English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Formula, origins, and sport in Clouscard 0:00 The 1929 crisis 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 is permitted, but nothing is possible."
1:01 At the end of the Second World War, Michel Clouscard, then 17 years old, felt a profound distress at seeing the resistance fighters disarmed. This painful event would mark his entire body of work. For nearly 50 years, he would study the transformations that capitalism imposes on society. He would become one of the most perceptive analysts of his time. This is the society we live in, it's capitalism. We are offered...
1:31 You can go anywhere, you can go to the Seychelles, you can have a huge, polluting, oversized 4x4. You can. Afterwards, it's going to be complicated to get it. You'll have to slog away, submit, you'll have to accept all our norms. Born in 1928 in Montpinier, near Gaillac, Michel Clouscard came from a modest family.
2:03 His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a miner in Carmaux. Passionate about sport, Michel Clouscard excelled in the 200 meters. He was even preselected for the 1948 Olympic Games. He would devote his first book to a sociology of sport, in which the athlete becomes the opposite figure to the narcissist of liberal society, who offers nothing but a body turned in on itself. Our first discussion on this topic, I remember, was about the Tour de France.
2:34 And I was surprised, having come from a background of expatriate colonial children, that in my mental images, what could be more vulgar than the connotations of the Tour de France, the advertising, the crowds, the vulgarity. And there Michel Clouscard pointed out to me, from a statistical point of view already, that the Tour de France has been measured, and it's the most colossal physical effort given in any sport, even more than the marathon. And he had a hard time making me realize the determinations that I mastered in the abstract, but which I was far from applying to myself, let alone making sociological use of, namely that if sport meets with such fervor—I think there's no other word—I'm trying to recall the other sense in which he spoke of it—among the working classes, it's precisely because it's at the level of muscular effort that labor recovers a form of recognition.
3:27 And for once, in a sublimated form, applauded and recognized, this part of his existence that is always denied, marginalized, even marked with indignity. So, was it a slip, or was it a rather successful slip in some way, but he gave up his sporting career when, wanting to win the 100-meter final, right after the war, he said that he wanted to lean forward a little to gain a few tenths of a second in the last meter, he sprawled out full length, the whole pack passed in front of him, and so he gave up sport and took up philosophy.
The thesis and the Marshall Plan 4:01 He thus left Gaillac and went to Toulouse to study philosophy. For him, Toulouse was already the big city, and he did not imagine it would only be a stepping stone before Paris. A brilliant student, he was encouraged to continue his studies at the University of Nanterre. He accepted a supervisory post at the Lycée Jacques-Decour, which allowed him to support himself and left him time to write his thesis, "L'Être et le 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 prism of relations of production under the Ancien Régime. He defended his thesis in 1972, before a jury including notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who praised the immense effort the subject required. This foundational work would give him the keys to immediately understand the stakes of May '68. Indeed, as early as 1973, in a book titled "Néofascisme et idéologie du désir," he denounced the collusion between the proponents of unrestrained enjoyment and the proponents of the liberal economy.
5:13 He traced this new political and social order back to the Marshall Plan. "The Marshall Plan is no longer today a project..." In 1947, US President Truman signed a program aimed at restoring the European economy. This aid plan, worth several billion dollars, was made up of four-fifths 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 post-war Europe, the situation was, to say the least, troubled. Peace had returned, but social peace risked being threatened. And the Americans' objective was both to try to improve the economic situation in Europe in order to prevent social demands from growing. The workers, let us not forget, were represented by a very powerful Communist Party. In the immediate aftermath of the war, part of the working class was armed. These were the francs-tireurs partisans. They had not been disarmed.
6:14 The bourgeoisie adopted a low profile because it had collaborated during the war. So social peace had to be maintained or restored. And the only means available was an economic one. And it was from this point on, thanks to American aid, that there began a period which a French economist, Jean Fourastié, would call the "trente glorieuses" [the 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 with the social security reforms which would promote, let's say, the well-being of the working classes.
6:48 That's the economic side. Of course, none of this was disinterested. On one hand, it was necessary to maintain and increase American influence in Europe. Officially they were the liberators. But on the cultural level, it meant getting the "made in the USA" ideology to penetrate en masse, through new modes of consumption, through music, and especially through cinema, which would play a major role in impregnating minds with the American way of life.
7:18 Why the Marshall Plan? So as not to have communism. Because if you go back to the old daddy's capitalism of before the war, with poverty and so on, I mean, they're already at 27%, 48% communist, almost 30% in Italy—well then, we're done for. So you absolutely have to loosen up a bit, and, well, not entirely recreate the Zola-style worker, loosen the reins a bit, and there you go. And that happened in all the countries concerned. And in France, it took on a particular dimension insofar as it combined with the CNR [National Council of the Resistance], which owes nothing to NATO strategy, and which affirmed a management that was both democratic and centralized, which was supposed to remedy the horrors against which the CNR had built an alternative.
