La nouveauté est révolutionnaire, la vérité aussi
(Novelty is revolutionary, so is truth)
Censier 1968
In a similar manner to Jacques Derrida, philosophers Jean-Louis Baudry and Jean-Joseph Goux combined in their theories—materiology and numismatics respectively—Marx, Saussure, and Freud. Baudry analyzed historically the metamorphosis of materialism, while Goux examined the homologies between money, meaning, and political power. In contrast to deconstruction, materiology and numismatics are “failed” theories that never made to the pantheon of “French theory.” While Baudry and Goux were both quite visible thinkers in the 1960s and 1970s, they were outsiders, in positions of dominated-dominated, for different reasons. Baudry was by profession a dentist and by hobby a philosopher, film theorist and novelist. Goux, for his part, exited the French intellectual field by accepting a teaching position in the US. They did not operate as full-time professional intellectuals and consequently could not insert themselves efficiently in powerful collaborative circles. Furthermore, they produced their theories after the major works by Derrida and Kristeva. Symbolically they were thus more the followers of Derrida than pioneers of speculative thinking.
In 1968, Tel Quel publishes a collective work entitled Théorie d’ensemble. On one hand, the title refers to a collective, a jointly created theory that has a common denominator, and on the other to mathematics, the paradigm science of sciences and its theory of sets. In the foreword to the 1980 paperback edition of the work, Sollers noted the following:
What is most essential about this book is based on a dream: to bring together reflection, and to use it to launch a general revolution. This “coming together” emerged from a burning awareness of the potential powers of literature, which the established and rooted repression attempted to belittle, slow down and oppress. Literature is thus not in the service of theory, as nearly everyone seemed to believe about Tel Quel at the time, but precisely the opposite. The sciences of language, philosophy, psychoanalysis helped to isolate the fabric of fiction, which is, to put it straight, endless (Sollers 1980: 7–8).
More clearly than any other publication of the 1960s, this book was linked to the avant-gardist theoretical tradition represented by the Russian formalists and futurists as well as the surrealists. Sollers admitted that each of the contributors to the book had, after its publication, retreated to their own corner. With hindsight, he noted:
That is a pity. This collection caused concern precisely because it did not respect boundaries, institutions or specialties. It shocked the scientific rationality, philosophical arrogance, literary indolence (unforeseen indolence), and the control of the publishing markets, which was increasingly becoming subject to the imperatives of fiscal management. It spoke to the university, and may yet do so again. It revealed those thousands of pages printed in the past that were guided by the desire to renounce knowledge, and, from its tumultuous subjectivism, posed questions to knowledge. Briefly put, the program meant juxtaposing oneself and an endless debate (Sollers 1980: 7–8).
The theory of the set had been preposterous. But Sollers kept the essential: the strict dichotomy between knowledge produced within the university and outside of it, a dichotomy that, undoubtedly, had only become more pronounced. However, this dichotomy could not be taken all that strictly, since many of the participants in the collective work, such as Barthes, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva, were at the time working within institutions of higher learning or research. In fact, they never left them.
Several important texts that never made it to the canon of French theory were published in the book. Jean-Louis Baudry’s article “Freud et la création littéraire” discusses Freud’s production from the perspective of writing and representation. Baudry attempts to find in Freud’s work the reasons that have kept psychoanalysis ensnared by speech and representation and prevented it from finding a textual fabric. To a relatively large extent, the article builds on Jacques Derrida’s essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture.” Baudry looks at Freud’s works from the perspective of textual dynamics and production. He is interested in how Freud interpreted the productions of artists, creators and poets. Baudry’s aim is to analyze how Freud used the term representation.
Baudry linked his theory to concrete changes in the society. In another work, Baudry noted that within the petit bourgeoisie, a group of active people was gradually emerging, forming a conscious avant-garde:
In the class struggle, the conscious avant-garde would thus be in the service of the proletariat, a specialized organ within the revolutionary organization, one whose role would be to neutralize ideology and its effects through direct action focused on the places where this ideology is being produced (Baudry 1971: 59).
On the whole, his argumentation differentiated the working of the signifier, the text and the petit bourgeois avant-garde from the bourgeoisie. In this way, Baudry justified a theoretical monopoly, and in this process the petit bourgeoisie thus defined became a crucial factor in the battle against ideology. The petit bourgeoisie superseded the proletariat. Sollers used a similar textual strategy of creating an intermediary, third category, in his essay “L’ouest s’éloigne”:
Just as we must maintain the break between science and ideology, we must also write a second break between ideology and the text … To not know the third term of the break (the text) would mean to simplify the break, to re-ideologize it, or, to be more precise, to break it off of language, to sever its tongue (Sollers 1971f).
