English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
The capitalism of seduction and Clouscard's youth 0:00 The crisis of 1929 led to war and its horrors. Since the Marshall Plan, capitalism has been using another weapon, the weapon of seduction.
0:31 Michel Clouscard analyzes this capitalism of seduction and sums it up in the formula "Everything's allowed, but nothing is possible."
1:01 Coming out of the Second World War, Michel Clouscard, then 17 years old, felt a profound distress at the disarming of the Resistance fighters. This painful event would mark the whole of his work. For nearly 50 years, he would study the transformations that capitalism imposes on society. He would be one of the most perceptive analysts of his time. This is the society we live in, this is capitalism. They offer you... You can go everywhere, you can go to the Seychelles, you can have a huge, polluting, tall 4x4.
1:40 You can. But afterward, it's going to be complicated to get it. You'll have to slave away, submit, you'll have to accept all our norms. Born in 1928 in Montdragon, near Gaillac, Michel Clouscard came from a modest family. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a miner in Carmaux. A sports enthusiast, Michel Clouscard excelled in the 200 meters.
2:11 He was even pre-selected for the 1948 Olympic Games. He would devote his first book to a sociology of sport, in which the athlete becomes the figure opposed to the narcissist of liberal society, which offers only a body turned in on itself. Our first discussion on this, I remember, was about the Tour de France. And I was surprised, myself, coming from a background in the small colonial expatriate world, in my mental image, what could be more vulgar, really, than the connotations of the Tour de France, the advertising, the crowd, the vulgarity.
Sport as recognition of labor 2:50 And then Michel Clouscard tells me, from a statistical point of view already, that the Tour de France—it has been measured—represents the most colossal physical effort given in sports, even more than the marathon. And there was the challenge of making me realize a determination that I mastered in the abstract, but that I was far from applying to myself, let alone making sociological use of it. Namely that if sport meets with such fervor—I think there's no other word—when I try to remember the other sense in which he spoke of it, in the working classes, it's precisely because it's at the level of the muscular effort it represents that work regains recognition.
3:26 and for once, in a sublimated form, applauded and recognized, that part of his existence which is always denied, marginalized, even branded with indignation. So is it a failed act? Or is it, in some sense, a well-achieved failed act? He gave up his athletic career when, wanting to work on the finish of the hundred meters, right after the war, he said, I wanted to lean forward a little to gain a few tenths of a second on the last meter, I sprawled full length, the whole pack passed in front of me, and so I gave up sport, I did philosophy.
From philosophy studies to the thesis L'Être et le code 4:01 He thus left Gaillac and went to Toulouse to study philosophy. For him, Toulouse was already the big city; he didn't imagine it would only be a stopover before Paris. A brilliant student, he was pushed to continue his studies at the University of Nanterre. He accepted a position as a supervisor at the Lycée Jacques-Decour, which allowed him to support himself and gave him time to write his thesis, Being and the Code. Under the supervision of Henri Lefebvre, he worked relentlessly, for the subject was immense.
4:36 He attempted to analyze the history of social relations through the lens of relations of production under the Ancien Régime. He would defend his thesis in 1972, before a jury that included Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who praised the immense effort the subject required. This foundational work gave him the keys to immediately understand the stakes of May '68. Indeed, as early as 1973, in a book entitled Neofascism and the Ideology of Desire, he denounced the collusion between the proponents of unrestrained enjoyment and the proponents of liberal economics.
The Marshall Plan against communism 5:12 He traces this new political and social order back to the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan is no longer today a project... In 1947, the President of the United States, Truman, signed a program aimed at rebuilding the European economy. This aid plan of several billion dollars was made up four-fifths of grants. But the conditions attached were immense. Among other things, they obliged the French state, through the Blum-Byrnes agreements, to open its market to American film productions.
5:44 One could say that in devastated postwar Europe, the situation was, to say the least, troubled. Peace had returned, but social peace risked being threatened. And the aim of the Americans was both to try to improve the economic situation in Europe in order to prevent social demands from increasing. The workers, let's not forget, were represented by a very powerful Communist Party. In the aftermath of the war, part of the working class was armed—these were the Francs-tireurs et partisans. They had not been disarmed. The bourgeoisie kept a low profile because it had collaborated during the war.
6:17 So social peace had to be maintained or restored. And the only means was an economic one. And it's from there that, thanks to American aid, there began a period that a French economist, François Perroux, would call the Trente Glorieuses [Thirty Glorious Years], characterized, let's say, by a general rise in the standard of living of all social classes and a certain reduction in inequalities, notably also thanks to reforms concerning social security, which favored, let's say, the well-being of the working classes.
6:48 So that's the economic side. Of course, none of this was disinterested. On the one hand, it was necessary to maintain and increase the influence of the United States in Europe. They were officially the liberators. But on the cultural level, it meant getting the ideology made in the USA to penetrate en masse, through new modes of consumption, through music, and above all through cinema, which would play a major role in steeping people's minds in the American way of life.
7:18 Why the Marshall Plan? So as not to end up with communism. Because if we go back to the capitalism of the good old days before the war, with poverty and so on, I mean, already the communists are at 27%, 48% in France, almost 30% in Italy. Then we're cooked. So we absolutely have to give a bit of slack, and well, we can't quite recreate the Zola-style worker, so give a little slack, and there you go. And that happened in all the countries concerned. And in France it took on a particular dimension in that it combined with the CNR [National Council of the Resistance], which owed nothing to NATO strategy, and which thus asserted a management that was both democratic and centralized, which was supposed—as an alternative that the CNR set up against those in power.
