Why does Frédéric Lordon, otherwise a sharp reader committed to the left, misread Michel Clouscard to the point of making him a critic of the "consumer society"?
In this preface to the new edition of Michel Clouscard's Néo-fascisme et idéologie du désir, Dominique Pagani praises Frédéric Lordon's battles (the principle of sovereignty, rejection of the European treaty, a cap on shareholder returns), then points out his misreadings: Lordon casts Clouscard as a critic of the "consumer society" attached to working-class frugality. Quoting Le Frivole et le Sérieux, Pagani shows that Clouscard denies such a society exists and explains the proletarian's deprivation of consumption by the extraction of surplus value. He links this misreading to the Atlanticist counteroffensive of the 1970s and to Althusser's Marxism stripped of dialectics.
Translated from the French. Read the original.
So as not to drown the answer to this question in the details of what follows, let us state at the outset that it will be affirmative: Private Lordon deserves, and on more than one count, to be protected and saved.
Not only because of the merits everyone grants him: clarity of communication in disciplines reputed for their jargon, critical sagacity in the examination of statements, interdisciplinary competence, from the hard sciences to the “affects,” by way of the strictly philosophical field, the very opposite of specialists shut up inside their disciplines; concern for form, in the properly aesthetic sense of the term, in the didactic exposition of subjects that seem least amenable to it (few economists have expressed for us the mechanisms of finance, and, in particular, of debt, in the form of a verse drama, and even in alexandrines).
These are a few of his excellent qualities… in civilian life!
But we are above all attentive to the soldier’s merits, to the positions he takes in the most topical political battles: it takes more than a certain bravery to condemn the “European” treaty, to dismiss both the FED’s “quantitative easing” and the anal retention of the BUBA, of which the ECB is merely the “Front office”.
More generally, to dare to rehabilitate sovereigntism, or, to avoid any conflation, the principle of sovereignty, within a milieu, that of most of his peers, where this notion (among the most decisive) of the Social Contract had come to border on obscenity: won’t we dirty our hands picking up this old rag soiled by that of the Front National? But Frédéric Lordon knows full well that if Le Pen seized hold of it, as one takes a flag from the corpse of an adversary, it was very belatedly, and by default, without a fight. Far from defending it, the “governing left,” that is, the market left, from the PS to the eco-Trotskyists, had abandoned it to the dustbin of history; and this in order to satisfy the demands of the formidable federalist pressure whose power has never ceased to grow over these last decades (these “Thirty Shameful Years,” as Michel Clouscard had named them). The far right had only to pick it up from there.
But our economist does not limit his fight to the mere critique of the dominant model. We know that he carries his assault to the institutional level, proposing to set a ceiling on the rate of shareholder remuneration [1] providing for “confiscatory” taxation beyond that threshold. Those who pull a face at the social-democratic coloring of the “regulation theorists” will grant that such a measure, from the Medef to Bercy, would rather be judged a Bolshevik provocation!
Finally, Frédéric Lordon knows better than anyone the importance of the theoretical detour for guaranteeing a minimum of efficiency to any impulse toward practical action. He even proposes—why yes, he too—a whole program for recasting the “human sciences,” or “social” ones, an overhaul that the present crisis seems to designate as opportune, necessary, even urgent (if indeed that term has any meaning in the theoretical field); a refoundation meant to accompany, while unifying it, the awakening of what it is customary to call “the left of the left.”
And this is precisely where the troubles begin and our initial question returns.
This “progressive refoundation,” thanks to the discredit the crisis has inflicted on the dominant liberal model, has become the most frequented forum; people jostle at the turnstile in a teeming effervescence where one sees the most disparate chapels colliding. From the multitudinous eco-anarchism of some to the “eco-socialism” of another; the most shopworn utopias rub shoulders there with the umpteenth attempt to “overhaul” “the theory of value” (the object of the game being to deconstruct it in passing), which brings us the great return, amid countless recent publications, of Marxist studies, which, ever since Althusser’s successful takeover bid for the PCF’s “ideological apparatus”—with the notable exception of M. Clouscard’s resistance—had seemed fossilized in the post-structuralist purr, that is, in this instance, the exegesis of an author who had nonetheless clearly signified that after millennia of “interpretation” of the world, at the speed at which capitalism “changes” it, one could do something other than endlessly replay hermeneutic overtime.