Thus the text always takes the side of science, and ideology positions itself to oppose the science of the text as Sollers is developing it: to criticize Sollers is automatically to be ideological. But at the same time that science is identified with the text and materialism, and ideology with idealism, we are dealing with a battle between ideas—immaterial entities—where materialism throughout history takes different forms (for example, taoism=materialism, Confucianism=idealism). This indeed is the fundamental idea of Baudry’s new science, materiology: to be the science of the historical variations of the metaphysical battle between two power-ideas materialism and idealism. Baudry notes the following about his new branch of science:
Ideological battle is permanent. It is always the same antagonism and battle, the battle of materialism against the prevailing idealism. We will call the study of this battle, its various fields, its various forms … by the name materiology (Baudry 1971: 51).
According to the Marxist-Leninist journal Cinéthique, this theorizing aims to neatly combine in one packet Saussurean linguistics, Marx’s theory and psychoanalysis, by using homologies between structures, identifying historical time and using similar methodologies (Cinéthique 1971: 47). These homologies and the identity of historical time (the myth of One Time) are manifested also in Kristeva’s semanalysis, in Jean-Joseph Goux’s numismatics and in Sollers’ monumental history as the universal science of values. Goux attempted to bring together in a great synthesis the forms of economic and signifying production (see Goux 1970: 212n, 218n): the primitive form of production, iconographic and pictographic writing, control of the unconscious; the Asian form of production, ideographic and pre-conscious writing; the form of production of the ancient Greeks and Romans, alphabetical and conscious writing; and the capitalistic form of production—the après coup of the ancient Greek and Roman form of production—an alphabetical, idealistic and monetary economy which is ruled by the signifier “phallus.”
Compared to Baudry, Goux’s text “Marx et l’inscription du travail” has a somewhat different perspective. The focus of numismatics, Goux’s new science, is values. His objective is to find structural homologies between the texts of Marx and Freud, and to reveal the logic of history. According to Goux, Saussure’s sign not only has exchange value, but also utility value (Goux 1968: 174), which the dominant ideology has concealed. Goux’s fundamental idea is that, by a circuitous route, this utility value is also a means of production:
Just like a product is the means of production for other products (a circuitous route by which other products are produced—through the wasteful use of a given labor force) signs (entities formed by signs, or parts of such entities) form the means of production of other signs (other sign combinations) (Goux 1968: 173–4).
The work of the signifier as the process of meaning formation, has been repressed by bourgeois ideology at the expense of the exchange process of the sign—in other words, the circulation of signs or their communicative function. With the aid of another homology, Goux links the study of the process of producing meaning to Freud’s meaning—preceding silent work of the unconscious and to Marx’s analysis of the emergence of money which he presented in the first book of Capital. In other words, Goux finds a homology between the linguistic sign and the favoring of exchange values between material objects, a homology that also reveals a shared genetic process and structure formation. It is precisely through studying these that Goux is able to present the dialectic logic of the symbolization process. Starting with the homology between the sign and the material object, Goux deduces that everything that precedes the sign—or, more precisely, the process of writing or the trace and work—is the target of repression by the bourgeois ideology. Goux identifies the exchange value of the sign with speech, or, more widely, with communication, and thus manages to group behind his project Jacques Derrida’s analyses of the writing/spoken act. In a Derridian fashion, Goux formulates his outcome as follows (Goux 1968: 183):
Thus it is revealed that logocentrism and the fetish of material objects and money are co-conspirators. Generally speaking, just as “circulation obliterates the limits set by time, place and the individual for the exchange of products” (Capital I, Chapter III) and thus enables the hypostasis of value, so also the hypostatized meaning (logos) is not only the outcome of the concealment of the value of the productivity of signs, but also of parenthesizing the production relationships of signs.
Goux criticized Saussure for having shut the process of sign production outside of linguistic analysis. Saussure had written: “The tool used for producing the sign is totally irrelevant, since it does not interest the system … From the perspective of meaning, it is totally irrelevant whether I write letters in black or in white, embossed or engraved, with a feather or with scissors” (Saussure 1960: 165–6). In his critique, Goux follows the critique elaborated by Derrida and Kristeva, among others.