7:58 You have to understand that the program of the National Council of the Resistance wasn't simply about putting an end to the war, it wasn't simply "never again war"; it was, to borrow Jaurès's words, never again capitalism, which carries war within it as a cloud carries a storm. That's what Clouscard truly felt, that "never again" side. And it so happened that the rot was starting again—the rot of slavery, of colonialism, of fascism, because it was indeed capitalism that fomented fascism to get out of trouble—all of that could start up again as if by miracle; all it took was to rot people's minds, to rot people, and that's the Marshall Plan.
State monopoly capitalism and the intellectual petty bourgeoisie 8:32 The Marshall Plan would set in motion major transformations in the recipient countries. The middle classes would fully benefit from it; they would symbolize the shift from an economy still marked by subsistence and scarcity to an economy of abundance. In opposition to the traditional bourgeoisie, they would slowly impose their culture and their worldview. From then on the codes were changing, but '68 would reveal this. This Marshall Plan, grafted onto a centralized state, made France enter fully into what has been observed elsewhere, into what economists have called state monopoly capitalism.
9:09 But France enters into it truly massively. This state monopoly capitalism, this kind of culmination, allows for maximal organization of production, of consumption, of morals, of space. France would experience what is called a long-term period of expansion, of growth. And this long-term period of growth went hand in hand with the modernization of the economy, reflected in the concentration of businesses, scientific and technical development, and, sociologically, the rise of a new social class made up of engineers, executives, teachers, researchers, technicians, whom I describe—they would be called the new middle classes.
9:51 I call it the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, because its capital, ultimately, is intellect, is its diplomas. And this class would take on, not only numerically, in percentage terms, an increasingly important role in the development of French society, but also on the ideological and cultural level. That is to say, one couldn't understand, for example, the success of the New Wave films if one didn't see them as the artistic expression of the worldview of these new, very modernist middle strata, very much in rupture with traditional bourgeois morality. State monopoly capitalism creates both the product and the customer.
10:26 It even creates new middle classes that will serve as both the advertisement and the consumers themselves. Power was held by a coalition of the business bourgeoisie, but one that traditionally relied on the old petty bourgeoisie—small shopkeepers, small artisans, small farmers, traditional liberal professions—very reactionary, with an authoritarian, centralized, technocratic government, personal power, General de Gaulle. And of course, politically, this new class could not express itself on the official stage.
10:59 And the result is that it would radicalize as its frustrations grew. It would move to the left. And the most excited among them, represented by their theorists, their leaders, would found various far-left parties, splinter groups—Trotskyists, Maoists, neo-anarchists—among whom Cohn-Bendit would be one of the best-known representatives. And not only would they attack the government, but the most radical would attack the very regime of the Fifth Republic, which they wanted to put an end to.
11:32 And the most radical still would attack capitalism itself. So that would be the revolution of May '68. But that was on the level of words, slogans, speeches. One must still know that in a normal, normalized capitalist country, this rising class of engineers, executives, technicians, teachers, researchers—of "grey matter," as it would later be called—is not meant to make revolution, but to assist the bourgeoisie in its domination, as an intermediate class, a median class, a mediating class, between those who direct and those who execute.
12:05 That's why we say that the neo-petty bourgeois were assigned to tasks of mediation, that is, of conception, organization, control, indoctrination, training, etc. To ratify this situation, an alliance was needed. A general alliance, what Gramsci calls a historic bloc, that is, in this case, the alliance of the propertied classes and the middle classes. Now, in revolutionary situations, it's the opposite that occurs—it's the alliance of the popular classes with the middle strata. Here, in this case, the propertied classes put the middle strata in their pocket by truly creating new middle classes.
12:41 I say middle strata deliberately, because it's quite clear that within the capitalist mode of production, with all the social hierarchical differences one can find—and you see this in Marx's Class Struggles in France, you have roughly 14 social groups—contrary to what the opponents of Marxism would have you believe, it is not a binary logic. But simply, the very logic of capitalism is structured around those who hold the major means of production and exchange, capital, and those who offer their labor power. To counter this dual logic inherent to the capitalist mode of production itself, tons of buffer strata are obviously needed.
13:18 Let's not necessarily call them classes—they're not necessarily classes, they don't experience themselves that way, they're not necessarily conscious of it—but they are middle strata. And state monopoly capitalism, created thanks to the Marshall Plan, had the knack of considerably increasing the number of people who felt themselves to be middle-class, and this via generalized wage labor. These are people who were made to love their chains, literally. The strike order was maintained by the four major union federations. The largest strike in the history of France took place during May '68.
The two May 68s and the testimony about Pompidou 13:51 It numbered close to 9 million strikers. And yet, today, only the struggles led by the student movements seem to hold our attention. Clouscard hypothesized that precisely the societal, liberal aspect of '68 had served as a counter-revolutionary dam against a process that was becoming fatal for capitalism. In '68 they were afraid, because there was France, but it wasn't just France.
14:24 In '68, there was Italy, there were most of the countries of Europe, there was the United States. They said, alright, that's it, they got what they wanted during the Trente Glorieuses. Now we take back control, we break them, we say they're useless. We'll put a bunch of them out of work, that'll scare the others. And that's what happened. May '68 is a play, a play performed by three actors, each playing his role.