But let us not spoil our pleasure: “the virginal, vivacious, and beautiful today” is not condemned to repeat yesterday, and one may nurture some hope that this revival of Marxist studies deserves the exclamation borrowed from Hamlet by the author of Capital: “Well grubbed, old mole!”
For it is of course “to the left of the left” that this bitterly competitive throng of “refounders” of every stripe turns into “quantum soup,” or, if one prefers sporting metaphors, into a “loose scrum.” And it is not only politics that finds itself summoned there to reconsider everything from the foundations up, but the whole of the “human” or “social” sciences, even anthropology, philosophy, and even—as if to echo the question “And where is God in all this?”—“ontology,” that old denial of social being, or of historical becoming.
Private Lordon is not the last to bustle about on all these redoubts of the ideological front, but the misfortune, for him and for us, is that he is most certainly not the first there!
And so he must, like the others, elbow his way to “persevere in his being,” keep his place in this free-for-all; in a time that is certainly not that of the “night of the long knives,” but rather the day of the little penknives. And in the confusion of battle it happens that he, like so many valiant skirmishers, relentlessly lays into allies, while himself allying with the worst ideological auxiliaries of the liberal-libertarian status quo whose death knell this crisis is sounding.
Thus it is that, after devoting long, studiously polemical pages to the storming of Michéa Hill, he has very few lines left to tackle the ascent of the Clouscardian Himalaya, which he must have taken, from afar, for a mere clod of earth, a victim of the optical illusions peculiar to steep terrain.
And so he lost his grip on the very first foothills, committing misreadings so manifest that ascribing them to contingency, in the mode of the “oversight” [2] seems out of the question: we are speaking of a reader who has rather accustomed us to a remarkable critical sagacity, constantly irrigated by a broad culture as well as by transdisciplinary competence.
Frédéric Lordon in fact presents Michel Clouscard as a scorner of the “consumer society” in the manner of Michéa and so many others whose sleep the masses’ legitimate desire for consumption would come to disturb.
This inversion of meaning links together two matricial misreadings:
– Clouscard’s discourse falls “directly in line with the critique of the consumer society,” a recalcitrant critique peculiar to Michéa-minded Gérontes deploring the debauchery of an eternal youth in Harlequin’s motley:
“The critique of the ‘liberal-libertarian counter-revolution’ is nothing new. A Marxist sociologist, Michel Clouscard (1928-2009), whose name and work had been largely forgotten, is making an astonishing comeback on the intellectual scene. Directly in line with the critique of the ‘consumer society.’”
– Worse still, this puritanism of a decidedly uptight sociologist is something Clouscard would impute to the valiant proletariat, so attached to the frugality of its condition that it would have managed to escape the sirens’ song of the market by refusing the consumerist temptation so as to “stick to” modest “equipment goods”:
“But Clouscard is attached, like Michéa, albeit in different forms, to preserving the purity of the working class. And first of all by showing that the working class is immune from all consumerist temptations: it sticks strictly to the (legitimate) satisfaction of its needs.”
A truly hallucinated reading, which douses with moraline the implacably Spinozist analysis [3] of Michel Clouscard, in which it appears rather that the containment of the working class within the sphere of needs, cut off from the benefits peculiar to the “market of desire,” far from being attributable to some workerist virtus or other, is instead an effect of exclusion peculiar to class division, that is, to liberal-libertarian rapacity and its extortion of surplus value:
“If the proletarian is in an ethical situation, this has nothing to do with theology or with moral categories. It is, I repeat, the extortion of surplus value that makes the proletarian.
This extortion is the very lack of consumption, the reduction of consumption to the mere reproduction of labor power, the objective site of indigence and destitution, whereas, paradox of paradoxes, it is the situation of the producer. One could express this relation by the very simple formula: extortion of surplus value implies (→) deprivation of consumption for the proletarian = ethical foundation of the producer’s claim (ethical foundation of Marxism).” (Le Frivole et le Sérieux, p. 117)
And since he cites p. 55 of Néofascisme, this is just the occasion to read it through to the end:
“One could propose this axiom: the progress of the productive forces, under the tutelage of the bourgeoisie, has the effect of exacerbating the contradiction between the producer and the consumer. The more libido manifests itself in the dominant classes (and their clientele of intellectuals), the more difficult the conditions of existence become for the proletariat. These are the two sides of the same coin.
