

In the January 3, 2000, issue of The Nation, Daniel Singer wrote:

"As the events unfolded in Seattle, a small cultural Franco-German television channel broadcast a recorded dialogue between two of Europe's most famous protesters: G�nter Grass, this year's winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, and the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who for years has used his prestige to help the expression of dissent. They criticized the extraordinary hold the ruling ideology now has, thanks to the media, on people's minds. They condemned the submission or cowardice of their fellow intellectuals. They deplored the fact that trade unionists cannot organize across frontiers even within the European Union.

[...]

And yet the protesters in Seattle and beyond have revived the forgotten belief that people can shape things through collective action. Despite the odds, they have set the agenda for the coming millennium by reminding us that there are many people on this planet ready to struggle from below against their own governments and corporations and for a different world--one in which human beings will no longer be merchandise."


Well. That was January 2000 and that was the context of the Grass/Bourdieu conversation. Which also appeared in "Die Zeit," which is where I came across it. At the time, I found the conversation interesting enough to contact the German weekly and representatives for both Bourdieu and Grass to secure permission to translate the German transcription into English for an anthology. All agreed, with Bourdieu's rep saying he'd actually prefer seeing the "Zeit" version appear over any other.

So I got to work and came up with a rough translation. And then it became clear that the anthology would not be coming together and, as these things go, never got around to polishing. So what follows is still rough, but should be shared now nonetheless.


--

Grass/Bourdieu: Speaking Up.


Pierre Bourdieu: Mr. Grass, you said somewhere that there is a European or German tradition which is also a good French tradition: speaking up. I'd like to do that here with you.

G�nther Grass: It's unusual in Germany for a sociologist and a writer to sit down together. Here, the philosophers sit in one corner, the sociologists in another, while the writers squabble in the back room. The kind of communication we have here rarely takes place. When I think of your book, _The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Societies_, or of my last book, _My Century_, I see that we do share one thing in our work: we tell stories from the bottom up. We don't glaze over society and don't speak from the position of the victor. Instead, within our fields, we are notoriously on the side of the losers.

In _The Weight of the World_, you and your collaborators were able to focus on the concept of understanding rather than on an air of superior knowledge: a view of the social conditions in France which can certainly be applied to those in other countries. As a writer, I'm tempted to use your stories as raw material. For example, the description of the Narcissus Way in which metal workers, who are often the third generation to go to the factories, are now unemployed and all but shut out of society. Or the study of the young woman who comes to Paris from the country and sorts letters on the night shift. Social problems are made clear in the descriptions of the workplace without their being shoved overtly to the foreground. I liked that.

I wish we had a book like this on social relationships in our country. The only question that arose for me might be one related to the discipline of sociology: humor doesn't appear in such books. The comedy of failure, which plays such an important role in my stories, is missing; the absurdities that arise in certain confrontations. Why is that?

Bourdieu: When you hear about such experiences directly from the people who have lived them, the effect is pretty devastating, and it's almost unthinkable to keep the necessary distance. In the end, we took out several of the stories because they were too moving.

Grass: May I interrupt? By humor, I mean that tragedy and comedy aren't mutually exclusive, that the lines between the two are blurred.

Bourdieu: What we wanted to do was to present the brutal absurdity to the reader without any sort of special effects. When it comes to human dramas, one is often tempted to write "beautifully". Instead, we tried to be as merciless as possible in order to present the violent aspects of the reality. For scientific but also literary reasons. We didn't want to become "literary" in order to be literary in a different sort of way. Of course, there were also political reasons. We felt that the violence currently being practiced by neoliberal politics was so great that theoretical analyses alone wouldn't do it justice. Critical thinking is not done on the level of the effects produced by these policies.

Grass: I should elaborate a bit on my question. Both of us -- you as a sociologist and me as a writer -- are children of the Enlightenment, a tradition which today, at least in Germany and France, is being called into question, as if the process of the European Enlightenment had failed. I don't think so. I see the failed developments in the process of the Enlightenment, for example, the reduction of reason to what is purely technically feasible. Many aspects which existed in the beginning, and here I'm thinking just of Montaigne, have been lost over the centuries. Among them, humor. Voltaire's _Candide_ or Diderot's _Jacques le Fataliste_, for example, are books in which the conditions of the age are also hideous, and yet the human capability to also present a comic, and in this sense, a victorious figure, even in pain and failure, perseveres.

