P.-P.J.: We’ve been focusing on the question of world and number. Simultaneously, we’re confronted with the question of community and number, which demands the same insistent interrogation: Do we have the necessary concepts to think this proliferation or do we have to invent a new ontology? I’d like to invite you to first clarify this notion of community by differentiating it from related notions, such as, for example, crowds, which inspired Baudelaire and sparked Benjamin’s thought, or masses, classes, and the multitude.
J.-L.N.: It’s interesting to take up a series of terms as you’re doing because it almost spells out a history. I realize this now because you say “crowds,” “masses,” “classes,” and “multitude”; one can add “people,” which has always flowed through these notions, and “community,” which is like referring back to a lost love who is found again and then lost anew perhaps … This history is important because it simultaneously accounts for an increase in number, which was actually an increase in number within countries in modern civilization and then in the industrial revolution, and for a change in the perception a society had of itself. You mentioned Baudelaire and Benjamin. There’s a moment in which modern society perceives itself as a society of crowds, which perhaps in some respects wasn’t completely new. For example, in the seventeenth century Boileau mentioned it in one of his satires, “Les embarras de Paris” [The Troubles of Paris], even though the society of that time did not truly perceive itself as a crowd.1 One may recall Horace’s expression: Odi profanum vulgus et arceo,2 heard as a condemnation of the tastes and opinions of common people [le vulgaire]. A Roman from that time could sense something of the crowd in Rome and confuse it with the plebes, and this is still the case when one speaks about the modern crowd. Which means that it’s a purely urban phenomenon—it’s always in a city that the crowd appears as a crowd. In the countryside, when peasants used to gather in the context of a war or revolt, one would speak about troops or gangs, suggesting a kind of swarming and proliferating, which not only corresponded to an increase in number, but also a collapse of what offered relatively natural frameworks or places of coexistence, which were, in reality, communities.
P.-P.J.: It’s hard to forget a crowd that was very famous, one could say, the crowd sung by one of the last century’s most popular artists, the crowd of Edith Piaf.3
J.-L.N.: Absolutely: “Carried away by the crowd that drags us along …” This song reminds me of an American book that received a lot of attention in the 1950s: The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman.4 It’s a very apt expression because, since the nineteenth century, what was considered to be characteristic of the crowd is that one is alone in it: The crowd is a numerous group, a tumult of movements that goes in every direction and nowhere. But it’s also a gathering that can be subject to passions, panic, commotions, rage, enthusiasm … Hence the attention given to crowd phenomena since the start of the twentieth century.
P.-P.J.: On this note, you wrote an article some time ago with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, “La panique politique,”5 which brings me to my next two questions: Are there political affects, and should one think about social bonds through Freud’s notion of “identification” (which he was never completely satisfied with)? And in the end, is it possible to determine what belongs to the order of the affective if, in a certain way, community is also a shared affect?
J.-L.N.: Every word you’ve used (crowd, mass, etc.) could be distinguished from the point of view of affect because behind these words lies the idea of community. Yet the idea of community has been defined by affect ever since Ferdinand Tönnies introduced the distinction between “community” (Gemeinschaft) and “society” (Gesellschaft).6 One is a gathering centered around inwardness, around the shared intimacy of an affect; the other is the organization of the balance of power or interests, and contracts that rely on a cold affect. Here it’s hard not to think of Zarathustra’s statement: “State is the coldest of all cold monsters,”7 though of course it’s out of the question to mix up society with the State. In any case—and only if we come back to this issue—what interests us, for now, is the crowd as a mode of gathering, as the true witness from the point of view of being-together [l’être-ensemble] in our modern and contemporary era. We’re still in the era of crowds, even if these crowds have taken on certain aspects that have transformed them into something else perhaps. For example, the group of spectators at a great game is united by a common interest but they are susceptible to enthusiastic or frantic behavior. Let’s also think about rock concerts, which then became “raves” or “techno” concerts: These are gatherings that have certain aspects of the crowd while aiming to be something else, like a community, a communion.