In other words, we are inverting the Marcusean thesis on the relation between libido and production. The good libidinality he proposes as liberating is, on the contrary, nothing but the way of life of the parvenus of the new system of profit. And the consumer society, in which the proletariat is supposedly wallowing, is nothing but the ideological mask of superexploitation.” (Néofascisme et idéologie du désir, pp. 55-6, 2013 ed.)
In the face of this univocity of the analysis, it must be noted that our economist’s “oversights” stem from the initial misreading (“We live in a consumer society”), which here clearly shows its matricial function. It is strange in the extreme to see Frédéric Lordon in fact succumb to the Wiederholungszwang (the “repetition compulsion”) in that he here reproduces the reception of Michel Clouscard in the orbit of the FN: the judgment of existence is the same there (Clouscard is that Père Fouettard of consumerist debauchery), only the judgment of value (he is right, he is wrong to whip…) radically opposes them. But both parties subscribe to the dominant discourse: “We live in a consumerist society.”
Michel Clouscard is, on the contrary, the first, and to this day the only one, a generation before the crisis we are living through, to dare to assert that while there are indeed milieus, strata, even classes that consume, the “consumer society,” for its part, exists nowhere, and has never existed except as a falsifying ideological vulgate running through the whole of reactionary discourse, from the NPA or political ecology to the FN. He even specifies, not without irony, that if a “consumer society” were ever to come into existence, it would for once be the divine surprise of “realized communism,” and that he would then be the first to be part of it!
To be clear, what Michel Clouscard’s genesis of liberal-libertarian ideology denounces is the anti-consumerist discourse of the consumer, such as it might emanate, for example, around the seventies, when some student who had flunked his prep classes—no hanging offense—but could count on Daddy’s funding to retrain in sheep farming in the Ardèche or art pottery in the Drôme, took the liberty of delivering over to leftist vindictiveness the sole object of his resentment: that old miner from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, a CGT man and even, no doubt, a Communist, who at that same moment, making it in extremis to retirement, a survivor of silicosis and firedamp explosions, and inaugurating, with one foot in the grave, his first color TV, instantly found himself vilified as a traitor to the revolution, locked into the over-consumerist cycle of “metro, work, sleep.”
Against this strange inverted portrait sketched by our economist, let us borrow here the salubrious voice of Spinoza:
“The idea Frédéric has of Michel expresses the state of Frédéric’s body rather than that of Michel’s body.”
What modification can our soldier’s body have undergone, on contact with Clouscardian expression, for him to come to lack to such a degree that sangfroid we so love in him?
So far is it from being true that the stakes of the debate lie here, in the place Frédéric Lordon assigns them, that of cold sociological analysis; in the “field” that is merely theoretical, epistemic, or “cognitive” (to speak like his emulators in absolute naturalism).
Slipping on the very first slopes of the Clouscardian cordillera, Private Lordon has fallen upon his most neuralgic wound: the primordial contradiction between, on the one hand, the social and political “progressivism” of his “manifest content” and, as regards the “latent content,” his allegiance to the worst of the ideological counter-revolutions of the postwar period: the one carried out in the seventies, at the acme of the Cold War, through the vast Atlanticist counteroffensive to recover the military, political, economic, social, and ideological ground too long lost to communist subversion, whether internal (the social advances of the Thirty Glorious Years) or external (the Soviet Farghestan).
On the French front, two mortgages then weigh on this reconquista: on the right, Gaullism; on the left, communism—two kinds of game hardly soluble in the Truman/Bush continuity. The old Vichyite right, which no longer skulks along the walls as it did coming out of the carnage, will take care of the first; it has recovered its health, if not a reputation, in that grayness of the extreme center between Giscardians and Socialists embittered by Algerian self-determination and by the Gaullian nose-thumbing at the Holy Alliance—the Brussels Commission and NATO—for this extreme center is hyperliberal, hyper-“European,” Atlanticist, federalist, and regionalist.