Bourdieu: But this feeling that we are losing our grip on the tradition of the Enlightenment is related to a reversal of the entire world view which is enforced by the currently predominant neoliberal view of things. The neoliberal revolution, and here in Germany, I can attempt such a comparison, is actually a deeply conservative revolution -- in the sense that one spoke of a conservative revolution in the 30s in Germany. Such a revolution is an extremely rare event. It recasts the past in its own light and at the same time presents itself as progressive so that those who fight the return to the old ways are perceived themselves as yesterday's news. Both of us are constantly facing this; we're always being treated as eternally behind the times. In France, one is an "old iron".

Grass: Dinosaurs...

Bourdieu: Exactly. There it is, the great power of conservative revolutions, "progressive" restorations. Even your argument could be laid out that way. They say we have no sense of humor. But the times aren't funny! There's nothing to laugh at.

Grass: I wasn't saying that we're living in hilarious times. Laughter in the dark which can be released by literary means is also a protest against the conditions. What's being sold these days as neoliberalism is a return to the methods of the Manchester liberalism of the 19th century. Even in the 70s, there was a relatively successful attempt throughout Europe to civilize capitalism. If I assume that both socialism and capitalism are ingenious wayward children of the Enlightenment, their relationship nevertheless betrayed a certain function to control one another. Even capitalism was expected to bear certain responsibilities. In Germany, we called it the social market economy, and even in the conservative party, there was an understanding that conditions such as those in the Weimar Republic were never to be allowed to return. This consensus was broken down in the 80s. Ever since the breakdown of the communist hierarchies, capitalism has felt it could go wild, out of control. !
There is no opposite force anymore. Today, even the few responsible capitalists are issuing warnings because they see that their instruments are out of control, that neoliberalism is repeating the mistakes of communism in that it is issuing articles of faith that claim infallibility.

Bourdieu: But the power of neoliberalism is so overwhelming that it's being implemented by people who call themselves socialists. Whether it's Schr�der, Blair or Jospin, these are people who practice neoliberal politics in the name of socialism. That makes analyses and criticism extraordinarily difficult because everything's so mixed up.

Grass: A capitulation to the economy.

Bourdieu: At the same time, it's extremely difficult to develop a critical position to the left of these social democratic governments. In France, there were the great strikes of 1995 which mobilized large numbers of workers, employees and intellectuals. Then came the unemployment movement, the great European march of the unemployed, the movement of immigrants who had no rights to stay -- a sort of permanent agitation that swept the social democrats to power where they at least acted as if they were carrying on a socialist discourse. But on a practical level, this critical movement is very weak, in large part because it remains captive within national borders. An effective position left of the social democratic governments must be made viable on an international level. That's why I ask myself: What can we, the intellectuals, do for such a movement for a "social Europe"? The power of those in control is not just an economic one, but an intellectual, a spiritual one. That's why !
it's so important to "speak up," to recreate a collective utopia: because among the capabilities of neoliberal governments is the ability to kill utopias, to allow utopias to appear pass�.

Grass: The socialistic or social democratic parties have themselves in part believed in the thesis that with the demise of communism, socialism has disappeared from the world as well and have lost their faith in the workers movement which has existed far longer than communism. If you part with your own tradition, you give yourself up. In Germany, there were definitely minor attempts at organizing the workers. For years, I've tried to tell the unions: You can't just see to the workers as long as they're working; as soon as they're shut out, they fall into the bottomless pit. You have to found a pan-European union for the unemployed. We complain that the unification of Europe is only transpiring on an economic level, but what's missing are the attempts on the part of the unions to break out of the national framework into a form of organization and action that transcends the borders. We have to stand up to global neoliberalism. But in the meantime, many intellectuals swallow ever!
ything down. And all you get from swallowing is indigestion, nothing more. You have to speak out. That's why I doubt that intellectuals alone can be counted on. While "the intellectuals" are still constantly spoken of in France -- at least that's the way it seems to me -- my German experience tells me that it's a misunderstanding to believe that being an intellectual means being on the left. The history of the 20th century, all the way to National Socialism, proves just the opposite: a man like Goebbels was an intellectual. For me, to be an intellectual is not a guarantee of quality. Your book, in fact, _The Weight of the World_, shows that people who come from the world of work who have organized themselves socially have far more experience in the social area than intellectuals. Today, they're either unemployed or retired and no one seems to need them anymore. Their strengths go completely unused.

Bourdieu: _The Weight of the World_ is an attempt to carry over to intellectuals a very modest yet at the same time very useful function. The public writer, as I know them from the countries in northern Africa, is someone who makes applies his writing abilities to the services of others so that they can record the things they know about. Here, sociologists are in a very particular position; they are people who can usually -- not always -- listen, who can decipher what people tell them, translate it and deliver it. That may be a little guild-like, but I think it's important that intellectuals take part in this work.

