In writing this book, I have tried to understand what the history, with all its twists and turns, of a handful of paintings attributed to Poussin can tell us, and in particular to discover why they triggered such a collective outpouring of energy, controversy and money over so many years. This investigation has made me reflect on the true nature of a painting, on the value – both economic and aesthetic – of a work of art, on the origin of the aura associated with creators and with works of art and, finally, on the role of art in our supposedly secular societies.
In order to explain the trajectory of such a highly coveted object, I gambled on taking a series of historical regressions. The present is weighed down by the accumulated layers of the past, which linger in our institutions and our categories of thought. The recent history of The Flight into Egypt would therefore not have been what it is without the historical construction of Poussin’s fame and his status as an artist regarded by certain art historians as the greatest French painter of all time. This fame would in itself have been meaningless without the existence of a distinction between artistic and artisanal domains. And these domains in turn would not have taken their current form had they not come to be associated with the sacred as opposed to the profane. Yet this opposition between sacred and profane is intrinsically linked to the social relations of domination, and a historical and anthropological investigation enables us to follow the closely linked transformations in the different forms taken by the sacred and by the exercise of power.
One of the major observations to emerge from this book is the fact that, contrary to claims of an ongoing disenchantment with the world, the sacred has never really disappeared from our world, but instead has altered and transformed itself to the point of becoming invisible. Social magic is omnipresent in the domain of economics, politics, law, science or art in the same way it is in those of mythology or religion, for it is the effect of the enchantment produced by power on those who tacitly recognize its authority. It is this enchantment which transforms the sculpture of an animal into a totem, a fragment of metal into a coin, a scrap of paper into a title deed, a proof of nobility, an educational qualification, or ordinary water into holy water. It is this same social magic which transforms a painting from the status of a simple copy to that of an autograph masterpiece, increasing the price of the object through the performative operation of attributing it to an old master.
Dipping into the domains of anthropological, historical and sociological knowledge, I have set out to question the foundations of belief on which our institutions and our perceptions rest. That has led me to think afresh about art and culture, by demonstrating that even before their role as emancipators, these are linked to relations of power and that, behind the admiration of works of art, domination can always be glimpsed.
The crossing of frontiers that I have authorized myself to undertake1 between disciplines and between specialized fields within each discipline has enabled me to access a certain level of social reality existing outside the one sociologists seek to reach with the help of the concept of the field. The advantage to be derived from reconstructing the historical foundation supporting the fields of cultural production lies in the fact that it enables us to identify the limits within which the artistic game must be played and the structural constraints which the actors are unconsciously obliged to respect, before focusing attention on the struggles inherent within each of those universes.
Far from denying the existence of any fields of cultural production, some of which can be regarded as games,2 the point of view I have developed throughout this research nevertheless enables them to be seen from a historical perspective and reveals their unchanging structural properties. Adopting a broader perspective than that of the researcher focused on struggles within the various fields, allows us to see, for example, that before becoming a central issue within artistic universes, the problem of autonomy-independence indicates the structural attachment of artists to the dominant forces of social structure. In order to gain power, they associated themselves with the powerful representatives of the State or the Church; in order to further increase that power, they fought to decrease their dependence on them.
Working outside the limitations of fields is a way of avoiding simply reducing the history of artistic spheres to an account of the glorious conquest of autonomy,3 a process which makes Manet or Flaubert into some kind of liberating hero. For, by concentrating too much on what lies within a particular field, we no longer see how the place occupied by that field, in the context of the relations of domination structuring society, limits the range of possible actions within its boundary. How can we understand, for example, what Bourdieu called a ‘symbolic revolution’, referring by that to the effect supposedly produced by Manet, Flaubert or Baudelaire, if we do not grasp the fact that, within their field, ‘revolutionaries’ often play on the opposition between the sacred and the profane, which is responsible for the distance separating them, as sanctified artists, from ordinary mortals? By aesthetically subverting the opposition between high and low, important and insignificant, sacred and profane, etc., they seem intent on abolishing this distance. Structurally dominant, artists and writers in quest of subversion have indeed often tried to reintroduce in their work the dominated, the profane, the ordinary, the insignificant, the common: ‘to write the mediocre well’ (according to Flaubert’s famous phrase4) or ‘to paint the mediocre well’ (as Bourdieu said on the subject of Manet). Such an approach to artistic or literary production represents aesthetic intentions which are equally shocking to both bourgeois and academic artists.5 Moreover, they are opposed as much to the approach which consists in ‘writing or painting what is important in an academic manner’ (the bourgeois artist) as to that which involves ‘writing or painting the important or the noble in a mediocre way’ (commercial artist6).