Baudry and Goux attempt to advance the science of text/writing, the sign and the text. An overall theoretical goal is to link together the working of the dream, work, and the production of significance. On one side of this theoretical setting we find capital, speech and consciousness, on the other labor, writing as a scriptural operation, and the unconscious. In this way, via numerous homologies and with the precision of a theoretical surgeon, a division into two opposing camps is neatly achieved. The objective is to bind together a non-working, speaking bourgeois ideology which functions only on the level of consciousness, and to juxtapose it with a revolutionary ideology that automatically is on the side of the working-class and the proletariat. On one side there are culture and the bourgeoisie, and on the other is labor and the working-class. The work-like nature of intellectual activity brought every intellectual worker closer to the working class. In Dialectique et histoire, Goux notes:
Thus the critique of political economics which exposes the fetish of money and the reification of exchange value, and which writes itself into historical materialism, has profound solidarity with the critique of metaphysical thinking in dialectical materialism. In both instances, the objective is to transcend invariance, unchangeability, immobility … towards a process either seeking to establish or to undermine balance, which is the same as the work of tensions, in other words the understanding of living contradictions, either in the society or in thought (Goux 1973: 34–5).
Petrification and unchangeability were the primary targets of Baudry’s and Goux’s criticism, which was in line with the objective of advancing the sciences of the text. A general problem with Goux, as well as with Baudry, Derrida, Sollers and Kristeva, was a lack of clear definitions for the concepts used and a tendency to argue on a purely formal level. Logocentrism and the concealment of work are implicitly equated with one another, as is the unconscious—which, as we recall, is being repressed—with labor and writing. This textual strategy is based on the following textual steps: first, one attempts to find a second level to a given problem, preferably a level of lower value or one subjected to the first level; secondly one shows that this level is repressed and forgotten; thirdly one equates the repressed level with some other corresponding level; and, fourthly, one shows through homologies that these two are equally repressed, whereby they can both be linked to, for example, bourgeois ideology. The theory was proved correct by the existence of all the repressed components, and it was thus necessary to bring them forward. With the magic of structural homology, it became possible to neatly package everything into a kind of everyman’s do-it-yourself-revolution kit (see, for instance, Rée 1985: 337–60).
There is a problem, of course, in that the bourgeois also work, even though work is linked with the proletariat and culture with the bourgeoisie. The proletariat also has an unconscious within which are hidden structures, power relationships and fantasies of the bourgeois political and social order. Logocentrism as a supremacy of speech, if one can even speak of such, does not only cover the levels of the bourgeois society, but the levels of all societies throughout history. The panoramic nature of logocentrism—a central ethical-political principle for finding direction in the jungle of competing ideas—conceals historical differences and development, lumping everything together under the metaphysics of the text. However, it is impossible to separate the components of the sign, the signifier and the signified, and to study the former alone, since it would literally have no meaning. In addition, these analysis totally overlook the social-historical level, despite it being in many respects the essential part of Marx’s work.
In many ways, these radical theories resembled the ideology of Baudelaire and other bohemians and decadents from the early nineteenth century. Sex, revolution etc. were all repressed. A relentless critique of moral codes was combined with a guilt complex and Romantic and individualistic unrealism. But the political revolution remained half-finished: the ennoblement, fetishization, and idealization of the text, work, the body etc. remained abstract operations. A Marxist might argue that the bourgeoisie propped up this unrealistic activity in order to support its own class rule. However, Tel Quel received backing from other rebellious intellectuals and communist intellectuals. For some time the Communist party succeeded in attracting young members of the intelligentsia to its ranks in its battle against the capitalist system. The fusion of political and theoretical revolutions had historically led to similar frictions between intellectuals and the Communist party. Problems arose specifically when a revolution of values within a text was equated with socialist revolution. With respect to Russian futurists, Leon Trotsky did not hesitate: he branded their thinking pre-revolutionary thought. In a similar vein, Lenin ordered that the print of Mayakovski’s work 150,000,000 would be limited to 1,500 copies precisely in order to more effectively fight against leftism. About Mayakovski, Lenin had said:
I understand nothing about this enthusiasm over Mayakovski. His verses are nothing but absolute gibberish with the word “revolution” tacked onto them. In my view, revolution does not need clowns à la Mayakovski playing games with it. It is futile to assert that Mayakovski is a hundred times better than Béranger (quoted in Besançon 1977: 238–9).
Theoretical radicalism had its own symbolic logic that did not follow the symbolic logic of political radicalism. Tel Quel’s Maoist turn accentuated this contradiction, as will be shown in the next chapter.