Un flic dort dans chacun de nous, il faut le tuer
(A cop sleeps inside every one of us, we must kill him)
Censier 1968
In French intellectual culture, reason and morality have historically been merged to such extent that philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once declared that the political convictions of French intellectuals are nothing but moral attitudes (Maurice Merleau Ponty quoted in Rémond 1959: 6). In the 1960s, reason seemed to have the upper hand over morality. When talking about the French intellectual achievements of the 1960s, connoisseurs mostly remember certain thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida and Foucault. Others think of the concept “structuralism,” an ism that attempted to make humanist and social sciences into real sciences, largely by imitating the model of linguistics. In the second half of the 1960s, structuralism became a general intellectual a priori, and its relative value declined. The birth of post-structuralism can be dated to the end of the 1960s and early 1970s when, largely through the input of the so-called Yale school, American literary criticism began to criticize the mechanistic qualities and scientific utilitarianism (logocentrism) of structuralism, using psychoanalytic and deconstructive vocabulary in this critique. Heideggerian connotations were obvious.
In their book La pensée 68 (1985), the French philosophers Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut focused on re-interpretations of Heideggerian philosophy in French philosophy of the 1960s, limiting, however, their discussion to certain figures (Bourdieu, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan). They coined the term “thought 68,” as if styles of thought could be so precisely dated, to talk about this form of philosophizing, which was characterized by a critique of reason, humanism, and the subject or subjectivity. Following this script, Bourdieu is interpreted as a combination of Marx and Althusser, Foucault of Nietzsche and Heidegger, Lacan of Heidegger and Freud, and Derrida of Heidegger and Derrida himself. Ferry and Renaut emphasize the critique of humanism and reason, and, through structural linguistics, the move towards scientification and the tendency to integrate and rationalize elements not previously rationalized (the unconscious, madness …). The emphasis on structural linguistics links this theorizing to the rise of the humanist sciences through structural anthropology, and to the emergence of certain schools of humanist and social sciences (the so-called Paris school, structural constructivism, structural Marxism, etc.). Likewise, it highlights the symbolic revolution that the 1960s thinkers carried out against the previous generation.
In his well-known book Le mirage linguistique, Thomas Pavel talks about moderate, scientific and speculative structuralism (Pavel 1988: 12–13, for a critique Lefebvre 1971). Pavel concentrates on the uses of structural linguistics in theorizations. Pavel’s classification follows the formula science-ideology, where scientific applications are classified as either hard or soft, and literary, political or aesthetic applications are considered speculation. Judging by the concepts used and the critique presented by Pavel in his book, his own preferences side with moderate structuralism. But bringing up the inner contradictions in or shortcomings of Derrida’s interpretation of Hjelmslev (Pavel places Derrida within speculative structuralism) or Lévi-Strauss’ phonological model (Pavel considers Lévi-Strauss a representative of scientific structuralism) does not as such suffice to explain more clearly how structuralism developed into a universal paradigm, beyond which French intellectuals dare not tread.
In order to distinguish themselves from French phenomenology, Sartreism and its view of politics, the new generation of intellectuals who began to emerge at the end of the 1950s let themselves be labeled as belonging to Lévi-Strauss’ rather than to Sartre’s club. This choice of labels revolved around certain packages of concepts (bundles), relatively heterogeneous yet contradictory wholes that were not reducible to the dichotomy of right or wrong. Labeled first and foremost through negation, attributed identities are always unavoidably inaccurate and unjust. In other words, the process of labeling or becoming labeled—which are inseparable since any act is always itself labeled—does not necessarily correspond to the subject’s own view of his/her own acts.
Subjectivism, intentionality and reference were for these thinkers at least initially only secondary problems, and their critique targeted the previous intellectual generation. The new 1960s generation was characterized by eclecticism, which became a central criterion of excellence. They valued daring hypotheses, the ability to perceive hidden analogies, in short, intellectual danger and the overstepping of academic conventions, all of which were combined with a wide range of eclectic references (from poetry to mathematics, via ethnology and film criticism). Eclectic erudition provided the external hallmarks of novelty and a definition of excellence emerged where the most important component was the ability to read and interpret texts. The general scientifization process led to reading and to a “science of the text”: “symptomatic reading” in Althusser’s terminology, “deconstruction” in Derrida’s framework, “the working of the signifier” to the Lacanians, “intertextuality” for Kristeva and her followers. All of these processes were distinguished from mere commentary on a text in the way an avant-garde artist is distinguished from a primary grade art teacher.