But the ‘symbolic revolution’ essentially remains a ‘palace revolution’, in other words something played out among themselves by those within the field, between the sons (and more rarely the daughters) of the bourgeoisie or of the aristocracy (more rarely of the middle and working classes), a means of challenging academic and bourgeois conventions before adopting them themselves and subsequently seeing them overturned by others, and so on. These different strategies, played out within the context of artistic games, never challenge the place of these games within society and the opposition between sacred and profane on which they are based. Moreover, if Manet paints ‘the mediocre’ and subverts hierarchies (by deciding, for example, to paint a genre scene in a format usually reserved for more noble subjects7), he is nevertheless still paying homage to nobility (with the use of extremely noble references to Titian, Giorgione and Raphael8). He shows in this way that he is involved in the same game as those he opposes, and strives to alter its rules without fundamentally threatening their existence. The ‘specific revolution’, if revolution it is, disrupts neither the lines of demarcation between the sacred and the profane, nor the position of artistic universes in the relations of domination which give structure to society. It is in any case very difficult to claim that, by the somewhat magical effect of a structural homology, the mysterious mechanism of which is not really explained, ‘if you challenge one hierarchy, you challenge (or might challenge) all the others’9 or that, by a ‘logic of a double strike’, by succeeding in an ‘artistic transgression’, Manet or Flaubert succeed in operating a ‘political transgression’.10 For it is difficult to see how the ‘dehierarchization of the gaze’ which ‘invested all the elements of the picture with equal visual value’11 could, in any way whatsoever, have contributed to the demolition of economic, political, educational, cultural or religious hierarchies outside the artistic game.
And even when we think that Duchamp desanctified the sacred field of art by introducing an ordinary and even vulgar industrial object (a urinal), or if we salute the desanctifying act of artists advocating the multiple (as opposed to the doctrine of the unique nature of the work), we forget that not only were the artists in question recognized within the artistic field, but that their names produce the same effects of social magic as any traditional painter. Whether exhibiting/painting/writing about the nothing, the insignificant, the immoral, the mediocre, the ugly, the vulgar, the common, the industrial, the ‘primitive’, etc., the grammar of these artistic acts is the product of a very long history whose powerful structuring force we are not always able to measure. Yet, as Braudel said, ‘the long term, is a sort of acknowledgement of the foundation in relation to which we judge the rest’.12 Artists who play at overturning or abolishing hierarchies and who integrate the profane into the sacred nevertheless have both their feet firmly planted on the pedestal of the sacred. The games of subversion they play within the confines of their fields not only fail to abolish the social hierarchies outside of them, but generally, where they do indeed have some success, only end up placing them in a dominant situation within their field and marginalizing or relegating others to the lowest depths of the artists’ hierarchy.
The logic of my research has led me to think that it would be particularly useful to tell the story of all artistic attempts to abolish the border between the sacred and the profane and to combat the effects of the separation and the distance between the work (and its creator) and the public. From strategies aimed at re-incorporating into the artistic domain the popular, the ‘primitive’, the banal, the physical, the material, the crude, the ugly or the insignificant, to the move to take art out of museums or to see artistic experiences organized outside institutional contexts, and including all the immersive experiences or the production of ‘multiples’, the various forms of subversion periodically played out within the artistic universe often end up resembling the movements of caged animals banging their heads against the bars of their cages. But tracing the outlines of this invisible cage will perhaps bring those who are imprisoned inside it a keener sense of the unconscious limits imposed on their actions.