P.-P.J.: This makes me think of a talk called “The World Rock Scene”8 that you gave at La Villette,9 in which you remarked simply that rock emerged in the postwar period, that is, after the failure of several attempts to develop communities, which took a bad turn, and at the same time, at the end of the era of metaphysics …
J.-L.N.: After the notion of “crowd,” you mentioned “mass,” a word that we’ve almost forgotten about today, though it used to be very present, perhaps until after the postwar period. The adjective “working” frequently accompanied it: “the working masses” was an expression that was used particularly in a positive sense, by people who were involved in social conflict. But the laboring masses could also …
P.-P.J.: … be dangerous. One recalls Louis Chevalier’s book in the 1950s, which speaks about “laboring classes and dangerous classes.”10
J.-L.N.: The word “mass” comes later than the French Revolution. In fact, the mass is the idea of the crowd, but considered as a true togetherness, and so the idea of “laboring mass,” taken positively, evokes a force, precisely that of the mass. In a pejorative sense, the notion of “dangerous masses” refers to the power of the uprising of these same masses. But I think the sense of “mass” has become quite mixed up with that of the “crowd” as well as with one of the two main meanings of the word “people”—the lower class people [le bas peuple] or little people [le petit peuple]. “Mass” is thus a forgotten word today because we’ve given up on a certain vocabulary of struggle in which “mass” used to either refer to class in a positive way, or to the majority of society contemptuously in a repulsive way. Today this is also the case with the word “people,” which is almost never used in a pejorative way. When someone says “people,” one is supposed to hear sovereign people, the dignity of the people, etc. Yet our society, which is unable to acknowledge that there’s a difference between an elite and a people, enacts this very difference even more so despite the fact that this hierarchy is less and less indicated symbolically (Bill Gates and his kind are just like you and me).
P.-P.J.: Whether one thinks about Georges Sorel,11 Freud,12 or Elias Canetti,13 for example, one should mention how recent this interest in the phenomenon of the mass is, and in the collective in general, which appeared as a new kind of reality that we realized we didn’t know how to think about.
J.-L.N.: Then comes “class,” a word that’s much older than its Marxist usage because, in fact, it was already used in Rome (classis). Class is actually a way to classify a society, to indicate a social stratum, a group of citizens with an official administrative or legal criterion. With the French revolution—the “working class” appeared in 1797—a classification came that was not handed out by the administration nor by the law of society, but was derived from an analytic view of society. The difference between class and mass doesn’t actually come from an instinctive view of a society that sees itself as a crowd or mass; this distinction presupposes a tool of analysis that establishes how a society is arranged or distributed, thus raising the question of the law of this distribution.
We’re coming now to the notion of “class conflict.” This expression had a strong impact when it first appeared, and it became a kind of necessary point of reference for at least a century—let’s say from 1880 to 1980. The enemies of class conflict could not pretend to be participants on the side of the bourgeois class, yet they had to construct complicated intellectual operations to disprove its existence. Frankly, they could deny the existence of the conflict, but they could not completely deny the existence of classes. The debate concerned the conflict more than the classes; how to calm class conflict in favor of an understanding between the classes, a share of the company profits for the laboring classes or the employees, etc. But for a very long time, the “class” tool of analysis, with or without the indication of conflict, was unavoidable; the “working class” was the exemplary class, and the bourgeois class, which was more differentiated, didn’t agree as much to be called bourgeoisie.