14:56 De Gaulle, the authoritarian father, Pompidou, the good-natured, liberal uncle, Cohn-Bendit, the enfant terrible. Michel Clouscard sees in May '68 a palace revolution, a second, symbolic Marshall Plan that would bring about the alliance of the liberal and the libertarian in order to push the representatives of the old bourgeoisie off the stage. The middle strata finally get to join the banquet of power. I had the good fortune, or at least the opportunity, to have lunch one day with the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, thanks to a professor of political science—I had studied at Sciences Po—he was a man of the right, also a professor at the Collège de France, in social history.
15:42 And I was his designated opponent in what at Sciences Po are called "conférences de méthode"—that's where you learn to talk about anything at all, but with a well-structured two-part outline. Georges Pompidou was one of his best friends because the two of them had studied together for the entrance exam to the École Normale Supérieure—they had both attended the École Normale. So they saw President Pompidou regularly, and one day, this was in 1972, Louis Chevalier said to me, would you be interested in meeting President Pompidou, because your analyses of the class nature of the '68 movement would greatly interest the President of the Republic, you'd see there would be certain points of convergence—I said, why not.
16:18 And besides, what interested me wasn't eating with Pompidou, it was seeing a bit how these political leaders thought about May '68, off the record, so to speak. So it happened off the record—indeed it wasn't recorded—in a Left Bank restaurant near the Pont Royal where Pompidou had his habits, with Louis Chevalier and a few others. The bodyguards were downstairs, we were in a little room, a lounge, a very chic and expensive restaurant—well, it was all paid for with taxpayers' money, of course, all those feasts. And Pompidou, a few minutes after discussing Godard's latest film at the time, moves on to: so it seems, Monsieur Garnier, you have an interesting analysis which, though Marxist, coincides fairly closely with, apparently, according to Louis Chevalier, the view we hold of May '68.
17:04 So I said, well yes, I suspect you're not a Marxist, Mr. President, given that you're a former chief representative of the Rothschild bank, but here's what I think of May '68, let me sum it up in a couple of words. And at the end of my summary, precisely on the irresistible rise of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, he says to me, well, would you believe it, that's the very analysis we were making, Monsieur Edgar Faure and Monsieur Maurice Grimaud among others, when decisions had to be made about whether or not to have the army clear out the Sorbonne. Because General de Gaulle, who was old-school France after all, let's admit it—this is Pompidou speaking, not me—had found a way to go off to Baden-Baden—they hadn't been informed—he took refuge there with his wife and part of his family, to go see General Massu to get the students evicted from the Sorbonne.
17:48 And we still explained to the General that this really wasn't a realistic solution, that all these agitated, excited people waving banners with hammers and sickles and portraits of Che, Lenin and Marx in that courtyard, they are the future elite of our country. So you don't shoot at your own elite. When Clouscard talks about '68, one must distinguish clearly between the two '68s—there's the workers' '68, I won't go back over it, the great advances of the Grenelle agreements, the very substantial increase in the minimum wage, union rights in companies multiplied—that's not at all what's being criticized, on the contrary, these are gains that are celebrated.
Libertarian liberalism and the evacuation of the social 18:24 I'm talking about the '68 that won out in people's minds and, if I may say, in their souls, because of the dominant power—that is, the liberal, libertarian '68, precisely. First called libertarian in order to conceal being liberal—as he himself told me, I'm not speaking behind his back—libertarian in '68 and liberal in '98. An association of terms thought to be opposites; so Clouscard had seen the profound unity as early as '68, precisely. These new middle strata believed that the party was only just beginning, and there they were, immediately plunged back into crisis, a crisis inherent to the capitalist mode of production.
18:57 They believed they had made their revolution, this middle-strata equivalent of Bastille Day that was May '68. Fundamentally, it was the forces of reaction that won out after '68, since—if we're drawing an unflinching balance sheet—after '68, the two forces that decline in France are Gaullism and Communism, that is, the forces of the Resistance. When Cohn-Bendit says "Gaullo-communism is finished, I'm a liberal-libertarian," he's paying, in a way, an indirect tribute to Clouscard, since it was Clouscard who coined the concept of liberal-libertarianism in '72; it's from May '68 onward that there would be a true Reconquista.
19:33 Reconquista of the social gains of the Popular Front and the Resistance. This counter-revolutionary side, which he is to this day still the only one to have shown in a developed and theoretical way—how does it manifest itself in sociological terms? First, through the progressive, indeed almost total, replacement of the social by the societal. It's obvious that replacing the two classes by setting women against men, the young against the old, Hutus against Tutsis, Corsicans against the French, is far more profitable for capital.
20:06 So Clouscard says very clearly that this tends to import civil war among the poor. What has been called the revolution of May '68 was, above all, a revolution one might call cultural—not in the Maoist sense of the term, but let's say it concerned lifestyle, values in private life, individual fulfillment, and so on. Collective emancipation, the fate of the workers, were clearly relegated to the background. To be convinced of this, one need only read the texts and writings of the theoretical spokespeople of this revolution, foremost among whom one can of course cite the inevitable Michel Foucault or the no less inevitable Gilles Deleuze.