My strategy of going back to a certain number of historical invariants seems to me an indispensable element in the study of the major implicit beliefs and of the broad self-evident assumptions shared by the worlds of art, of culture and beyond.
It is, however, important to make it clear that this approach does not indicate any kind of mistrust towards art or scholarly culture. Reconstructing the deep, structural, centuries-old links between art, the sacred and domination is not an undercover way of expressing a form of ‘cultural Poujadism’. The commentary on art that I have formulated in this book should be read as a specific case in the context of a more general study of the implicit beliefs and the magical effects of all domination. I would indeed like readers to be able to continue this task by reflecting in a similar manner on other domains such as business, government, school, university, politics, journalism, sport, religion and, of course, science. For the aim of this kind of research is to increase the historical consciousness of what we are and to provide the opportunity to re-appropriate what it is that, silently but powerfully, determines who we are.
Since sociology began to turn its attention to cultural practices, it has exposed the social inequalities that exist in terms of access to culture and has explored the reasons why, in spite of all the efforts towards cultural democratization already in place, such inequalities continue to exist. But it seemed to me imperative to push the critical analysis still further and to explore what kinds of social relationships and what forms of social life underlie what we commonly call ‘culture’. The struggle against inequalities of access to culture would be pointless if it was not also part of a process of interrogation into the nature of what comes under the name of ‘culture’ in Western societies and beyond. Museums, galleries, libraries, concert halls, opera houses, theatres, cinemas, festivals, etc., are all places where human relations are established, where the place and the behaviour of each individual are silently organized. My aim has been to go deep to the roots of all this.
It seems to me that it is precisely this kind of radical interrogation that will be needed today in the public debate. After many decades of intense cultural faith where people tended automatically to associate ‘Culture’, with a movement of emancipation or of elevation and dreamt of achieving significant progress towards cultural democratization, people have begun (with the much repeated observation about the persistence of cultural inequalities) to hesitate between the project of encouraging people to aspire to the ‘major works of art of humanity’ and one which aims at a multiplicity of forms of cultural expression all officially recognized (the famous ‘cultural democracy’), between a ‘culture for all’ (considered too elitist and monolithic) and a ‘culture for each’ (which cheerfully plunges towards cultural populism and is based on a fragmented vision of society). If the cultural actors or the key figures of the cultural world still sometimes speak the language of the Enlightenment (emancipation, elevation, advancement, education, development of the critical spirit, etc.), they often give the impression of expressing themselves in a foreign, or worse still, a dead language. As for those who think they are resisting elitism by defending the opinions or the desires of the dominated, they never question the social production of these expressions which are devoid of spontaneity and often originate from the most commercial of cultural enterprises or even from the world of advertising. If we stay within the context of this opposition, we might almost prefer a deliberate elitism, when it is accompanied with a democratic voluntarism, to demagogic populism which pays lip service to the recognition of cultural plurality even when hierarchies remain in place and abandon the less able to the socializing forces of the market. But it is the framework itself of this opposition, in which the cultural actors are imprisoned, that should be questioned. Without a central reflection on ‘culture’ (and art), its shape, its meanings and functions, cultural politics will gradually become devoid of meaning and of any kind of collective ambition and enthusiasm.
In order to get back to the roots of artistic and cultural matters, I needed to operate a certain number of ‘detours’ which ‘delayed’ access to the matter announced in the introduction: the history of paintings attributed to Nicolas Poussin. By preceding the detailed analysis of this tangled history with an exploration of some problematic and historical elements, I wanted first of all to demonstrate that what we experience on a daily basis can pass completely unnoticed unless we see it from a standpoint of knowledge which allows it to be seen as something not necessarily self-evident. But I also, and especially, wanted to show to what extent the present is always heavy with the weight of the accumulated past. The smallest gesture, the smallest decision always relates back to a sequence, long or short, of relatively similar gestures or decisions. Those who act do so more often in total ignorance of the historical conditions of possibility underlying their acts. They are oblivious to what it is that has constituted them as individuals – all that continuous, complex and sometimes contradictory process of socialization which has gone into shaping their attitudes and their skills – and of what has made possible the terrain on which they live and act. My research here sets itself the task of challenging all that is perceived as self-evident and aims to historicize the unconscious.