I’m still very struck by the fact that we’ve completely abandoned this vocabulary after this century, which was permeated by the idea of class (except when fascisms actually wiped out the opposition between these classes with a “mass” that was transfigured into a people while the people themselves were transfigured into the “people’s community” or Volksgemeinschaft). One should take into account the critical analysis of Marxism that came from within Marxism itself and leftist circles—I’m thinking in particular about the positions that Jacques Rancière has taken. It’s remarkable that at a certain moment this author completely refused to analyze in terms of class in order to replace this notion with the notion of the “no part” [sans part] or those who do not really take part in the City.14 There’s no politics unless the “no part” manifest themselves in a movement in order to claim or demand their right to have a part. Rancière, I think, wanted to refuse the idea of an opposition between classes because it would have to go through a reversal of domination by way of class dictatorship, which Alain Badiou to the contrary still considers necessary. For Badiou, of course, a dictatorship of the proletariat still needs to be put in place at a certain point. Rancière made this entire working class culture known because he was almost the only one to work on it. What’s surprising is that Rancière’s position almost turns the character of the conflict into a recourse that can no longer be the instrument of a party’s calculated politics, rather than making the character of the conflict a secondary determination, even though he doesn’t dismiss that the conflict may take the form of a revolt or insurrection. I also think that this thinker’s position is connected to a loss of confidence in a history whose aim is the elimination of classes. We know that in the last thirty years, the gap between the “rich” and the “poor” has increased considerably, from every point of view, and the objective situation of confrontation has intensified. But the self-interpretation of society is no longer expressed in terms of conflict. This thought’s key word, “exploitation,” has been replaced by “domination”; one may wonder why this is the case …
When we used to speak of exploitation, we thought we were able to identify the exploiter, the capitalist in his individual form, with his top hat and cigar, who makes the worker work and extorts surplus value from them; this simply consisted in recalling Marx’s analysis. Still today, no one would dare say that the extortion of surplus value doesn’t exist. But the notion of exploitation and the notion of class conflict along with it were connected to the idea that one could calculate surplus value. Surplus value has been completely given up on. Still this is what Marx pursued in all his work, just as others did. But the incalculable character of surplus value lies in the fact that what Marx considered to be value in itself—absolute value, that is, the value of human work, not only in terms of productive force but as the truth or reality of human beings expressing themselves in work—cannot be defined or quantified. So it remains true that some work for a wage, and we no longer try to say whether it pays a just amount for the value of their work, and at the same time, this wage is incomparable to what for others is actually not their wage but their income, the profit they make off their capital.
P.-P.J.: We can identify another gimmick in the relationship of exploitation. In general, the one who exploits is concerned with the workers’ survival but not with their quality of life. The exploiter’s gimmick, then, consists in having the workers themselves produce the objects that they must acquire in order to live the ideal kind of life that the exploiter embodies. In almost every economy that relies on the idea of “consumption,” it’s a question of putting forward a system of values—the values of those who dominate—and presenting them as desirable, common, and able to be shared by all.
J.-L.N.: Yes, you’re right. What this actually means is that, in this entire issue of the classes, we end up with a re-homogenization of society. But it takes place, as you suggest, by copying an image, the image of the dominant classes, which is nothing other than the greatest power, financially speaking, to acquire what everyone is supposed to long to possess.
P.-P.J.: Whether one possesses them or not, the same values are valued.
J.-L.N.: Exactly. In fact, the values that are valued are always very well defined by Marx as general equivalency, or money; the value that’s valued is the value into which everything can be converted at any moment. We’re also no longer in the realm of the difference that existed in the past between a prince’s possessions and a craftsman or peasant’s possessions. Consumption opens up another realm entirely and refers to the greatest number in a way that’s even more deceitful or perverse one could say. The society of consumption is not only a society that’s regulated by a sort of endless desirability for a growing quantity of things that are presented as ends in themselves, even though they are only means of sustaining other things. It’s also a society that favors number, even a large number of objects. There’s a value in a large number itself, in accumulation for accumulation’s sake.
P.-P.J.: What you’re telling me reminds me of a very combative text by Gérard Granel in which he speaks about teaching and remarks that the university is already entirely “commodified,” meaning that culture itself is part of a social behavior of accumulation.15 One “does” the exhibitions, for example, a practice that characterizes a class or social group. One has to have seen this or that.
J.-L.N.: Yes. Speaking of which, the recent success of certain exhibitions is something that perplexes me because I’m torn between the description you’re offering and the desire to resist, to say: “Come on! It’s consumption, even though it’s not the same as watching television all day.”