7:59 One must understand that the program of the National Council of the Resistance was not simply about ending the war, it wasn't simply "never again war," it was, to borrow Jaurès's words, never again the capitalism that carries war within it as the cloud carries the storm. That's what Clouscard truly felt, that sense of "never again." And it so happened that the rot was starting over, the rot of slavery, of colonialism, of fascism—because it was indeed capitalism that fomented fascism to get itself 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 is the Marshall Plan.
State monopoly capitalism and new middle strata 8:32 The Marshall Plan would set in motion major transformations in the beneficiary countries. The middle classes would fully profit from it; they would symbolize the shift from an economy still marked by subsistence and scarcity to an economy of abundance. Opposing the traditional bourgeoisie, they would slowly impose their culture and their vision of the world. From then on the codes were changing, but '68 would reveal it. This Marshall Plan grafted onto a centralized state brought France fully into what had been observed elsewhere, what economists called state monopoly capitalism—but France entered into it massively.
9:12 This state monopoly capitalism, this kind of culmination, allows for maximum organization of production, of consumption, of mores, of space. France would experience what is called a period of long-term expansion, of growth, and this long-term 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—which I describe, they'll be called the new middle classes, I call it the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, because its capital is ultimately its intellect, 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 ideologically and culturally.
10:08 That is to say, one wouldn'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 middle strata, very modernist, very much in rupture with traditional bourgeois morality. State monopoly capitalism creates both the product and the customer. It even creates new middle strata, who become both the advertisement and the consumers themselves. Power was held by a coalition of the business bourgeoisie, which traditionally relied on the old petty bourgeoisie—small shopkeepers, small craftsmen, small farmers, traditional liberal professions—very reactionary, with an authoritarian, centralized, technocratic government, personal power, General de Gaulle—and of course, politically, it could not express itself on the official stage, and the result is that it would radicalize as its frustrations grew, it would drift leftward, and the most excited among them, represented by their theorists, their leaders, would found various far-left parties, or splinter groups—Trotskyist, Maoist, neo-anarchist,
11:18 of which Cohn-Bendit would be one of the best-known representatives, and not only would they attack the government, but the most radical among them would attack the regime of the Fifth Republic itself, which they wanted to bring to an end, 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 nonetheless 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 command and those who execute.
12:05 That's why it is said that they were assigned, so to speak, the neo-petty bourgeoisie to tasks of mediation, that is, of conception, organization, control, inculcation, training, and so on. To ratify this state of affairs, an alliance was needed, a general alliance, what Gramsci calls a historic bloc, that is, in this case, the alliance of the possessing classes and the middle classes. Now, in revolutionary situations, it's the reverse that occurs, the alliance of the working classes with the middle strata. Here, it was the possessing classes that won over the middle strata, truly creating new middle strata.
12:41 I do say middle strata, because it is quite clear that within the capitalist mode of production, with all the differences in social hierarchy one can find—and if you take Marx's The Class Struggles in France, you find roughly 14 social groups, contrary to what the vulgarizers of Marxism would have you believe, it's not a binary logic. But simply, the very logic of capitalism is articulated around those who hold the great means of production and exchange, capital, and those who offer their labor power. To counter this dual logic inherent in the capitalist mode of production itself, one needs, of course, tons of buffer strata.
13:18 Let's not necessarily call them classes, or they're not necessarily classes, they don't experience themselves that way, they aren't necessarily conscious of it, but they are middle strata. And state monopoly capitalism, created thanks to the Marshall Plan, had the knack of vastly increasing the number of people who felt themselves to be middle class, and this through generalized wage-earning. These are people who were made to literally love their chains. The strike order was maintained by the four major union federations. The largest strike in French history took place during May '68.
May 68, a palace revolution 13:51 It numbered nearly 9 million strikers. And yet, today, only the struggles led by the student movements seem to hold attention. Clouscard hypothesized that precisely the societal, liberal—liberal and libertarian—aspect of '68 had served as a counter-revolutionary barrier against a process that was becoming fatal for capitalism.
14:21 In '68, they got scared because there wasn't just France—it wasn't just in France. In '68, there was Italy, there was most of the countries of Europe, there was the United States. They said, this is over. They got what they wanted during the thirty glorious years. Now we take back control, we break them, we say they're worthless. We're going to put a bunch of them on unemployment, that way it scares the others. And that's what happened. May '68 is a play.