Vincennes and the gurus: Althusser, Lévi-Strauss 20:42 But this revolution did indeed prove one thing, without a doubt: that this intellectual petty bourgeoisie was not progressive, insofar as its goal was not, in fact, to be done with capitalism, but to be done with a society it considered archaic, blocked, traditionalist, padlocked, locked down—I'm borrowing terms often used by Cohn-Bendit—and the proof of this is that, when the University of Vincennes was created, in the woods of the same name, it would be at the initiative, on the one hand, of a number of government officials, including Jacques Chaban-Delmas, the Prime Minister at the time, and the Minister of Education, Monsieur Edgar Faure.
21:27 But as interlocutors, they did have some brilliant representatives, I dare say, of the '68 movement, namely, among others, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, a few Communists—and Georges Pompidou, during the meal I mentioned earlier, told me the following. He said, it's very simple, we said to ourselves, all these people, these famous agitators—well, if we give them lecture halls, if we give them amphitheaters, they'll make their revolution in a closed vessel, and meanwhile, we'll have peace in the streets.
22:02 I myself became a teacher starting in 1976, and by then it was really the end of official contestation, and everything had returned to order. The former protesters had become mandarins, their students were groupies before their gurus, and all in all, things went quite smoothly, there wasn't much unrest. So one could say that Paris VIII was, in the end, both the apotheosis and the end, intellectually, of the contestation. Working within the philosophical lineage of Rousseau, Hegel and Marx, Michel Clouscard would wage a quarrel against the thought-leaders of '68—Althusser, Sartre, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss—intellectuals who, for Michel Clouscard, had in common that they relegated economic and historical determinations to the background.
22:47 They embody the treason of the intellectuals, abandoning social questions and collective stakes in favor of the societal concerns dear to the middle strata. To take a few very localized examples. Let's take Althusser, for instance, let's take the way Althusser brings in economic determination. It's not nothing, after all—when one claims to follow Marx, that's fine—with Althusser, he never brings it in in concreto. And at the same time, always—let me explain—he says, of course it's the essential determination, the one that—I'm a Marxist, more Marxist than me, you die trying—and the economy is always there as a determination, but—this is his phrase, he didn't coin it himself but he uses it in such a way—"in the last instance"; Althusser uses this in such a way that, in the end, one ends up with a Marxist theory that never talks about economics: as soon as one talks about a particular, concrete case, about aesthetics, about art, there's no more question of economics—it's always "in the last instance"; it's only a matter of economics when one is actually talking about economics—never will he say, look, here is the economic determination that explains the shift from serial music to post-serial music; you never find that—I'm exaggerating a bit on purpose.
23:49 And giving credit where credit is due, there's Lévi-Strauss. Now Lévi-Strauss is someone serious, not at all a fraud, to use Clouscard's word, with his accent—there's an epistemic rigor, and a formalization that has proven itself and that is effective, provided one doesn't talk about our own societies—it's like Boas, far be it from me to make him out to be some kind of guru—but it holds, as Lévi-Strauss himself says with a little wordplay of his own, only for societies without history. In the double sense: societies that exist before history, and at the same time, societies without palaver, without globalized conflicts.
24:21 This Kantianism without a transcendental subject, which Lévi-Strauss quite explicitly claims as his own, has precisely the advantage, unlike Kant—and this is where there is a betrayal of the best of Kantianism in neo-Kantianism—of ridding us precisely of history. This struggle, against the current of the dominant ideology, would earn Michel Clouscard being kept at a distance both from the media and from academic circles. His work would long remain unrecognized or ignored.
Clouscard's marginalization; reconciling praxis and psyche 24:54 Michel Clouscard also met with a fate somewhat similar to that of another philosopher who was somewhat boycotted, less than him, by people from his own milieu—his academic milieu, one might say, and of researchers—namely the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Both of them had the fault, in the eyes of the petty bourgeois who were formerly revolutionary, so to speak, and then re-centered, of not having thrown their progressive frocks to the nettles and of continuing to feel solidarity with the working class, which is unforgivable in a milieu of renegades.
25:31 So, Clouscard, indeed, found that his works went unrecognized, especially since he was attacking the gurus of sixty-eight-ist ideology. He took on Althusser, he took on Gilles Deleuze, among others, and a number of other people as well. And obviously, one does not spit in the soup when the soup has been prepared by the master chefs of the dominant ideology. It was at the Old Navy, a small café located between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, that Michel Clouscard took up residence and wrote a large part of his work there.
26:04 In this privileged vantage point for observing Parisian worldliness, he met up with friends who would matter in the genesis and evolution of his thought: Henri Lefebvre, his thesis supervisor, and Lucien Goldmann, whose method would inspire him for a long time. Each of them, indeed, was clearing ground little frequented by the sociology of their time. The first accomplices Clouscard thought he detected in the quarter were, as it happened, those who, like Goldmann and Lefebvre, came out of a Marxist current that was not content to develop the productive forces and the relations of production, but brought the indispensable, unavoidable and necessary analysis of these relations into phase with everyday lived experience, everydayness, the concrete, interiority—in short, all those categories that are now summed up in the evasive terms of affect, and which Clouscard concentrates in the term psyche.