P.-P.J.: I may have been mistaken in my example, which was that of art, because my remark was about art exhibitions, and was based perhaps on an “indignation,” which itself relies on a certain conception of art.
J.-L.N.: When one thinks about these exhibitions, the recent one on Monet, for example, that had to stay open overnight, I wonder if there’s not another desire that goes along with the consumeristic excitement, the desire perhaps to encounter this thing that we call a work of art, which has always been distant and which has now become closer.
P.-P.J.: It’s the same for tourism in a way.
J.-L.N.: Yes, it’s the same for tourism, it’s true. One could almost say that in consumption, which in fact is full of the idea of accumulation and is permeated by general equivalency, one finds both the large number as a value in itself somehow, and the conversion of a large number of people into a large number of things. This society of the crowd, mass, and class has become a society of travel, movies …
Could the notion of “multitude” assist us in our situation in any way? This word was very recently brought into theoretical vocabulary, notably through the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt16 and in the journal Multitudes. I have the feeling that we’ve been wanting to actually take back the large number with this word at a moment when and in a condition in which we’re not finding a form to seize it with: “people” was forgotten, “mass” was in rough shape, and “class” was an organized form … The “multitude” is a plurality in itself; it is considered to be, by itself, what was expected of class, that is, a certain force, a dynamism. Multitude or multitudes are by themselves energetic; they do something, but the thing they do isn’t within the order of the fight, which implies organization and engaging head-to-head. Instead, multitudes produce something of the order of an internal agitation, sometimes a deconstruction, a destabilization, a mobilization. We’re witnessing all kinds of collective movements—more and more frequently for economic motives, and for ideological reasons (“marriage for all”) as well as for political ones (the “indignados,” occupy)—in which traditional organizations are not very present and in which the temporary facilitators typically don’t last long. In the same vein, the so-called “social” networks (a strange name as if society was happening there, which is actually not entirely wrong!) don’t set up any “party” or “union” or even “movement,” but rather shape malleable, metastable groups … For Negri, these movements bring desire and libido into play directly, as he explains in his book about Venus.17 And, in fact, one has to talk about collective affects. I’ll come back to this if you don’t mind.
But first I’d like to call for caution: I understand the movement that may have led to thinking in terms of affects, but at the same time, I’m very skeptical of this because I have the impression that, as a result, an unintentional converse reaction is taking place. (I’m not accusing Negri or others of being “deceitful servants of capital” in the words of the anti-imperialistic expression that dates back to the wars of liberation.) Having abandoned the idea that there’s a historical subject of the conflict—the class enemy—one places confidence in the non-organized swarm; I have the impression that this is already over. What could have presented itself as the possibility of the emergence of another form of subversion, or at least one of transformation, isn’t talked about much nowadays.
P.-P.J.: If one chooses to remain in an irenic vision of the relationships between human beings, how does one manage to think about conflict while deconstructing traditional concepts? I’m thinking very specifically about what Jacques Derrida said when he returned from Prague, which you and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe mentioned in your book Retreating the Political.18 For example, how would one deconstruct the notions of freedom, rights, and the subject despite the fact that for some these are the weapons they have at their disposal in the heat of the conflict?
J.-L.N.: I think this issue has changed somewhat. At the time of the Prague events, so to speak, when we were deconstructing, say, the notion of freedom, it’s true that we’d find ourselves in a kind of contradiction in relationship to people who were purely and simply undergoing imprisonment and being deprived of freedom. We couldn’t speak to our audience about deconstructing a freedom they didn’t yet have. It was no less true—I already thought this at that time—that we could legitimately say that once they would have our freedom, they would find themselves confronted with the problems it entails.
P.-P.J.: Which does seem to be the case after the fall of the Soviet regimes.