14:53 A play performed by three actors, each in his own role. De Gaulle, the authoritarian father, Pompidou, the easygoing, liberal uncle, Cohn-Bendit, the enfant terrible. Michel Clouscard sees in May '68 a palace revolution, a second Marshall Plan of a symbolic order which would see the alliance of the liberal and the libertarian in order to remove from the stage the representatives of the old bourgeoisie. The middle strata would finally take part in the banquet of power.
15:24 I had the chance, or at least the opportunity, one day to have lunch with the President of the Republic, Georges Pompidou, through 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, of social history. And I was his designated opponent in what are called at Sciences Po the "méthode" seminars. That's where you learn to talk about anything, but with a well-structured two-part outline. Georges Pompidou was one of his best friends because the two of them had prepared together for the École Normale Supérieure entrance exam.
15:57 That is, to get into the École Normale Supérieure. Both of them were Normaliens. 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 would see that there would be certain points of convergence. I said, "Why not?" And what interested me wasn't dining with Pompidou, but seeing a bit of what political leaders thought about May '68, "off the record," so to speak.
16:27 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 small room, a lounge, a very chic and expensive restaurant. Well, of course, all this was paid for with taxpayers' money, all these feasts. And Pompidou, a few minutes after discussing Godard's latest film at the time, launched into, "So it seems, Mr. Clouscard, you have an interesting analysis which, although Marxist, apparently coincides fairly well, according to Louis Chevalier, with the view we have of May '68."
17:04 So I said, "Yes, I rather suspect you're not a Marxist, Mr. President, given that you're a former proxy of the Rothschild Bank." But here is what I think of May '68. Let me sum it up for you in a nutshell. And at the end of my summary, precisely on the irresistible rise of the intellectual petty bourgeoisie, he said to me, "It so happens that's the analysis we made, Mr. Edgar Faure and Mr. Maurice Grimaud, notably when decisions had to be made as to whether or not to have the army evacuate the Sorbonne." Because General de Gaulle, who was, let's admit it, old France after all—this is Pompidou speaking, not me—had found a way to go to Baden-Baden.
17:39 He hadn't told us. He had taken refuge there with his wife and part of his family, to go see General Massu about getting the students removed from the Sorbonne. And we explained to the General, all the same, that this really wasn't a realistic solution, that all these agitators, all these excited people waving banners with hammers and sickles and portraits of Che, Lenin, and Marx, in that courtyard, are the future elite of our country. So you don't shoot your own elite. When Clouscard denounces '68, one must carefully distinguish between the two '68s.
The two 68s and the reconquista 18:11 There is the workers' '68 — I won't go back over it — the great gains of the Grenelle agreements, the very significant increase in the minimum wage, workplace union rights. That's not at all what is being criticized; on the contrary, these are gains he celebrates. I'm talking about the '68 that prevailed in consciousness and, so to speak, in souls, because of the dominant power—that is, precisely, the liberal-libertarian '68. First of all, the one who called himself libertarian in order to admit being liberal is Cohn-Bendit himself—I'm not speaking behind his back.
18:41 Libertarian in '68 and liberal in '98. An association of terms one would have thought opposed, whose profound unity Clouscard had already perceived back in '68, precisely. These new middle strata believed the party was only just beginning. And there they were, immediately falling back into crisis. A crisis inherent, in fact, to the capitalist mode of production. They believed they had made their own revolution, this "Bastille Day" of the middle strata that was May '68. Fundamentally, it was the forces of reaction that prevailed after '68, since '68 leaves us with an unflattering balance sheet.
19:11 After '68, the two forces that declined in France were Gaullism and communism, that is, the forces of the Resistance. When Cohn-Bendit says, "Gaullo-communism is over, I am a liberal-libertarian," he is thereby, indirectly, paying a kind of homage to Clouscard, since it was Clouscard who coined the concept of libertarian liberalism, in '72. It's from May '68 onward that a true reconquista would take place. A reconquista of the social gains of the Popular Front and of the Resistance. This counter-revolutionary aspect, which he was the first and, to this day, the only one to see in a developed, theoretical way—how does it manifest itself in sociological terms?
19:47 First, through the progressive, almost total, evacuation of the social by the societal. It's clear that replacing the two classes by pitting women against men, the young against the old, Hutus against Tutsis, Corsicans against the French, is nonetheless more profitable for capital. So Clouscard says quite clearly that it tends to shift civil war onto the poor. What has been called the revolution of May '68 was above all a revolution one could 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.
20:24 Collective emancipation, the fate of the workers, was clearly relegated to the background. To be convinced of this, one need only read the texts and writings of the theoretical spokespersons of this revolution, foremost among whom one can obviously cite the inevitable Michel Foucault or the no less inevitable Gilles Deleuze. But this revolution did indeed prove one thing, no doubt: that this intellectual petty bourgeoisie was not progressive insofar as its objective was not to put an end to capitalism, but to put an end to a society it considered archaic, blocked, traditionalist, padlocked, locked down.