27:01 To reconcile praxis and psyche—that is, the whole economic and historical becoming, that of material production, with the psyche, which seems the furthest removed from it while being its highest, most elevated product—that is common sense; I have no aim beyond that, because it is achieved almost on every line of their masterly works. It is the moment common to Rousseau and to Clouscard, of holding together both the Social Contract and the New Heloise, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
The concept of the neighborhood (quartier) 27:34 Likewise, you find in Clouscard the critique of libertarian liberalism and that extraordinary title, Treatise on Mad Love. One has to see it—it seems incompatible, mad love and a treatise. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau arriving from Geneva and discovering the hypocrisy and indecency of the Parisian salons, Michel Clouscard drew from his own experience of Parisian worldliness the concept of the quartier. The quartier, for Michel Clouscard, is the culmination of social evolution. It is the laboratory of new marginal and transgressive cultural models that will become the norms of the new society.
28:10 This microcosm, which will become the publicity vehicle for new lifestyles, is made up of the demographic surplus of the bourgeoisie. You have, for example, the sons of notables who don't fit in, the guy who failed his prep classes and gets sent off to do humanitarian work, or the student whose studies are prolonged indefinitely. These eternal younger sons of the bourgeoisie occupy quite specific places. They tend to group together in quite specific places. This is what Clouscard, through a necessary conceptual abstraction, calls the quartier.
28:43 By quartier, he is thinking, of course, for example of the Montparnasse of the Surrealists or the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the Existentialists. It is there that most of these people, who are no longer really within the system of production, who live off a certain form of bohemianism, who consume without producing in a certain way, will create a thoroughly coded, specific culture and above all define a fashion. This fashion will then serve to become prescriptive.
29:13 It will be able to prescribe afterward a new model according to which the middle strata, thanks to the Marshall Plan, will end up consuming. That is to say, it is in the quartier that the worldly initiation into the new Marshall-Plan-style consumption will be created. I recall that the quartier, for him, is a figure, a metonymy that can be taken literally. It is the Latin Quarter, even if it could be Montparnasse in other periods, but also with geographical annexes. It should not be taken too literally. He often told me that the Luberon was where many people of the quartier type had their country houses.
29:49 The Luberon was where Althusser treated his depression under Lacan's care. At that point, you couldn't make it up. So this Luberon, for one season, during the holidays, was part of the quartier. His indifference to the realistic, geographical side is evident in this anecdote. Someone, precisely at the Old Navy, once asked him where he was going—this was Clouscard. He said, I'm going to Corfu. Really? I meant to say Calvi. Yes—these are holiday spots where you always find more or less the same behaviors, the same offshoots of what goes on between the Café de Flore and the Old Navy.
30:26 Clouscard shows that this takes on enormous sociological importance, especially in the 1960s. Because this model of enjoyment without ownership, of consumption without production, of art without concrete political context—that is, art reduced to mere formalization—I am not criticizing formal research as such, which has its own meaning. But an art that is purely formalist cuts itself off from the society that expresses it. So there is an emblematic site of the victory of this cultural revolution carried by the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia: the Centre Georges Pompidou, better known as Beaubourg.
Beaubourg and subsidized subversion 31:05 The initiative for this center came from Georges Pompidou himself, even though he wasn't very enthusiastic about the project, finding it too avant-garde; but he was fairly democratic, unlike Mitterrand. He accepted the project that was presented, the one everyone knows today once it was built. One can consider that this building, especially in its early years—say the late 1970s, early 1980s—was the temple of institutionalized protest, insofar as the exhibitions presented, whether painting, sculpture, film, or debate, took up one by one all the themes of sixty-eight-ism: the critique of consumer society, mechanization, industrial society, and ecology, which was also beginning to appear among the themes.
31:56 I took part, as a so-called curator, in one of these exhibitions. The theme was 'who decides the fate of the city,' and our exhibition was a very left-wing exhibition that criticized real-estate speculation, the grip of developers on city centers, and so on. And the audience that came, whom I called in an article 'the little Beaubourgeoisie,' was perfectly in tune with these exhibitions, which were in fact designed and organized by people who had been former leaders or gurus of May '68.
32:27 I'll mention, among others, a very well-known sociologist, Jean Baudrillard. This kind of building would multiply throughout France. One could say that most of the 'maisons de la culture' [cultural centers], which had already begun to be sown in the 1960s but would develop further afterward—all these trendy cultural venues, as they'd later be called—are essentially stagings of the neo-petty-bourgeois worldview. These are what all the culture sections of the papers read by the neo-petty bourgeois talk about, papers like Libération, the culture pages of Libération, Les Inrockuptibles, Télérama, and so on.
The capitalism of seduction and the training of gestures 33:02 You have to be provocative, you have to be insolent, but without disturbing too much, of course—that's what's called comfortable rebellion, subsidized subversion, nothing more. And it was very successful, it worked very well, and it satisfied the great majority, if not all, of the new middle strata. In 1981, Michel Clouscard, then a professor of sociology at the University of Poitiers, published Le capitalisme de la séduction [The Capitalism of Seduction], a genuine bestseller.
33:35 In this essay, Michel Clouscard carries out an anthropology of our modernity, analyzing the gestures and rituals of integration into capitalism. When the colonial period was ending, a new colonization was beginning—the colonization of minds. I take up an entire systematics of gestures, of rituals that are regarded as gestures of emancipation and liberalization. And I show that, on the contrary, these are the cultural models that capitalism needs for its new market—its enormous market, the market for the leisure industry, for pleasure, entertainment, fashion, and the commercial monopolies on sex, drugs, and gambling.