What I have tried to say in this book is, moreover, not unconnected with certain views expressed by actors from within the world of art and culture. Critical lucidity is not, of course, a property reserved only for scholars, who in fact sometimes sorely lack it. But when the views in question come in the guise of a detailed accusation aimed at the powers in place; when, moreover, they are based purely on personal experience rather than on elements of empirical truth, the ideas expressed can unfortunately be reduced to the subjectivity of an isolated or extreme point of view and any element of objective truth is rendered instantly invalid. This is why, when the French painter, sculptor and artist Jean Dubuffet published Asphyxiating Culture in 1968,13 the polemical tone and the essay format of the book unfortunately somewhat overshadowed the extreme accuracy of a certain number of insights drowned in a denunciatory rhetoric.
Dubuffet essentially takes on the ‘minuscule caste’ primarily made up of functionaries/employees of the ‘cultural body’ (‘The Ministry of Culture’, ‘The Department of Arts and Letters’, ‘the grotesque Academie de Belles Lettres’) along with the ‘professors’ (symbolized by the art historian A. Chastel, described as a ‘soldier of culture’ and epitomizing the ‘Sorbonne spirit’ or even the ‘grotesque professorship at the Sorbonne’) and, secondly, the ‘columnists, commentators and all merchants, speculators and commercial agents’.
In a certain way, this work is an ideal type illustration of the oppositions which not only structure the relationships between artists and teachers or between artists and cultural officials, but also the relationships between avant-garde and academic artists. The critical attack, largely heavily focused on the State and the teaching profession, denounces the ‘misleading choice’ of a ‘very restricted circle – the caste of lords’ in terms which have echoes of political totalitarianism: the Culture Minister is renamed ‘Minister of enculturation’ and the writer refers to ‘indoctrination’, of ‘cultural conditioning’, of ‘cultural propaganda’ or ‘cultural militancy’.
Dubuffet defined the system that he was criticizing by its principles of ‘order’, of ‘fixity’ and of ‘hierarchy’ (a ‘vertical’ vision) which he set against ‘anarchy’ (the ‘egalitarian and anarchistic expansion’), against ‘mobility’, against ‘equality’ and the ‘horizontal proliferation’ of the artist. By opposing the State, the ‘social’ and ‘culture’ to the ‘individual’, ‘individualism’ (the ‘healthy vigour of individualism’) and the ‘artist’, he acts, however, as though artists had not themselves been stakeholders in the great hierarchized structure that he is decrying. In doing so, he is forgetting the whole long-established history of the sanctification of poets and artists and the creation of the liberal arts.
However, in spite of the limits of this exercise in critical thought, which is in reaction to a situation created notably by the introduction of the post of culture minister in 1959, Dubuffet’s examination of the beliefs which support the whole cultural edifice is, nevertheless, a searching one. He endeavours to get to the root of things, challenging the series of unquestioned assumptions on which all the practices in the system rest.
First of all, Dubuffet has a strong intuition that the art world rests on beliefs that need to be radically and systematically challenged, rather than criticized in a fragmentary or isolated manner. There is no shortage of acts of ‘subversion’, he explains, but nobody ever criticizes the whole system, and notably the ‘foundation of the system’, which is a matter of a ‘scale of values’, of ‘conditioning of the thought that we do not feel, but which very much exists’: ‘Here and there, we see little rebellious spirits contesting culture at different levels, and they are numerous, but rare are those who open their eyes wide to see the whole picture, and who muster the courage to contest it all, from the bottom up. Most contest one of its levels while arguing another, and get tangled in the issue like a fly in cotton candy.’14
Culture is profoundly linked ‘to the ranks of the dominant class, or […] those who aspire to fit in with this class’. In order to grasp the ‘foundation’ for the entire conception of art and all its forms, we need therefore to get away from the overall structure which is that of social domination: ‘Another character of our culture […] is its spirit of hierarchy, which is obviously consistent with the fact that it was constituted throughout the centuries by a caste intent upon making a social hierarchy prevail, and thus inclined to institute hierarchies in all domains instead of horizontal alignments, instead of abundance.’