J.-L.N.: Yes, and I could address the same issue now in a more contemporary way. Some Chinese people read an interview in Libération in which I touched upon the idea of emancipation.19 I said that we spoke a lot about the emancipation of humanity in order to oppose all the civil and religious tyrannies of the Ancien Régime that society endured and also all the tyrannies that came after it. Nevertheless, the expression “the emancipation of humanity,” which no longer holds much value, isn’t entirely interchangeable with that of justice. Nowadays, the whole world is emancipated at least potentially in terms of law, even though some enormous injustices continue to exist. Still one continues to stumble on this word “emancipation”—a leftist word, perhaps from a more refined left than the former Marxist left—and in the end its endurance brings us to ask the question: What is an entirely emancipated humanity? More precisely, from what is humanity emancipated? This question is close to the question of alienation, this word of Marx, who seems to call for a disalienation that’s an integral reappropriation of something—we don’t even know what it is precisely, or even whether it makes sense to say that it took place before or that it will take place later on.
This interview was going to be published in Beijing in the journal Thinkers. Its editors translated it and asked me to add a few explanatory comments, arguing that the idea of emancipation very much continues to represent something for the Chinese. But what does it represent for these men and women? The emancipation from the Chinese regime … I agreed and tried to say very quickly what the Western history of the word and thing is, indicating that emancipation is probably not always and everywhere an empty word, that one might really need to be emancipated from an authority, a tutelage, a despotism, a tyranny, and so on, but that at the same time, a big part of the experience of the modern world leads one to assess that there’s no absolutely emancipated subject either. The word “emancipation” comes from Roman law: An emancipated slave became a fully free man. Today, on the other hand, it’s perhaps no longer possible to think about an absolutely emancipated human being.
P.-P.J.: You wrote that, in modernity, something new lies in the fact that it continues to speak of emancipation but without knowing who is emancipated or for what aim. Here it’s a question about the possibility of realizing an identity that one appropriates for oneself.
J.-L.N.: Absolutely. And we’re dealing with a question that’s come up before: Who? We don’t know who we emancipate—we say it’s man, but actually, since we don’t know who man is, we don’t know who we emancipate … The same question arises when it’s a question of emancipating a “people”; “who” or “what” are we speaking about?
1. [Boileau-Despréaux, Satires, ed. Albert Cahen (Paris: Librarie E. Droz, 1932), 83–89.—Trans.]
2. Horace, Odes III.1.1, 22–23 BCE. [“I shun the uninitiated crowd and keep it at a distance,” Horace, Odes and Epodes, ed. trans. Niall Rudd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 141; “I have no use for secular outsiders, / I bar the gross crowd,” Horace, Odes, trans. James Michie (New York: Duke University Press, 2002), 117.—Trans.]
3. The song La Foule [“The Crowd”] was performed by Edith Piaf in 1957, with lyrics and music by Michel Rivgauche.
4. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
5. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, “La panique politique,” in Retreating The Political, trans. Simon Sparks (New York: Routledge, 1997), 1–28.
6. Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. Abhandlung des Communismus und des Socialismus als empirischer Culturformen (Leipzig: Fues’s Verlag, 1887).
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1978), 48.
8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “La scène mondiale du rock,” in Rue Descartes 60 (2008).
9. [La Villette is an area in northeast Paris that contains a museum of music.—Trans.]
10. Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous Classes in Paris During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century, trans. Frank Jellineck (New York: H. Fertig, 1973).
11. Georges Sorel, Reflections On Violence, ed. Jeremy Jennings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
12. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1959).
13. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1960).
14. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics And Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).
15. Gérard Granel, “Appel à ceux qui ont affaire avec l’Université en vue d’en préparer une autre,” in Erres 9–10 (1980). Reprinted in De l’Université (Mauvezin: T.E.R., 1982), 77–96.
16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004).
17. Antonio Negri, Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo. Nove lezione impartite a me stesso (Rome: Manifestolibri, 2000).
18. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, Retreating the Political, trans. Simon Sparks (New York: Routledge, 1997).
19. “Le sens de l’histoire a été suspendu,” interview with Éric Aeschiman, Libération, June 4, 2008.