21:02 Here I'm borrowing adjectives often used by Cohn-Bendit. And the proof is that when the University of Vincennes was created, in the woods of the same name, it was on the initiative, on one hand indeed, of a number of government officials, including Jacques Chaban-Delmas, prime minister at the time, and the education minister, Mr. Edgar Faure. But as interlocutors, they nonetheless had a few brilliant—I might say—representatives 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.
21:46 He said, it's very simple, we said to ourselves, all these people, these famous guests—well, if we give them classrooms, if we give them lecture halls, they'll make their revolution in a closed vessel, and meanwhile, we'll have peace in the streets. I myself became a teacher starting in 1976, by which time 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 things considered, everything went along quite well, there wasn't much trouble.
Quarrel with Althusser and Lévi-Strauss 22:19 So one can say that Paris VIII was, in the end, both the apotheosis and the end, intellectually, of contestation. Following in the philosophical lineage of Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, Michel Clouscard would wage a quarrel against the intellectual figureheads of '68—Althusser, Sartre, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss—all thinkers who, for Michel Clouscard, had in common that they relegated economic and historical determinations to the background. They embody the treason of the clerks, abandoning social questions and collective stakes in favor of the societal concerns dear to the middle strata.
22:58 To take a few very, very, very localized examples. If I take Althusser, for instance—the way Althusser brings in economic determination, which is no small thing after all, in his reading of Marx—well, Althusser never actually brings it in, in concreto. And at the same time, always—let me explain—he says, oh of course, it's the essential determination, it's the one that—me, I'm a Marxist, more Marxist than me you die—and the economy is always there as a determination, but, in his phrase—which he didn't coin himself, but which he uses in such a way—"in the last instance"—Althusser uses it in such a way that, in the end, we end up with a Marxist theory that never talks about economics: as soon as one speaks of a particular, concrete case, of aesthetics, of art, there's no more question of economics, it's always "in the last instance"; it's only a question of economics when one is actually talking about economics—he'll never say, look, here's 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. And, giving credit where it's due, Lévi-Strauss—now Lévi-Strauss is someone serious, not at all a lightweight, to use Clouscard's phrase in his own accent—there's real epistemic rigor, and a formalization that has proven itself and is effective, provided one doesn't talk about our own societies—it's always the same thing, instead of making him a master thinker,
24:09 but which is valid, as Lévi-Strauss says with his own little play on words, only for societies without history, in the double sense: societies that exist before history, and at the same time, societies without conflict—without globalized conflict. This Kantianism without a transcendental subject, which Lévi-Strauss quite explicitly claims for himself, has precisely the advantage—unlike Kant, and here is a betrayal of what is best in Kantianism turned into neo-Kantianism—of ridding us precisely of history.
24:40 This battle, going against the current of dominant ideology, would earn Michel Clouscard exile from both the media and academic circles. His work would remain little known or ignored for a long time. Michel Clouscard also met with a fate somewhat similar to that of another philosopher who was somewhat boycotted, less than he was, by people from his own milieu, his academic milieu, one could say, and of researchers, namely the philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre.
25:12 They were both at fault, in the eyes of formerly revolutionary petty bourgeois — in quotation marks — who had since become more centrist, for not having thrown their progressive habits to the wolves, and for continuing to feel solidarity with the working class, which is something unforgivable in a milieu of renegades. So Clouscard did indeed find that his books went unrecognized, especially since he was attacking the gurus of the sixty-eight ideology.
Reconciling praxis and psyche; the concept of the quarter 25:42 He took on Althusser, he took on Gilles Deleuze, among others, and a number of other people. And obviously, one doesn't spit in the soup when the soup has been prepared by the master chefs of dominant ideology. It was at the Old Navy, a small café located between Saint-Michel and Saint-Germain, that Michel Clouscard set up shop and wrote a large part of his work. In this privileged spot for observing Parisian high society, he found his friends who would matter in the genesis and evolution of his thought.
26:12 Henri Lefebvre, his thesis advisor, and Lucien Goldmann, whose method would inspire him for a long time. Each of them, indeed, cleared ground little frequented by the sociology of their time. The first accomplices Clouscard believed he had detected in the neighborhood, as it happened, were those who, like Goldmann, like Lefebvre, came out of a Marxist current that was not content to develop the forces of production and relations of production, but sought to bring the indispensable, unavoidable and necessary analysis of these relations into phase with everyday life, everydayness, the concrete, interiority — in short, all these categories now summed up in the vague terms of affect, and which Clouscard concentrates in the term psyche.