Grass: At the same time, you would have to appeal to the intellectuals given to neoliberalism. There are people among them who are beginning to doubt whether the utterly unchecked circulation of money around the globe, whether the mania that has broken out within capitalism ought to be countered. For example, mergers without meaning or purpose resulting in five or ten thousand people are put out of work. The maximizing of profits alone is reflected in the stock exchanges.

Bourdieu: Unfortunately, it's not merely a matter of countering the predominant mindset. In order to see any sort of success, one must encourage critical discourse to make it public. Right now we're talking with each other in order to try to break out of the small circle of intellectuals. I'd like to break through the wall of silence a bit -- precisely because it's not merely a wall of money. There's a contradiction in television: it's an instrument that allows us to speak here and at the same time silences the likes of us. We're stormed and overpowered by the predominant mindset, and we leave nothing behind. The great majority of journalists are often unwitting accomplices to the predominant discourse, the unanimity of which is almost impossible to break. It's very difficult in France -- with the exception of a few well-respected personalities -- to step out before the public. But unfortunately, many highly placed people are going silent and there are only a few who put symbo!
lic capital to use to speak -- even to those who can't find the words themselves.

Grass: Television, like all grand institutions, of course, has come up with its own superstitions: the ratings, whose dictates are honored. That's why conversations like the one we're having now rarely appear in the major programs, but rather, on Arte. I never take part in talk shows. I think the form is hopeless because it doesn't communicate anything. In all this blather, the one who comes out on top is the one who talks the longest or most stridently ignores his conversation partner. Further, as a rule, very little ever comes out of it because just when things might get interesting, when things are coming to a head, the moderator breaks it off. Both of us come from the tradition that reaches back to the Middle Ages, to the dispute. Two people, two different opinions, two sets of experiences that complement each other. Then, if we put some effort into it, something can come of it. Perhaps that would be a recommendation to this Moloch television, to reach back to the proven f!
orm of dialogue, focusing on a theme, as in a dispute.

Bourdieu: Unfortunately, a certain set of circumstances would have to come together in order for producers of the discourse, writers, artists, researchers to be able to once again appropriate their means of production. I'm very consciously putting the terms of the somewhat old-fashioned terms of Marxism to use here. It's a paradox that people of the word have no control of the means of production and distribution these days; they have to pull back into niches, find alternative routes.

Grass: Just so we don't fall into the realm of complaint: we've always been in the minority, and the amazing thing is that when you look at the process of history, you can see just how much effect a minority can have. Of course, tactics have to be developed in order to be heard. I see myself, for example, as a citizen, forced to break a fundamental rule for a writer: "Don't repeat yourself!" In politics, you have to repeat a proven thesis almost like a parrot, which is exhausting because you're constantly hearing the echo of your own voice. But this is evidently a part of it if you're going to find any listeners at all such a loud world.

Bourdieu: What I admire about your work is your search for means of expression that will allow a critical, subversive message to reach a large audience. Nevertheless, I think that circumstances today are quite different from those in the century of the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia was a weapon, a means of communication to be used against obscurantism. We have to fight these days against completely new forms of obscurantism.

Grass: But still as a minority.

Bourdieu: Only the opposition back then was far weaker. Today, we're dealing with powerful media-multis, and there is no safe island left. For publishers, for example, publication is becoming more and more difficult and critical books are more and more of a problem. And as important as I may find my conversation with you, it's with the idea in mind of coming up with a message and communicating it. Instead of being a tool of television, we have to make television a tool of understanding in the service of that which we want to say.

Grass: The playing room is limited. And there's something else I have to wonder about myself: I never thought that the day would come when I would have to demand more state. We always had way too much state in Germany, particularly the state of order. But now we're heading off toward the other extreme. Without aiming to have anything to do with ideology, neoliberalism has taken on the wishes of anarchy to do away with the state, to shove it off to the side. Get rid of it, we'll handle it. If a necessary reform takes place at all these days, whether it be in Germany or in France, nothing happens until industry, the economy approves. Anarchists could only dream of such disempowerment of the state, and so, I find myself -- and you probably do as well -- in the curious position of ensuring that the state takes on its responsibilities again, regulates again.

Bourdieu: It's exactly this reversal of situations that I'm talking about. But is it enough for us to demand "more" state? In order not to fall into the trap of the conservative revolution, one has to think about inventing a different sort of state.