Dubuffet senses that it is the verticality of the system which is its central characteristic. He quite rightly detects in the very concept of ‘beautiful’ (he could just as easily have taken the notion of ‘sublime’ as his example), this ordering and hierarchizing vision which characterizes cultural institutions like the sacerdotal power: ‘Beauty is a direct descendant of the angel’s chants, of the burning bush – of which Professor Chastel, at the Sorbonne in his star-studded robe, surrounded by his servants, reveals to us the unalterable dogma (rule in hand).’
Like Plato imagining the ideal City, Dubuffet even goes as far as to formulate the idea that only the creation of a teaching system geared to the systematic challenging of all beliefs would allow the current state of affairs to be changed. These ‘institutes of deculturation’, humorously called ‘nihilist gymnasiums’, through which all agents of culture should pass, would require a ‘long period’ of attendance ‘disentangling oneself from cultural permeation can only take place slowly, in small successive steps. It requires that one question a great number of fundamental ideas, one after the next, the validity of which wrongly seemed at first to go without saying’. In these utopian schools, ‘especially lucid monitors’ would deliver ‘deconditioning and demystification over several years, so as to endow the nation with a body of solidly trained negators’. The teachers in these schools should therefore embark on a veritable mission to cleanse all beliefs, all ‘accepted ideas’ and all ‘revered values’: ‘All our thought mechanisms which involve cultural conditioning without our being aware of it would be denounced, in this way we would clean the machinery of the mind until it was thoroughly scoured. We would empty our heads of all the masses cluttering it, with suitable exercises we would methodically develop the invigorating faculty of forgetting.’
But what exactly are these beliefs? First of all, they amount to the arbitrary establishment of ‘values’ by a ‘cultural body’, and the indissociable hierarchization of works or artists which are targeted. The ‘cultural body’ determines the works of art which deserve to be looked at and admired and provoke ‘emotion’. This is what happens, for example, in the case of Racine or Raphael, held up as indisputable values. Dubuffet denounces the ‘devastating effect of prestige’, the ‘concept that an objective value can be assigned to art’, often tinged with cultural ‘patriotism’ and with ‘idiotic and jingoistic chauvinism’. He sees in it the desire, exercised by a small elite, to determine ‘values’.15
These choices imposed as self-evident are entirely arbitrary and extremely ‘specious’: ‘Their preservation results only from the fact that a small coterie chose and applauded them, while eliminating all others.’ They ensure that the public ‘renounces all impulse so that the esteem the public has for a production will be in proportion with the rank the cultural church has assigned that production in its classification’, the consequence of which is that ‘an artist with no rank will therefore seem to the public a pitiful, rejected character, an incapable soul’. The exorbitant power of the agents of the cultural establishment is therefore quite simply that of being able to make works and their authors exist or to cast them into oblivion. In such a belief system, the museum is the legitimate place designated for any work of art: it is therefore impossible ‘that there may exist paintings that are not found in any museums […] if it is not in a museum it cannot be called a painting, it simply does not exist.’16
Dubuffet condemns therefore ‘the fraud and the emptiness of these certificates of value’, but taking his criticism a bit further still, he attacks the ‘despicable notion of value’. Whether it is ethical, aesthetic or economic, value must belong to those notions that must be radically challenged:
To put an end to culture, which for millenniums has been running rampant, we must first destroy its supporting idea: the idea of attributing a value to the production of art. I am using the word ‘value’ here both in its economic and in its ethical or aesthetic sense – one implies the other, in any case. We can only abolish the commercial value by abolishing the aesthetic value, the latter is much more pernicious than the commercial value, and much more strongly anchored. The notion of conservation is also linked to the idea of value. Obviously, we conserve objects to which a value is attributed, and the desire to conserve would no longer make sense once the idea of value were abolished. The role of the cultural body is to attribute values to productions. This prerogative, this power, brings it great pride and is what pushes so many people to join its ranks. It plays the role of an appraiser, its judgements will determine the distribution of prestige and profit […].