27:01 To reconcile praxis and psyche — that is, the whole economic, historical becoming, that of material production, and psyche, what seems furthest from it while being its highest, most elevated product — this is common sense, I won't say the goal because it is achieved almost on every line of their masterful works; it is the moment common to Rousseau and Clouscard of holding together both The Social Contract and Julie, or the New Heloise, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker and the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.
27:34 Likewise, you find in Clouscard the critique of liberalism and liberalism and the Treatise on Mad Love. Like Rousseau arriving from Geneva and discovering the hypocrisy and indecency of the Parisian salons, Michel Clouscard drew from his own experience of Parisian high society the concept of the neighborhood [quartier]. The neighborhood is, for Michel Clouscard, the culmination of social evolution. It is the laboratory of new cultural models, marginal and transgressive, which will become the norms of the new society.
28:10 This microcosm, which would become the showcase for new ways of life, is made up of the demographic surplus of the bourgeoisie. You have, for example, sons of notables who don't fit in, the guy who drops out of prep school and gets sent off to do humanitarian work, or the student whose studies are indefinitely prolonged. These eternal younger children of the bourgeoisie occupy quite specific places. They tend to gather in quite specific places. This is what Clouscard calls, through a necessary conceptual abstraction, the neighborhood.
28:42 The neighborhood naturally brings to mind, for example, the Montparnasse of the surrealists or the Saint-Germain-des-Prés of the existentialists. That's where most of these people, who are no longer really part of the production system, who live a certain kind of bohemian life, who consume without producing in a way, will create a thoroughly coded, specific culture and above all define a fashion. This fashion will later serve as a model, will become prescriptive.
29:14 It will be able to prescribe afterward a new model according to which the middle classes, thanks to the Marshall Plan, would end up consuming. That is to say, it's in the neighborhood that the fashionable initiation into the new consumption typical of the Marshall Plan is created. I should recall that the neighborhood, in his work, is a figure, a metonymy that one can take literally. It's the Latin Quarter, even if it could be Montparnasse in other eras, but also with geographical extensions. One should not take it too literally, too realistically. He often told me that the Luberon was where many people from the neighborhood had their country house.
29:49 The Luberon was where Althusser was treated for his depression through Lacan. At that time, you couldn't make this up. So this Luberon, for one season, during vacation time, was part of the neighborhood. His indifference to the realistic geographical side is clear in this anecdote. Someone, precisely from the Old Navy, asks him one day: where are you going? It was Clouscard. He says: I'm going to Corfu. Really? I thought he'd say Calvi. Yes, Calvi, Capri, Corfu, he replied. Yes, they're categories. They're vacation spots where you always find more or less the same behaviors, the same branches of what happens between the Café de Flore and the Old Navy.
30:26 Clouscard shows that this takes on enormous sociological importance, especially around the 1960s. Because this model of enjoyment without having, of consumption without production, of art without concrete political context — that is, art reduced to its mere formalization — I'm 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. Now, there is an emblematic site of the victory of this cultural revolution carried by the intellectual petty bourgeoisie: the Centre Georges Pompidou, better known as Beaubourg.
Beaubourg and "Le capitalisme de la séduction" 31:05 The initiative for this center came from Georges Pompidou himself. In fact, he wasn't very enthusiastic about the project, he found 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 — let's say the late 1970s, early 1980s — was the temple of institutionalized contestation, insofar as the exhibitions it presented, whether painting, sculpture, film, or debate, took up one by one all the themes of sixty-eight: the critique of consumer society, mechanization, industrial society, ecology, which was also beginning to appear among the themes.
31:56 I took part, as a designer so to speak, in one of these exhibitions. The theme was: who decides on the city, and our exhibition was a very left-wing exhibition that criticized real estate speculation, the grip of developers on city centers, etc. And the audience that attended, which I called in an article the petty bourgeoisie, was perfectly in tune with these exhibitions, which were in fact designed and organized by people who had been former leaders or gurus of thought of May '68.
32:27 I would cite, among others, a very well-known sociologist, Jean Baudrillard. This kind of building would multiply all over France. One can say that most of the houses of culture, which had already begun to be sown in the sixties but which would develop further afterward, and all the trendy cultural venues, as they'll be called later, are essentially staged performances of the neo-petty-bourgeois worldview. These are the people talked about in all the culture sections of the newspapers read by the neo-petty bourgeoisie, such as Libération's culture section, Les Inrockuptibles, Télérama, etc.