Grass: Just so we don't misunderstand each other: neoliberalism naturally only wants to do away with that interest it economically. The state will be allowed to go on policing, representing the state of order. But if the powers of order are taken away from the state, the powers that have to do with the layers of society -- not just the social cases, children and old people who have been shut out of work or are still in -- if an economy spreads that shies away from every responsibility as it rushes toward some sort of globalism, then society has to find a way to take care of them above and beyond the state. Irresponsibility is the determining principle of the neoliberal system.

Bourdieu: In _My Century_, you call up a series of events, for example, the story of the small boy who is brought along to the talk by Liebknecht and then pees on his father's neck. I don't know if this is a personal memory, but regardless, it's a completely unique way of discovering socialism. Or what you said about J�nger and Remarque: there are several things between the lines about the role of intellectuals who make themselves accomplices to tragic events. I also like what you had to say about Heidegger, about whose rhetoric I wrote a very critical book.

Grass: That, for example, is something that amuses me: the fascination expressed by French intellectuals for J�nger and Heidegger because all the clich�s Germany and France hold for one another are turned on their heads. That all the smokiness which led to such terrible events in Germany is admired in France is absurd.

Bourdieu: It was because I separated myself from the Heideggerian mysticism and fought against it on the deepest level that I was pretty ostracized. It's not too comfortable being a Frenchman formed by the Enlightenment in a country that throws itself at the mercy of such obscurantism... A president of the French Republic awarded J�nger a medal; that was a horrible event.

Grass: This story about Liebknecht. What was important to me was that, on the one hand, Karl Liebknecht agitated the young -- a progressive movement moves forward in the name of socialism -- and at the same time, the father, in all his excitement, doesn't notice that the boy wants down from his shoulders. When the son pees on him, the father beats him. This authoritative behavior leads the son to volunteer when the First World War breaks out, and so, ends up doing precisely what Liebknecht was warning against. And concerning J�nger and Heidegger: it might be more useful for French intellectuals to pay more attention to the Germans of the Enlightenment. There was not only Diderot and Voltaire, but also Lessing; there was Lichtenberg -- a very funny man of the Enlightenment, by the way, whose statements would likely be more appreciated by the French than by J�nger.

Bourdieu: Ernst Cassirer, as a great inheritor of the Enlightenment, was only moderately successful, while his opponent, Heidegger, aroused tremendous interest. One often has the terrible impression that, like some fraud of history, the French take on the bad things from Germany, and vice versa, the Germans from the French.

Grass: In _My Century_, I depict a professor who, during his Wednesday seminar, thinks about what he would have done as a student in 1966/67/68. Back then, he came out of the Heideggerian philosophy of the sublime, and he ends up there again. In between, he's given to radical swerves and becomes one of those people who publicly tear into Adorno. That's a very typical biography for this period. I was right in the middle of the events of the 60s. The student protests were necessary and had more effect than the spokespeople of pseudo-revolution of the generation of 68 would liked to have admitted. The revolution didn't happen -- there was no basis for it -- but society changed. In _From the Diary of a Snail_, I describe how the students yelled out when I said: Progress is a snail. Verbally, of course, you can make the great leap -- they were of the Maoist school -- but the original phase, namely, the society it's about, is not in a hurry. You wonder when things snap back and you !
call it counter-revolution, all in the full-blown vocabulary of a communism that even then was teetering. But there was little understanding.

Bourdieu: I published a book in 1964, _The Inheritors_, in which I describe the varying positions of students from petite bourgeois and those from bourgeois backgrounds. Political radicalism was far more visible in those students from bourgeois backgrounds, while students from petite bourgeois or workers backgrounds were more conservative and given to reform.

Grass: Usually it was sons from good houses, as I called them somewhat provocatively, who had never dared to carry out their conflicts with their fathers out of fear that their money would be cut off that transferred the conflict to society.

Bourdieu: In 1968 there was an ostentatious, above all, symbolic, artistic revolution -- very radical if you were to go on appearances. On the other hand, there were people who introduced measured proposals to change the education system, the entrance requirements for the high schools. In those days, they were held in contempt as reformists, and therefore, laughable by the same people who are conservatives today.

Grass: In the 70s, in Germany and the Scandinavian countries, there arose a consciousness of the idea that if the economy were allowed to go on exploiting natural resources, the environment would be destroyed. The ecological movement came about. But the socialist and social democratic parties concentrated solely on the old social questions and shut out ecology or viewed it as something oppositional, and this still goes on to a certain degree. If we expect the neoliberal side to realize its intellectual potential in order to come back to its senses, then the same thing has to be said about the left side. It has to be recognized at last that ecology cannot be separated from the theme of work. All decisions have to pass the test: are they ecologically acceptable?