Dubuffet thus advocates, no more and no less, ‘eliminating these classifications’ and ‘eliminating the myth of value, and bringing things back to the realm of good old pleasure stripped of all legitimation, of spontaneous and free interest outside of all mechanisms of prestige’.
In the context of such a situation where classifications and hierarchization dominate, the link between aesthetic value and commercial value is a strong one, involving very high prices, and very high prices immediately give the impression that the work has great aesthetic value: ‘We must, moreover, bear in mind that high prices are the result of prestige and prestige results from high prices; so that there is an intimate collusion between the cultural body and the commercial body. Culture and commerce walk hand in hand. We cannot destroy one without destroying the other’. Dubuffet denounces ‘the devastating effect of prestige conferred upon certain works, by the commercial prices they obtain and by the homages that follow (or vice versa)’.
But he still does not stop there. Pursuing his train of thought, he sees clearly that the relationships established between works of art and their public within such a system are defined by the relations of social domination which surround them. By creating a distance between the works and the public, the sacred is separated from the profane, and there is only a relationship ‘of reverence’ of the second in relation to the first. Works of art are presented by museums as ‘the only admissible ones’, and the public is encouraged to admire these rather than to create others. Creation does not inspire creation, but instead the admiration of the dominated for the dominator:
When the well-to-do, aided by their scholars (who aspire only to serve and fit in, and who are nourished by the culture developed by this caste for its glory and devotion), open their castles, museums and libraries to the people, they have no intention of inspiring them to try their hands at creation. It isn’t writers or artists that the propertied class means to create with its cultural propaganda, it is readers and admirers. Cultural propaganda aims to impress upon these underlings a sense of the gulf separating them from the prestigious treasures to which the dominant class holds the keys, and of the futility of attempting to make a valid creative work outside of the designated paths.
Then it is basically the very categories themselves of ‘works’ and of ‘public’ or of ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’ that are challenged. For Dubuffet, it is not just a matter of readjusting the relationships between these terms, but instead a matter of radically challenging the relationship established between an exhibited work17 and a public who come to admire it, based on a social relationship of domination: ‘But should one view works of art? Isn’t it precisely the idea of taking the work of art as a thing to view – instead of something to live and to do – that is the basis for an unchanging factor in the cultural standpoint?’ In the ideal society dreamt up by Dubuffet, such relationships would be abolished: ‘There will be no more viewers in my city, only actors. No more culture, therefore no more viewing. No more theatres – theatre beginning where the stage and the room divide. Everyone will be on stage, in my city. No more audience. No more viewing, so no more actions altered at their source by the fact that they are destined to be seen […].’18
It would be no exaggeration to say that, in spite of the limits of such an exercise, few people have gone so far in a systematic and global criticism of the categories, beliefs, habits, attitudes and institutions which has then led to a general re-examination of art itself and not just of a particular artistic trend, of art per se and not simply of the uses and purposes to which it is put: ‘this grip will only be released when the notion of art, and not only that of the painting, will have ceased to be conceived of and perceived, when the mind will have ceased to project art as a notion to be gazed upon, and art will be integrated in such a manner that thought, instead of facing it, will be inside it’.
Utopians are in short supply today. Yet we need to be able to imagine the kind of society, the type of human relationships, the nature of individual and collective experiences towards which Dubuffet’s criticism might lead us. Is the sheer intensity of the experience of the world he is targeting, in which culture is seen as a form of constant celebration of the senses and the spirit, realistically compatible with the status of artists and the forms of remuneration available to them? Surely any notion of elevation disappears in a society without any hierarchy or, at least, in a society within which art and culture do not occupy superior positions within the hierarchy? Should the market and the State also disappear along with the institutional forms of culture? In any case, it becomes clear that any radical transformation of culture must necessarily be accompanied by a transformation of all forms of exercise of power.