33:02 You have to be provocative, you have to be insolent, but without disturbing things too much, of course. This is what's called comfortable rebellion, subsidized subversion, nothing more. And it has been very successful, it has worked very well and has satisfied the vast majority, not to say the totality, of the new middle classes. In 1981, in 1981, Michel Clouscard, then professor of sociology at the University of Poitiers, published 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 a whole system of gestures, of rituals that are seen 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 of the leisure industry, of pleasure, of entertainment, of fashion, of commercial monopolies on sex, on drugs, and on gambling.
Anthropological training and binary music 34:16 So there is a fantastic permissive market that needs standardized gestures of use. Clouscard shows how there is a genuine anthropological training in the very way of consuming, and this from childhood on, where you're made to believe in a world where all you'd need to do is push a button for things to work. Pushing a button is the dream of the absolute consumer. Everything else is robots. As Aristotle said, if shuttles wove by themselves, there would be no more need for slaves. But we know that even with automation, shuttles don't actually weave by themselves.
34:50 But we're made to believe that everything runs by itself, everything works by itself. That's exactly the problem. So, from childhood, there is a naive, peremptory use of the machine. Of all forms of training, I come to the one which, in my opinion, concentrates the essence of the process of understanding that Clouscard develops on this occasion, which is training. I hold to this 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.
35:20 It must be observed that from 1950, roughly the fifties, up to today, mass music has never stopped, structurally speaking, being binary. It's really quite extraordinary. From the very appearance — without any aesthetic value judgment, it's a judgment of existence one can measure — of rock'n'roll, from rock'n'roll to today's rap, passing through disco, techno, whatever you like, it's still binary. That is, the identical reproduction of the same fragment of duration with the clearly marked beat that characterizes so-called variety music.
35:52 It's 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 this is that ideology — rock is only an analogy of that society. He often gives this example: he says, not so long ago, before the fifties, in the northeast you had accordion for popular music, in the southwest it was more the tango, Spain isn't far, and so on for this or that region.
36:24 And those are the true popular musics, in the sense that such and such a flower or plant can only appear on a given soil. I'll leave aside the naturalistic connotations of my example. Likewise, it's clear that the traditional music of Australian Aborigines can 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 that brings it forth. On the other hand, speaking of pop music, for him, is exactly the opposite of popular music. That's where there's the same thing as 'people,' and it's against the people. This double shift is interesting.
36:56 Namely, that from the moment a hit is released in the morning, then when I'm shaving I hear it again, then when I go to work in my car I hear it again, etc. — it's the opposite; it's not the expression that comes from below, from a popular substance that becomes subject in a musician, it's quite the reverse. It's something that comes from above, and it's in this sense that it is anti-popular for Clouscard, and it's a form of conditioning. This is where we spoke of anthropological training. 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 If you see, there is a history that is finished, and it's precisely this one. Popular culture is a culture on the verge of disappearing. It's the one that emanates directly from 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 attitudes. This is really a decisive area 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 in which — he said, mocking Foucault a bit by antiphrasis — he saw the true great confinement, Foucault's expression, which Foucault places at the appearance of reason in the seventeenth century. No, for him it's the opposite: the great confinement is this, it's the boom, boom, boom, as if the bar lines of rock in the extensive sense — not rock'n'roll specifically, but the rock aesthetic, which includes disco, techno, whatever you like — as if these repetitive bar lines were the bars of the prison and the ghettos in which young people are locked up, roughly speaking, that's what he says. And so we're made to pass off as emancipatory and transgressive a music that is, in a way, a music of submission to the order of repetition — move along, nothing to see here, there's no other horizon, our system isn't the best but all the others are worse, there is no alternative, we're heading into a wall, but our system is still the best and all the others do even worse. That side of it is somehow devastating for him.
Market of desire and Marxist analysis of consumption 39:08 The training for consumer society thus takes on the guise of transgression. Even as fashions change, the trajectory stays the same. Whether they come from sexual practices, music, or fashion, transgression invariably moves from marginality to the opening of new markets that Michel Clouscard would call the market of desire. It was long possible to consider that capitalism was harsh in developing countries, but in post-industrial countries, on the contrary, it has a whole strategy of integration, because it has a whole new market that escaped the analysis of bourgeois economists and Marxist ones too, and a whole new market that brings in enormous profits on one hand, allows the traditional market to be revitalized, and thirdly, I believe, even allows for a regulation, a normalization of the crisis.
39:57 Consumer society — here is a fact hardly ever questioned. Michel Clouscard asks, with irony, a consumer society? Wouldn't that mean that workers consume what they produce, and that consequently we are no longer in a capitalist society at all? There is no consumer society strictly speaking. There is a class that is consumed. That's why a Marxist analysis of consumption still needed to be done — something most so-called traditional or dogmatic Marxists probably never did, but they no longer have anything Marxist 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 way. Classes were studied in terms of production, but he also studied classes in terms of consumption. This is one of Clouscard's great originalities, and he's one of the very few to have really done it. Let me give a simple example. The miner, for instance, who was, for a particular sector, part of the working class at the time. The miner who had coughed up his lungs in the mines for 40 years and who had the statistical luck of reaching retirement, because plenty died of silicosis all the same.