Bourdieu: All these pseudo-terms such as social liberalism, Blairism are mystifications of the ruling power over the ruled. Europeans are fundamentally ashamed of their civilization and don't dare to do anything more. This is beginning quite obviously with the economy, but more and more, it's reaching into cultural areas; they're ashamed of their cultural tradition. In a way, the Europeans are living in a state of sin which is being perceived and judged as a defense of backward traditions -- in the fields of the cinema, in literature and so on.

Grass: In our country, those aligned with Schr�der see themselves as modernizers and the others are dismissed as traditionalists which is a hilarious misnomer. The neoliberals snicker when social democrats and socialists in Germany and in other countries are confined to such meaningless definitions.

Bourdieu: To pick up on the problem of culture: I was truly glad to see that you were awarded the Nobel Prize because it honors a magnificent European writer who "speaks up" and defends a certain type of art that many perceive as having had its day. The campaign against your novel _Ein weites Feld_ was carried out under the pretense that it was literarily behind its time. In the same way, the same twisted logic is currently being applied more and more to the formalistic accomplishments of the avant garde in that they are being cast as old-fashioned. In France, there is a full-blown debate on contemporary art which is actually about the autonomy of art versus the economy.

Grass: About the Nobel Prize: I could live quite well without it, and I hope I'll be able to live well with it. Some said, "Finally!" or "Too late!", but I'm glad to have received it in my advanced age, well beyond 70. When a young author receives the Nobel Prize, I can imagine that it's quite a load to carry because the expectations are going to be so high. Today, I can deal with it ironically and still be happy about it. But that should be that as far as that theme goes.

I think we should be making offers which cannot be ignored. The large television production companies are also at a loss in their misguided faith in ratings. One has to help them out. The same goes for the relationship between neighboring France and Germany who have fought each other to the point of near extinction, whose wounds are still palpable and who are making every rhetorical attempt at reconciliation. And suddenly, one realizes: It's not just the language barrier; there are other dimensions in between which are not being perceived. I referred to this earlier, that we're not even able to recognize a shared history of European Enlightenment. This was better in times when nation states weren't as dominant. The French recognized what happened in Germany, and vice versa; there was a correspondence between both groups which in those days fought as minorities and managed to see through the process of the Enlightenment despite censorship.

It's time to reestablish that relationship because we have nothing else in hand besides the experiences of the process of European Enlightenment -- including the developments that failed. We are right to decry the dominance neoliberalism has attained in the meantime and the areas it rules over irresponsibly. But we should also consider: What did we get wrong in the process of European Enlightenment? Somehow, capitalism and socialism, as children of the Enlightenment, need to come together at a single table again.

Bourdieu: You may be a bit optimistic here. I think the economic and political powers of neoliberalism weigh so heavily on Europe that the accomplishments of the Enlightenment are truly in danger. The French historian Daniel Roche is currently writing a book in which he shows that the tradition of the Enlightenment in France and Germany had very different meanings. What was meant by "Aufkl�rung" was quite different from what the French meant by "lumi�res". These differences have to be overcome if one wants to avoid the destruction of all that we associate with the Enlightenment -- the progress of science, technology and the taming of this progress. The invention of a new utopianism is needed, one that exercises social powers. Because of the danger that this will be perceived as a regression to old political thought, new social movements must be brought to life. In their current form, the unions are no longer contemporary. They have to change, redefine themselves, go internatio!
nal, rationalize; they also have to challenge the social sciences to do well what they should.

Grass: That means a fundamental reform of the union movement, and we know how difficult it is to get this apparatus moving.

Bourdieu: Yes, but we can certainly take on a role here. For example, the social movement in the last few years has been far more successful than it had been for years for historical reasons. The traditions of the French workers movements were always very much of the roll-up-your-sleeves tradition, often hostile to intellectuals, at least in part. Today, in times of crisis, the workers movement is much more open and capable of listening to our objections. The movement is more thoughtful and takes on more and more new forms of criticism. These critical, reflexive social movements are, in my opinion, the future.

Grass: I see that somewhat more skeptically. We're both at an age in which we can be counted on to speak up as long as we remain healthy, but the time frame is coming to an end. I don't know what it's like in France -- I assume not much better -- but I see very little preparedness and very little interest in the younger generation in the field of literature to carry on this tradition, which is part of the Enlightenment, namely, to speak up, to get involved. If nothing appears in this area and relieves us, this part of a good European tradition will also be lost.


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