Some recent reactions to the cultural policy adopted by the City of Marseille in the context of its role as ‘European Capital of Culture 2013’ seem to echo Dubuffet’s criticism. In 2012, an anonymous action group published, on the Marseille internet site ‘Marseille at war’,19 an editorial entitled ‘2013 and the great cultural bluff’. The authors of the text explain that ‘in Western countries culture has become the means of management and control specific to our time’. What is targeted here is the absence of what, at the very heart of the lives of the city’s inhabitants, gives shape to existence:
Where are the myths and the dreams, where are the legends and the stories, where are the dialects and the local slangs, where are the games and the challenges, the songs and the dances, everything which effectively gave meaning to the life of each individual within the community, everything which introduced a collective mediation between the individual and the universe within the working classes? These forms of expression which belong only to the ‘plebs’, and of which we are effectively the trustees, have alas been cruelly snatched from us. They have ended up frozen and stored away, like disparate elements of the cultural heritage of humanity. Sooner or later they will turn up in a museum, a festival or an Arte documentary.
Culture has become the name for ‘a device for the management and neutralization of intense experiences’, a strategy designed to ‘activate the flow of tourists and of neo-Marseille residents’ and the establishment of a social relationship of admirers and admired:
The cultural operation imposes […] a distanced view – in reality, it forces us to go through this immense hypermarket of cultural products in the same state of absence as that of someone walking through a shopping centre. Culture introduces the distance of the spectator in every area. We are invited to attend a screening, a performance, a lecture, an event. Culture transforms the inhabitants of a town into an audience. This year, such and such a cultural event has attracted an exceptional audience we are told. And the location of this gathering, deserted as soon as the festival is over, will wait for another cultural event to be scheduled before it is occupied again.20
We would like researchers to be as ambitiously probing as a Dubuffet or this Marseille action group and, more often than is currently the case, to see them digging deep down to the roots of the implicit beliefs21 which structure practices. The task of acquiring knowledge ostensibly has no limits, and scholars, who can remain detached from any specific interest in the world of art and culture, need not restrict the scope of their analyses. They do not need to be culturally, politically or economically ‘useful’ or ‘reasonable’ and can indeed exploit their absence of ‘responsibility’ in terms of action to produce truths which, initially at least, nobody wants to hear. Unfortunately, we live in times where the lukewarm nature of certain ‘investigations’ or certain ‘critiques’ is habitually mistaken for the burning issue of the day and where any subversion of scientific investigation, let alone subversion of a political nature, is strictly confined to what is politically acceptable.22
What is the ultimate purpose of the social sciences if they fail to ask the questions nobody else is asking or if they do not continue to seek when everyone else has given up? Caught up in their various ordinary occupations and preoccupations, the members of a society have only an extremely limited view of the complex social world in which they are immersed. In general, they devote their time and energy to circumscribed and localized activities and have neither the leisure nor the means to piece together the broader frameworks within which they operate. The ordinary, spontaneous visions are visions of the close to hand and are often a little short-sighted.
‘Society’ is an invisible monster which is presented to us, in a deformed, caricatured and biased way, in political, journalistic, promotional, religious or moral discourses. The images of society in circulation are the economic means of transforming the Leviathan into simple and visible images. The social sciences therefore have a highly important role, and an overwhelming responsibility which amounts to opening the way to realities which remain inaccessible to immediate experience, through the use of rational and empirically based means. Through their shared work of patient reconstruction, social scientists are in a position to offer far more faithful images of the social world, of its structures, of its major rules or of the main social mechanisms which govern it. This mediated knowledge – which allows access beyond the limited horizon of all those visions that reduce the social world to what actors have been able to feel, think or say about it – implies a dissociation of perception and of knowledge. It enables individuals to get to know the world outside the direct and immediate perception of it, by reconstructing reality from a range of data collected, criticized, organized and structured in different ways.