41:04 Nobody talked about pollution back then. Notice, when there were millions of guys dying of silicosis, we talked about exploitation, which seems more appropriate to me. It wasn't about pollution. And when it was polluting the worker's lungs, nobody cared about pollution. But when it reaches second homes, that's terrible. That miner, when he had the luck to reach retirement and buy his first color TV in the sixties — 'sellout, you're a bourgeois now, you're no good for the revolution anymore.' And who said that? Those young people who were sent off, thanks to daddy's money, to raise sheep in the Ardèche, the poor things.
41:36 I'll take an example of convivial sociality, typically sixty-eight. It's him who calls the worker out. The worker — the one I saw for 40 years — gets branded as having become bourgeois because he bought a color TV just before retiring. It's really monstrous. There's a violence in that discourse one can hardly imagine, a violence that is still exercised today through the complete removal of the notion of the proletariat from the scene. Clouscard's coherence is not a totalizing coherence. It stems, on the contrary, from the totalitarian side of the ideology he denounces.
42:08 This way of evacuating — each time it's the same thing that gets evacuated, annihilated, repressed, censored, whatever term you prefer, depending a bit on the institutions and contexts involved. It's the moment of labor, precisely. The obscene moment. The moment that makes Vulcan uglier than Narcissus. That's just how it is. This is where Clouscard's analysis is absolutely decisive. He made an analysis that has truly become classic in sociology and politics. He distinguished, on one hand, capital goods from so-called consumer goods that are libidinal, playful, marginal.
Capital goods and libidinal consumption 42:43 What he showed is that you fundamentally have a two-speed society. Let's 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 for getting to work, since not everyone lives near their job, most are in the suburbs, so they have to drive to work. It's the washing machine to enable women's generalized entry into work — of course, women were already starting to work massively, especially in the working class. Capital goods also include collective infrastructure, roads.
43:15 Does one 'consume' a road? All that serves the very organization of production itself. That's what the working class and employees — broadly, the workers of this country — have access to. It's completely different from what Clouscard calls libidinal, playful, marginal consumption, which is the privilege of a select 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 very organization of society, the fact of having access to a car in order to sit in three hours of traffic and get exploited twelve hours a day is not the glitz and glamour they show you on television.
43:54 Modernization did bring some things that mattered plainly — a washing machine is not nothing, a fridge is not nothing, and so the fact that everyone aspires to have that is understandable. But then we're sold a dream, and there you go: dream away, but submit. For Michel Clouscard, the magic of consumer objects can only work if we consign to oblivion those who produce them. Work becomes the unconscious of a society that has become one in which the playful is everywhere. Ironically, 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 any 'proles,' the blue overalls have disappeared, even in factories people are rarely dressed in blue overalls anymore, whereas before that was the whole working class — it was easy in '36, when they went down into the streets they were all in blue. Now that's also part of the individualization
45:05 of people, who no longer recognize themselves as belonging to a single class. If you go into a factory like mine, we have overalls that are a bit blue with a red trim, but those who work on the machinery have their own blue-and-black overalls, others have grey ones, and so on, whereas before we were all the same, we had the same relationship, it was the same boss and all that. Now it's outside companies that come in to work, and we're all different, and that's part of an ideology that says: we don't want to see you anymore, you no longer exist. Yet the people who do this work, and there are many of them, and the people in their families — that's not nothing — but 'we don't want you anymore, you're has-been,' the proletariat is has-been. The working class, contrary to what we're told, has not decreased in number — it may have decreased in number in the most developed countries, those that have become 'deindustrialized' so to speak, but on a global scale, when you look at countries like India, like 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 worldwide continues to grow.
The phantom class and geographic eviction 46:15 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 mostly concentrated in big companies but 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 — we shouldn't hide behind words. So this working class has become dispersed, somewhat diluted, but alongside the persistence of this working class, there's also the expansion of a new type of proletariat: that of employees. When we talk about the information and communication industries, that means there are also proletarians in those sectors, they're simply classified as employees. The new domesticity of service jobs, whether window cleaners, pizza delivery workers, or supermarket cashiers, there's a whole crowd of new jobs held by people who are also proletarians, in situations of growing precariousness. Their children, moreover, risk living worse than their parents.