As for lifting the communist mortgage, that will be the business of the “Forty Shameful Years”—that is how Clouscard designates the “Mitterrand generation” [4].
We are then in France, the country in Europe where cultural and/or ideological stakes are particularly “sensitive” and mobilizing. Hegel liked to recall, not without admiring tenderness, that “the French have their heads close to their caps.”
The absolute priority of the Atlanticist counteroffensive, on the ideological segment of the front, is then to de-Marxize that cap. “Structuralism,” then, in its wake, the “post-structuralists” and other “new philosophers” (better suited to the celebrity-culture public, averse to “structural causality” and other “Borromean knots”), will not need to be told twice. The philosophical segment of this new anti-popular front will never tire of launching the hunt for “totalitarianism” in its most abominable forms: universalism, humanism, progressivism, Christiano-Marxism (thank you, Uncle Nietzsche), Cartesianism, and, of course, supreme infamy, “Hegelo-Marxism”: does not one paragon of this liquidation foam with rage when he speaks of “the infamous dialectic”?
“But what use is it to affect a haughty discourse?” [5]
This is not the place to unfold the history of the ideological postwar period: Michel Clouscard, over the course of his publications, never ceased to offer paths toward its intelligibility. But the reader clearly senses that what is at stake goes far beyond an experts’ quarrel and the epistemic field. And so, to the question of why our soldier lost his sangfroid at the mere contact of Clouscardian discourse, we must seek the best answer in the involuntary staging of this quarrel, that is, in the scenography that the following statement condenses as well as could be:
“A Marxist sociologist, Michel Clouscard (1928-2009), whose name and work had been largely forgotten, is making an astonishing comeback on the intellectual scene.”
One sees clearly here that in speaking of “scenography” we are not indulging in “the injection of meaning,” that capital sin in the codex of the structuralesque inquisition: if Michel Clouscard is climbing back onto the stage, it is because until then, until the crisis, he lay beneath the stage, in the underground, to the point that he was believed dead, buried, forgotten, and here he is poking out his nose, that is, the mole’s snout, “on the intellectual scene,” thus accomplishing, to an unbearable degree, the etymology of the syntagm “obscene.”
Our courageous soldier will be granted that one would panic for less.
Indeed, nothing less than a “specter” has been haunting the “human sciences” since their emergence, between the Paris Commune and the Great War. A specter that slipped into their germinal nucleus from the very beginning and that one of Michel Clouscard’s most serious quips lucidly identifies: “The human sciences were invented to lock down the nascent spread of Marxism” (to ward off the double “critical mass”).
Max Weber’s ideal type, the Husserlian antepredicative, the relatively autonomous Bourdieusian field, the socius as libido, mother of the illusio and other habitus; the “Deleuzian” conatus—which owes more to Bergsonian élan vital than to Spinozist mechanism—Althusser’s economic determination in the last instance, the Foucauldian micro-powers… whatever the essential differences between these approaches, which it would be foolish to conflate, they are nonetheless in a “relation of equivalence” strictly “modulo” their historical function: to reduce the considerable extension of the concepts of mediation and determination carried out by Hegel and Marx against positivism, which retains only “natural” determination, or, at the opposite extreme, the mystic, who refuses all determination.
One can at last measure the quasi-traumatic shock our soldier has suffered; reading Clouscard is his first contact with the ghost of Marx, of whom, liberal-libertarian censorship oblige, he had known until then only the philosophical poverty that remains of him after the evisceration performed by Althusser: a “Marx” expurgated of the “infamous” dialectic, of alienation, of logical idealism (the only thing capable of ruining the ontological idealism of substance), like a cytoplasm deprived of its Hegelian nucleus. A Marx who will never bore you stiff with economic, social, or historical determination (those dirty, polluting things), except at the calends of the “last instance,” that is to say, precisely, never. Infrastructural determination, the decisive advance of historical dialectics, the only thing capable of reuniting determinism and freedom, can thus join the empyrean of the neo-Kantian thing-in-itself.