34:16 So there you have a fantastic permissive market that needs its ritual gestures of use. Clouscard shows how there is a genuine anthropological training built into the very way of consuming, starting from childhood, where you're made to believe in a world where you'd only need to press a button for things to work. Pressing a button is the dream of the absolute consumer. Everything else is robots. As Aristotle said, if the shuttles wove by themselves, there would be no more need for slaves. Yet we know that even with automation, the shuttles concretely do not weave by themselves.
34:49 But people are made to believe everything works on its own, everything runs on its own. That's really the problem. So from childhood on, there's a naive, peremptory use of the machine. Of all the forms of conditioning, I come to the one which, in my view, concentrates the essence of the process of understanding that Clouscard develops on this occasion—it is the conditioning. I attach importance to it because it penetrates into the intimacy of the subject. I'm thinking of the musical field, the sound field, and in particular the musical field.
Musical training: the binary metric 35:19 One must observe that, from 1950, roughly the fifties, up to today, mass music has never ceased, structurally speaking, to remain binary. That's really extraordinary. From the very appearance—without any aesthetic value judgment, this is a judgment of existence one can measure—of rock'n'roll, all the way to rap today, passing through disco, techno, whatever you like, it is an identical reproduction of the same fragment of duration with a strongly marked beat, characteristic of what are called variety musics.
35:52 It is the rock metric that comes to kill jazz swing, that comes to kill musical knowledge, that comes to kill both learned music and popular music, and of course jazz, which is the most learned of popular musics and the most popular of learned musics. All that is this ideology—rock is only, how shall I put it, an analogue of that kind of society. He often used this example: he'd say, not so long ago, before the 1950s, in the northeast you had the accordion for popular music, in the southwest it was more the tango—Spain isn't far away, and so on and so forth.
36:24 And that is truly popular music, in the sense that a given flower or plant can only appear on a given soil—I set aside the naturalist connotations of my example—likewise, the traditional music of the Australian Aborigines could only appear within a determinate geography, history, and mode of production. In that sense, one can call it popular; it is the expression of the people who bring it forth. Whereas talking about 'pop music,' for him, is exactly the opposite of popular music. It's where there's 'people'—and it's against the people. That double shift is interesting.
36:55 Namely, that from the moment a hit is released in the morning—then when I shave, I hear it again, then when I drive to work, I hear it again, and so on. It's the opposite. It's not an expression coming from below, from a popular substance that becomes a subject in a musician. It's exactly the opposite. It's something that comes from above. In that sense it's anti-popular for Clouscard, and it's a form of conditioning. That's where we spoke of anthropological training. Indeed. Now, the fact that, in the example of mass musical consumption, there is this exorbitant dominance of the binary, to the point that the history of music has stopped.
37:27 You see, there is a history that has come to an end. That's exactly it. Popular culture is a culture on the way to extinction. It's the one directly present within the popular classes, insofar as they remain autonomous, independent, insofar as they escape the ideological domination of the bourgeoisie. Mass culture, on the other hand, is a culture—I'd say—of mass distribution, low-end, manufactured for the popular classes in order to alienate them, to make them adopt conformist and consumerist positions. It's still a decisive field, because with music we touch on that famous capture of souls that Clouscard denounced in the more insidious forms of capitalist predation.
38:08 And what he denounces is precisely the fact that a canon, a musical framework, has been elaborated—he'd say, a bit mockingly, by antiphrasis of Foucault, in which he saw the true 'great confinement,' Foucault's expression, which Foucault locates in the emergence of reason in the seventeenth century. For him it's the opposite: the great confinement is this—the boom, boom, boom, as if the bar lines of the rock beat, in the extensive sense—not rock'n'roll specifically, but rock aesthetics, which includes here disco, techno, whatever you like—as if these repetitive bar lines were the bars of the prison and the ghettos in which our youth are locked up, roughly speaking. That's what he says—and so what is presented as emancipatory and transgressive is actually a music of submission, in a way, to the order of repetition: move along, nothing to see, there are no other horizons, our system isn't the best, but all the others are worse, there is no alternative, we're heading for a wall, but our system is still the best and all the others are even worse—that side of it is, in a way, what he found so hopeless.
The market of desire and class consumption 39:08 Training for consumer society thus dresses itself in the clothes of transgression. Even as fashions change, the pattern stays the same. Whether it comes from sexual practices, music, or fashion, transgression invariably moves from marginality to the blossoming of new markets, which Michel Clouscard would call the market of desire. For a long time, capitalism could be seen as wicked—it is, in developing countries—but in post-industrial countries, on the contrary, it has an entire strategy of integration, because it has a whole new market that escaped the analysis of bourgeois economists, and Marxist ones for that matter, a whole new market that brings in enormous profits on the one hand, and, on the other, energizes the traditional market, and thirdly, I believe, even allows for a regulation, a normalization of the crisis.
39:57 Consumer society—there's a fact rarely questioned. Michel Clouscard asks, ironically, wouldn't a consumer society mean that workers consume what they produce, and that consequently we are already no longer in a capitalist society? There is no consumer society strictly speaking; there is a class that is being consumed. That's why a Marxist analysis of consumption was needed, which most so-called traditional or dogmatic Marxists no doubt failed to carry out—but then they have nothing Marxist left about them, in the sense that they don't practice applied Marxism the way Clouscard did.