In France, the ideal type intellectual has been on the left and independent from any kind of establishment. In reality, however, French intellectuals have had to comprise with worldly authorities such as the Catholic Church and the French Communist Party. This was especially clear in the 1960s, when, seeking to develop a total critique of society that resonated with the young public’s aspirations, radical intellectuals flirted with the Communist party. The 1960s “neurosis of the text” was linked to more general intellectual effervescence the central terms of which were “signifier” and “text,” and “structure” was the central axiom of science. Theoretical-intellectual updating led to a new hierarchy of academic subjects and scientific objects, where the upper echelons were occupied by “sciences of the text” (linguistics, semiology, Lacanian psychoanalysis, literary theory …), i.e. inner reading; in the middle was ethnology (Lévi-Strauss and his followers); and on the bottom were sociology (Bourdieu) and psychology or external reading. The inner economy of a text became its truth, and that was where science had to direct itself. In France, the foundation for this linguistic turn was in the works of the so-called nouveau roman, which attempted to create a new literature on the ruins of the old. A key journal in these aspirations was Tel Quel, a theoretical-literary publication issued four times a year, edited from the start (1960) by Philippe Sollers. In the 1960s, a significant group of thinkers gathered around the journal, among them Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva. As they emerged at the end of the 1950s, the members of the Tel Quel group became developers of the so-called nouveau roman.
In the 1950s, the nouveau roman presented an alternative to young authors. This development was linked with broader intellectual transformations, mainly the development of the humanities and the social sciences. The nouveau roman presented an objective, “scientific” literature that functioned also as a way to tap on intellectual radicalism, represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss and structuralism. This radicalization culminated in the events of May 68 when students and writers occupied the building of the venerated Société des gens de lettres.
The nouveau roman attempted to tear down the individual-centered and psychologizing traditional novel, which it wished to replace with meticulous description and an objective style. It resembled what the famous critic Saint-Beuve said about Gustave Flaubert’s way of writing: “Flaubert manipulates the pen as some others manipulate the surgeon’s scalpel.” Protagonists used the stream-of-consciousness technique invented by James Joyce. Compared with the surrealists and their automatic writing, the crucial difference was that the nouveau roman emphasized mathematics and the structure of a literary work. The nouveau roman also attempted to question the roles of both the reader and the author. In the 1950s, the philosophy of the nouveau roman was called phenomenological realism, neorealism, or the school of the gaze. By admitting the independence of fiction from reality, the nouveau roman attempted to get away from literature’s function as a reference (conventionalism). As Jean Ricardou, one of the movement’s leading theorists put it, “fiction is no longer writing about adventure but the adventure of writing” (Ricardou 1971: 33).
In the text, conflicts between individuals were replaced by battles between sentences, and priority was given to grammatical units. Grammatical units replaced unchanging individuals. Paraphrasing Roland Barthes, objects were just there; they were never something. Writing (écriture) had become an all-encompassing truth that hinted at nothing. “On a white plate on the kitchen table there are three thinly cut slices of ham” (Alain Robbe-Grillet). With textualization, even characters in books became mere words and slaves to letters (lending to the development of letterism). According to the philosophy of the nouveau roman, language was not a neutral tool for representing the world. The nouveau roman attempted to discard the classical view of language as some transparent bridge between thought and world—largely following the critique put forward by the surrealists. The text was like a body, which, when it functions well, is unnoticed and problem-free. The literary theory of the nouveau roman was, all in all, strongly oriented towards processes. The concept of writing that Barthes developed in the 1960s immediately found followers from within the nouveau roman movement. However, many of Barthes’s reforms could be traced back to the Russian formalists and futurists (Bradbury and McFarlane 1976: 269–70). In his time, Barthes was important in bringing to France the thoughts of Russian formalists such as Viktor Schlovsky. The translations of Russian formalists like Viktor Schlovsky by the Bulgarian literary scholar Tzvetan Todorov were well received. The literary theorist Gérard Genette, for instance, noted “in 1966 this collection of texts, the most recent writing of which dates from 1928, comes at the right time and speaks to us in the present tense” (Genette 1966: 34). Todorov himself explained his task thus, testifying to the relatively closed nature of French intellectual life in the 1960s:
When I arrived in France in 1963 from my small country which was afflicted with xenophobia, I was surprised to realize that in the field of literary theory the French did not know about what had been written in Bulgarian or Russian—which are exotic languages—nor what had been written in German or even in English. My first intellectual task here was to translate from Russian into French (Todorov 1986: 20).
From then on, the word would become the lash of a whip, as Aeschylus had already said, and the same lash also slashed both humanity and sanctity, to say nothing of politics, from the text. Authors no longer saw themselves standing in front of their products as the creators of their books, but rather as being inside their text as a word among words and letters. All that remained was the time and space of words.