And now, all at once, Private Lordon sees this ultra-light Marxism disappear, only to see the hard-core version spring up in its place.
In this way, rid at last of the social threat, the marvelous societal world of “free and undistorted competition” between conatus can at last divide—sorry, “deconstruct”—those women and men whose “class consciousness” had at last arrived—and at what a price!—at the necessity of uniting. “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” had concluded the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
Clouscard has illustrated as closely as possible the effects of this (bloody) communitarian restoration when he declares that “capitalism carries civil war among the poor”: Shiites against Sunnis, machos against Femen, Serbs against Albanians, “Corsicans” against “French,” young against old (trendy young reactionaries against fuddy-duddy old progressives); Kurds against Iraqis, gays against straights, the unemployed against wage earners…
Their list is necessarily indefinite, insofar as all conflicts are welcome in it provided their motivation is no longer social but societal, or, in more precise terms, insofar as the opposing terms express an “already-there” irreducible to history, to economics, etc. A native, naturalist, substantialist already-there—in a word, an ontologizing one.
Does not the author of L’Être et le Code go so far as to say that “Nature,” unlike matter, is “posterior to history” (a triple distinction that ought, according to him, to be written into the primary-school curriculum)? And since we are pointing out a few of his obscenities, does he not let slip that those who, in ’68, proudly positioned themselves “to the left of the PC” rather embodied what was then stirring to the right of de Gaulle? A prophecy sadly confirmed by the record in privatizations to the credit of the Trotskyist Jospin, the election to the summit of the Medef of another “enragé,” the Maoist Kessler, the elevation of the Maoist and warmonger Barroso to the head of the European Commission, and the swarm of Trotskyist French doctors among Bush’s most neocon advisers.
Michel Clouscard does not say that the lib-lib is fascist; he confines himself to analyzing the historical process that leads from the leftist flash of lightning to the fascist storm. And if one considers that this reflection was carried out nearly half a century ago, one will admit that, compared with the retrospective models that the corpus of the social “sciences” is multiplying today to explain “how we could have come to this,” Clouscard’s historical science can at least boast of a prospective efficiency unequaled in point of predictability.
Our mission, then, will be to reassure our hero: it was only a bad dream. Ghosts do not exist. All this is in the past. The (cold) war is over; NATO has won the battle of Paris. In one generation we have gone from Hegel to Heidegger, from Marx to Nietzsche, from Aragon to Céline, from Merleau-Ponty to Onfray. All is well. Narcissus has liquidated Vulcan [6]. Is it not time, in these hours of generalized overhaul of the social sciences, to read Clouscard more calmly, leaving “nature” to the physicists?
We certainly cannot immunize him against a return of the social repressed, of the spectral mole, rising from the dialectical depths toward the ideological surface: this crisis is merciless…
“But willingly impassive, there rests, before it has ripened, fiercely,
that which busies itself below.” [7]
Dominique Pagani, August 2013
Preface to the new edition of Néofascisme et idéologie du désir (Delga, 2013)
First published on RAGEMAG
[1]. The “SLAM.”
[2]. Some excellent lines are devoted to the dialectic of “sight” and “oversight” in Reading Capital. They express the best Althusser: the one who still proceeds from his excellent training in the postwar French epistemological school.
[3]. Michel Clouscard, in Le Frivole et le Sérieux, taking up on his own account the “primary notions” of the Ethics, seems to answer in advance these misreadings concerning him:
“M.C.—I propose quite the opposite. You distort my words by subordinating Marxism to an ethics (…) Since you refer to Spinozism, I shall proceed by analogy. Ethics, morality, psychoanalysis are merely modes of the relations of production. These correspond to the attributes, to the two attributes: consumption and production. Attributes of the substance which, by distant analogy, is the process of production.”
[4]. “We can take three million votes from the PCF,” declares Tonton the hitman in 1971, that is, at the outset of his (resistible) contract: the French right in all its forms, Le Pen included, never hoped for as much.
[5]. Racine, Phèdre, Act 1, scene 1.
[6]. Michel Clouscard, Refondation progressiste, pp. 21-23.
[7]. Hölderlin, Celebration of Peace.