40:31 Because Clouscard did not content himself with doing what was done in the nineteenth century, when there was no other option. Classes were studied in terms of production, but he also studied classes in terms of consumption. This is a very great originality of Clouscard's, and he is one of the very few to have actually done it. Let me take a simple example. The miner, for instance—to take a particular sector of the working class at the time—the miner who coughed his lungs out in the mines for forty years and who has the statistical luck of reaching retirement, since quite a few died of silicosis all the same.
41:04 Nobody talked about pollution back then. Notice: when there were millions of guys dying of silicosis, people talked about exploitation, about pollution—but when it was polluting the worker's lungs, nobody gave a damn about that pollution. But when it reaches second homes, then it's terrible. This miner, when he has the luck to reach retirement and buy his first color television in the 1960s—bastard, you're a sellout, you've become bourgeois, you're no good for the revolution anymore. And who says that? Those young people whose poor parents' money—thanks to daddy's money—was sent to raise sheep in the Ardèche.
Capital goods and libidinal consumption 41:36 I'll take an example of convivial 'societality,' typically '68-ish. It's he who calls the worker names. The worker, after forty years, gets treated as co-opted, gone bourgeois, because he bought a color television just before retiring. It's really monstrous. There's a violence in this discourse that one can hardly imagine, a violence that is still exerted today through the complete erasure of the notion of the proletariat from the picture. Clouscard's coherence is not a totalizing coherence—it stems, on the contrary, from the totalitarian side of the ideology he denounces.
42:06 This way of erasing—each time it is the same thing that gets erased, annihilated, repressed, censored, whatever term you prefer, depending a bit on the authorities and the contexts—it is the moment of labor precisely, the obscene moment, the moment that makes Vulcan uglier than Narcissus. That's how it is. This is where Clouscard's analysis is absolutely decisive, and he made an analysis that has really become classic in sociology and politics. He distinguished, on one side, capital goods, from so-called consumer goods that are libidinal, ludic, marginal.
42:42 What he showed is that you fundamentally have a two-speed society. Say, workers and employees, who make up the majority of the French population, can only consume so-called capital goods—to give you an example, that's the car to get to work, since not everyone lives near their workplace, they need cars to commute. It's the washing machine, to allow for the generalized entry of women into work. Of course, women were already massively working, especially in the working class. Capital goods also mean collective infrastructure—roads.
43:15 Does one 'consume' a road? All of that fosters the very organization of production. That is what the working class and the employees—broadly speaking, the workers of this country—have access to. It's completely different from what Clouscard calls libidinal, ludic, marginal consumption, which is the privilege of the few. Clouscard puts it very well: it's not because misery drives a car that it's no longer misery. If you look at the organization of society itself, having access to a car in order to sit through three hours of traffic jams and be exploited for twelve hours a day is not the glitz and glamour they show you on television.
43:54 Modernization did have some genuinely important things about it. Simply put, a washing machine is not nothing. A fridge is not nothing. And so it's understandable that everyone would aspire to have that. But afterward, you're sold a dream—dream away, dream away, but submit. For Michel Clouscard, the magic of consumer objects can only work if those who produce them are relegated to oblivion. Labor becomes the unconscious of a society that has become one where the ludic is omnipresent.
The ghost class 44:28 Irony of history: the Carmaux mines, where Michel Clouscard's father worked, have been turned into a leisure park. The memory of the worker fades away in favor of the enjoyment of the consumer. The working class has become invisible. It has disappeared from magazines. You no longer see workers. You no longer see... the blue overalls have disappeared, even in the factories. We're rarely dressed in blue anymore, whereas before, that was the whole working class. It used to be easy to spot.
44:58 In 1936, when they took to the streets, they were all in blue. Now that's also part of the individualization of people, who no longer identify with a single class. Go to a factory like mine—we have overalls that are sort of blue with a red trim. But those who work on the mechanics have black overalls, others have gray ones, and so on. Whereas before, we were all the same. We had the same relationship, it was the same boss, all of that. Now it's outside contractors who come in, and we're all different.
45:30 And that's part of an ideology which says: we no longer want to see you, you no longer exist. Yet the people who do this work, and there are plenty of them, and the families they belong to, that's not nothing. But we don't want you around anymore. You're has-been. The proletariat is has-been. The working class, contrary to what is claimed, has not decreased in number. It may have decreased in number in the most developed countries, those that have 'deindustrialized,' so to speak.
46:01 But on a planetary scale, it's quite obvious when you look at countries like India, China, or the so-called emerging countries. What is also emerging is a new working class. And overall, both in absolute and relative numbers, the share of the working class on a global scale continues to increase. So, coming back to France or to a so-called developed or advanced country, one can say that the popular classes are divided into two categories. The workers, who are no longer mainly concentrated in large firms, but are more scattered than before, because there have also been changes concerning what's called management, the organization of work—which is in fact the reorganization of the modes of exploitation.
46:40 One mustn't hide behind words. So this working class has become dispersed, somewhat diluted. But alongside the persistence of this working class, there is also the expansion of a new type of proletariat—that of employees. When we speak of the information and communication industries, that also means there are proletarians in those sectors. It's just that they're classified as employees—the neo-domesticity of service jobs, whether window washers, pizza sellers, or supermarket cashiers.