The space of the text was re-organized according to mathematical principles, yet gave authors absolutely free rein to construct their books. For example, the murder in a murder mystery might not take place in the beginning but at the end, the murder being caused by the text. Books and texts became problematic entities, where combining grammatical units together and conducting syntactic and lexicological experiments was central. Literature had become a great experiment, used to prove the literary superhuman’s absolute liberty in relation to the world. The body of language, whose holiness was incessantly guarded in the classical novel, had been transformed into the object of abuse and violence. In the fashion of the Prague school, linguistics was used to find homonyms, paronyms, synonyms, variants and oppositions.
The nouveau roman made a clear distinction between political beliefs and literary praxis, although its theoretical foundation remained formalistic. Literature and politics were thus separated. In the texts of the nouveau roman, contents emerge from the interplay and linkage of forms. As the author Bernard Pingaud aptly said (Pingaud 1968a: 8–9), “its [language’s] essence is in its activity.” Problems arise, however, when language and the world are radically separated in this fashion. How can we understand the world, or can we understand it at all? This problem can be solved only by claiming that the world is like a text. Thus the text becomes an omnipotent theoretical principle. Later in the 1960s, this argument was boosted by Jacques Lacan’s motto that “the unconscious is structured like a language.” The discontinuity was not located between the world and words, as it had been for Karl Marx and other political theorists, for instance, but between the unconscious and the text that exposed it. Following the idealist tradition, the reference, or the world, had been reduced to a by-product of language. As we shall see later, Barthes and his followers assimilated political revolution with textual revolution.
It is interesting to note how close the nouveau roman is to the naturalism of Flaubert and his contemporaries: the endeavor of its protagonists to refrain from practical action, the cold expression and description, the avoidance of morality and the renunciation of life. In the nouveau roman these aesthetic requirements became ontological and scientific principles, whereby the text is granted primacy relative to life. This elevation of the text is thus in a sense the elevation of art and a certain aesthetics. The primary role of art relative to life not only reflects an ideology of art for art’s sake, but also a modern Bovaryism, the forgery of life. This development unites the nouveau roman to the literary tradition of the entire twentieth century, a tradition that emphasizes two factors (Hauser 1982: 78 and 79): the routinization and mechanization of life; and the destructive, relentless character of time. Both of these are reflected in the works of the nouveau roman in the form of localization of time and temporalization of space, a fragmentation of time that is manifested as the abandonment of linearity and the disintegration of the subject’s identity.
These works were, of course, wholly the products of the subject’s imagination and associations. A paradox arose, since their authors were writing elitist and abstruse texts while declaring that they were intended for everyone. A common feature of the nouveau roman was reification, the absolute priority of the object over the subject, or over the problematic subject or protagonist of the novel. Protagonists had disappeared from texts. But instead of concentrating on depicting the objective world, as did some of the representatives of the nouveau roman, especially Alain Robbe-Grillet in his earliest works, these writers preferred—to distinguish themselves—to replace this objectivism with a description of the subject’s process of disintegration.
Theoretically, these thinkers attempted, with varying degrees of success, to link together the theories of Marx, Saussure and Freud. For many of them, a central problem became the status of the subject in western philosophy and science. By the subject was meant the thinking, speaking, acting, doing or writing agent (Roudiez 1992: 19). Julia Kristeva, for example, attempted in her semanalytical theory to scientifically explain the process of the subject’s formation. Without Marx, Kristeva’s theory would be idealist; without Freud she would return to a kind of mechanical materialism. In their scientific aspirations, theorists like Kristeva and Sollers, in their own view, succeeded in avoiding ideology and in creating a new, materialistic theory of signification and knowledge. Following Barthes we could say that ideology was manifested as something natural and self-evident. According to Jacques Derrida, significance forms a so-called transcendental content or signified, which governs other meanings. This significance is perpetuated and remains outside of criticism. Kristeva in turn linked ideology to the subject’s consciousness, to humanism and to idealism. Ideology creates a consistent, stable and unified subject to which meaning is attached. If ideology creates the subject, then language creates ideology, since every representation in language presents certain meanings as natural and self-evident. For these theorists to escape ideology and idealism, they had to create a theory that would avoid the transcendental signified and the representative function of language. Julia Kristeva’s solution was, following Lacan’s view of the unconscious (Lacan 1966b), to talk about a structure without a center. In Kristeva’s framework, the formation of meaning and the subject were both always processes of becoming something and never actually being anything, so that a center could not be created through fixation. Perpetual motion guaranteed that no meaning could become dominant: through constant motion, all meanings are equal influences of language. This was a perfect metaphor for what was happening in the theoretical and social fields, rebellion against the bourgeois order.