47:25 Unemployment is rising, precariousness too, temporary jobs, etc., part-time work, and altogether we must recognize that nearly 60% of the working population is made up of these workers and employees. The isolation in which the working class finds itself in this societal discourse is really extraordinary. If there is one group that has been abandoned, because it has no 'natural' identity to cling to, whether through ethnicity, origin, sex, or birth — which is the social positioning par excellence — precisely, it's never discussed. The proletarian embodied by Jean Gabin in Le Jour se lève has disappeared from the picture, or rather from the discourse; not from reality, mind you: relocations happen, but there has never been so much industry, there has never been so many workers. I would remind you all the same that the average French couple is, statistically, worker and employee. So when we talk about the disappearance of the working class or the popular class, we should be careful about what we're told. It has disappeared from the discourse of the elites, whether politicians, journalists, or a number of social science researchers beholden to power, but in fact it has not disappeared.
48:35 We have simply lost sight of it — a ghost class, since nobody talks about it anymore, even though there are more than 6 million, almost 7 million people classified sociologically as workers. We're made to believe that with technology, jobs have changed and workers no longer exist, that there's nothing but middle classes anymore, when in fact they still exist, and moreover, on a global level, the working class is, how shall I put it, the one that is multiplying everywhere; peasants are becoming workers everywhere in the world, and so on. That's why I spoke of a ghost class, since it has been hidden since the seventies. The exclusion of workers is not only symbolic, it is also geographical. City centers are now devoted to leisure and consumption; consequently, workers are undesirable there. This translates into forced exile, an eviction, an expulsion of the popular classes into places increasingly far from city centers. There is a genuine forced emigration
49:45 of these classes who can no longer afford to live in the center. There are operations either of renovation, of clean sweep — neighborhoods are destroyed — or so-called rehabilitation, urban renewal, where old buildings are restored, done up, but so that, once renovated, they become accessible only to those social strata who can afford them. Let me give a quick example, one Clouscard actually suggested to me, in the last years before his death: Rue Mouffetard had already taken on its current appearance — that is, we had both known, earlier, the era, sorry, when Rue Mouffetard, almost like this neighborhood of Paris, had floors where you'd find poverty up on the sixth floor, where there were little old ladies living alone with their cat, on a tiny pension, who couldn't even feed themselves properly, each on her own, but who would meet downstairs at the butcher's alongside the bourgeois lady who lived on the grand floors. In short, all of that made up a world — that's what I want to illustrate: it was a totality. In a world there is a totality — a deceptive totality, fallacious, even unjust, a totality all the same; as the saying goes, it takes all sorts to make a world. Whereas now the poor are pushed out to La Courneuve because of rent constraints, or these past few years to Évry, to change compass points.
50:56 and they go off to be seen elsewhere, and then human habitat becomes very homogeneous, and so, in a way, Rue Mouffetard is no longer the world it once constituted; it's now just one stop on a tourist circuit. The result is that, contrary to what we're told, the majority of the popular classes in France do not live in the so-called housing projects, the 'sensitive urban zones' in technocratic jargon — that's at most 4.4 million inhabitants. The majority of the French popular population lives either in what's called the peri-urban area, that is, beyond the near suburbs, or now already in rural zones, within a radius of, say, 40 to 50 km from central Paris for the Paris region, or of course, something we tend to forget, in all those small or medium-sized towns that used to be industrial towns and which, after mergers, acquisitions, relocations, restructurings, have been devastated — people lost their jobs and these towns now have unemployment rates often close to 30 or 35% among the population aged 18 to 50. The concealment of the working class follows the very logic of liberal-libertarian society
The parliament of the collective worker 52:07 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 the parliament of the collective worker. In his final years, Clouscard proposed doubling parliament — the chamber of deputies plus a second chamber — abolishing the Senate and replacing it with the parliament of the collective worker, that is, a parliament that would bring together what are generally called the 'living forces' of the nation — to put it simply, the producers of wealth, who are after all the best placed to decide on the everyday fate of a community. It sounds quite simple; it's all the more incredible that the proposal isn't brought up more often. It's his way of ensuring that legislation escapes precisely both the danger of formal law, sufficiently denounced elsewhere, I won't dwell on that, and the usual deviations of graft and corruption.
53:17 of corruption, of lobbying, and so on—but it is a far more rational way of giving institutional guarantees so that this world of praxis is no longer simply erased from the scene but instead occupies a decisive and determining place within the institution itself. In 1995 Michel Clouscard withdrew to Gaillac, to the family home, in order to continue writing his work; he died there from the effects of Parkinson's disease on February 21, 2009. Like Rousseau, Michel Clouscard refused all his life to give in to the fashions of his time, offering us instead a new, lucid and engaged view of society. He invited us to find, in the human values of solidarity and friendship, the foundations for a progressive refounding. The aim is to propose 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 re-founders who understood friendship, philia, as a political virtue and a kin of love.