47:12 There is a whole host of new jobs held by people who are also proletarians, in situations of growing precarity. Their children, moreover, risk living worse than their parents did. Unemployment is rising, precarity too, temporary jobs, part-time work, and so on—and no doubt we should keep in mind that nearly 60% of the working population consists of these workers and employees. The isolation in which the working class finds itself within this societal discourse is really extraordinary. If there's one group that's been abandoned, it's because it has no natural identity to cling to, whether by ethnicity, origin, sex, or birth—which is the social positioning par excellence.
47:56 Precisely, it's never even discussed. Jean Gabin's proletarian cap in Le Jour se lève has vanished from the discourse, from the scene. One shouldn't believe otherwise: offshoring happens, but there has never been so much industry, there have never been so many workers. Let me remind you that the average couple in France is, statistically, a worker and an employee. So when people talk about the disappearance of the working class or the popular class, one must be careful about what's being said. It has disappeared from the discourse of the elites—politicians, journalists, and a number of social-science researchers beholden to power—but in fact, it has not disappeared.
48:35 We simply lost sight of it. The ghost class, since no one talks about it anymore, even though there are more than 6 million, almost 7 million people who are sociologically classified as workers. We're led to believe that with new technologies, trades have changed and that workers no longer exist, that there are only middle classes now, but in fact they still exist. And what's more, on a global level, it's... how shall I put it... the working class is the one that's multiplying everywhere.
Geographic exclusion: the rue Mouffetard 49:05 Peasants are becoming workers everywhere, all over the world. That's why I spoke of a ghost class, since it has been hidden since the 1970s. The exclusion of workers is not only symbolic, it is also geographical. City centers are now devoted to leisure and consumption. As a result, workers are unwelcome there. This results in a forced exile, an eviction, an expulsion of the working classes to places further and further away from city centers.
49:41 There is a genuine forced emigration of these classes, who can no longer live in the center. There are either operations of renovation—tabula rasa, whole neighborhoods destroyed—or so-called rehabilitation or urban renewal operations, where old buildings are restored, done up, but so that, once renovated, they become accessible to strata who can afford them. I'll give a quick example, because it was Clouscard himself who suggested it to me, in the last years before his death: Rue Mouffetard had already taken on its current appearance.
50:13 That is to say, we had both known the time when Rue Mouffetard, like almost every neighborhood in Paris, had floors where misery lived up on the sixth floor, where there were little old ladies living alone with their cats, on a tiny pension, feeding their cat before feeding themselves, but who would meet downstairs at the butcher's with the bourgeois lady who lived on the noble floors. In short, all of that constituted a world. That's what I want to illustrate. It was a totality. In a world, there is a totality. A deceptive, fallacious, even unjust totality—but a totality.
50:43 Indeed, the saying goes, "it takes all sorts to make a world." Whereas now, the poor are expelled to La Courneuve because of rent constraints and so on, in recent years, or to Évry to change cardinal direction, and are sent off to be seen elsewhere, and human habitation has become very homogeneous. And so, in a way, Rue Mouffetard is no longer the world it once constituted. It's now merely a stop on a tourist route. The result is that, contrary to what is claimed, the majority of the working classes in France do not live in the housing projects.
51:16 In the housing projects known in technocratic jargon as "sensitive urban zones," there are at most 4.4 million inhabitants. The bulk of France's working-class population lives either in what's called the peri-urban area—that is, beyond the near suburbs—or, increasingly now, in rural zones, within a radius of 40 to 50 km from the center of Paris, or, of course, as we tend to forget, in all those small or medium-sized towns that used to be industrial towns, and after the mergers, acquisitions, offshoring, and restructurings, these towns were devastated, people lost their jobs, and they now have unemployment rates that often approach 30 to 35% among people aged 18 to 50.
The Parliament of the collective worker 52:01 The concealment of the working class answers to the very logic of liberal-libertarian society, repressive toward the producer, permissive toward the consumer. The capitalist system seeks to mask a reality: the consumption of some is nothing but the consumption of the labor of others. To reconcile these two facets of the individual and of society, Michel Clouscard proposes the creation of a Parliament of the Collective Worker. In his last years, Clouscard proposed doubling Parliament, alongside the Chamber of Deputies, with a second Chamber, abolishing the Senate and replacing it with the Parliament of the Collective Worker.
52:40 That is to say, a Parliament that would bring together everything generally called the nation's living forces, to put it simply. The producers of wealth are, after all, best placed to decide the daily fate of a community. It sounds simple enough, which makes it all the more incredible, I mean, that the proposal isn't put forward more often. For him, it's a way of ensuring that legislation escapes either the danger of formal law—sufficiently denounced already, I won't dwell on it—or the usual deviations of malfeasance, corruption, lobbying, and so on.
The end of Clouscard's life; friendship as a political virtue 53:19 But it is a far more rational way of giving institutional guarantees so that this world of praxis is not merely evacuated from the scene, but instead occupies a decisive and determining place within the institution itself. In 1995, Michel Clouscard retired to Gaillac, to the family home, to continue writing his work. There he died from complications of Parkinson's disease on February 21, 2009. Like Rousseau, Michel Clouscard refused throughout his life to yield to the fashions of his time, offering us instead a lucid and committed new outlook on society.
53:58 He will have invited us to find, in the human values of solidarity and friendship, the foundations of a progressive refoundation. It is a matter of proposing a new horizon for human life, at once concrete and spiritual. The sharing of love and friendship, the unity of the subject and the citizen, following in the footsteps of the great refounders who understood friendship—philia—as a political virtue and a kin of love.