Such understanding allows the social sciences to emphasize the fundamentally historical character of what they are describing and analysing, the historicity of the social world signifying that it is at the same time partly independent of our current individual wills (it depends on the action of billions of other human beings who have preceded us), but that it is not in any way natural and can, therefore, in the more or less long term, be transformed.
From this point of view, the growing interest within the social sciences in all forms of phenomenology which focus on the relations actors maintain with the world, or in other words, on the subjective experience they have of the world (social phenomenology, ethnomethodology, comprehensive or pragmatic sociology) has resulted in researchers gradually turning their attention away from the search for truths which lie outside the realm of the immediate consciousness and perception of actors caught up in the often limited scope of their actions. Endlessly repeating, as though the objectivizing approaches might have forgotten it, that actors are active, that they think, feel, perceive, imagine, picture, etc., they simply forget to ask what it is that acts, thinks, feels, perceives, imagines or pictures through them, or in other words, what unacknowledged ‘inherited’ historical currents (familial, educational, economic, cultural, political, religious, etc.) flow through and condition them. Certainly, actors act and think but what was it that made them become acting and thinking actors? Doing away with the objective frameworks of the action, which more often than not are only understood after a long process of investigation, and which ordinary actors are not necessarily aware of, is to make such actors the conscious centre of (and responsible for) everything that happens to them, but at the same time this means ignoring everything that, without them realizing or feeling it, guides, limits, constrains and dominates them. Instead of being content to ‘describe people’s lives’, and, in the end, simply to tell us stories, researchers should instead set out to focus debate on the self-evident assumptions which are rarely discussed, the ones which we inherit from history. Their task should be to awaken our sleeping consciousness by turning an objective, rigorous, probing and critical gaze on the state of the world.
For that, apart from the dose of healthy ‘Olympian irony’ recommended by Joseph Gusfield, scholars need to distance themselves from the most commonly played games so as to be able to observe them, compare them, describe them and interpret them. But this observation point from outside the game, this exotopia referred to by Bakhtin, is in no sense a lofty position of transcendence. Even when they advocate ataraxia, in other words, a detachment and indifference in relation to all forms of life, philosophy and religion forget that this position in suspense from the world and its issues still implies a form of commitment, precisely that proposed by the rules of the philosophical or religious game. Reflexivity would not be complete without an awareness of the collective conditions and beliefs which make it possible to suspend any other form of belief. The knowledge of social games which are shaped by history and independent of our intentionalities – those configurations that Norbert Elias endeavoured to reconstruct – therefore relies on the participation in a game and that game is the learned game.
The responsibility of the social sciences in exposing the structures of the social world, and in particular the reality of domination, is overwhelming and, if we want to see it play an emancipatory role, we need to be vigilant about preserving the right conditions in which the science can be exercised.
No ultimate, mystical or chemical experience will ever bring us the truth about the world. The only way in which we can see the ‘bowl’ in which we are swimming is by the slow and rigorous accumulation of a maximum amount of work gathered from across extremely different sectors of knowledge and by extracting from it the invariants, the shared properties or mechanisms while at the same time keeping at a distance all distracting solicitations and injunctions. But that therefore implies a belief in a certain progress in knowledge, in the possibility of mastering the truth about the way societies function and in a cumulative scientific process which authorizes today’s researcher to revisit, discuss, criticize, refine, amend, reformulate the problems as they were left by the great researchers of the past.
Unfortunately, the learned universes which are amongst the rare places in which it is possible to stand apart from the ordinary games are not themselves protected from the invasion of logics which belong outside that of the search for truth: those associated with money, with institutional power, with political ideology, with fashion, seduction, provocation, speed, too broad a focus, unproductive productivity, narcissistic self-promotion or non-stop communication.
The sciences of the social world, and sociology in particular, have undoubtedly never been in such a confused situation in terms of the values and practices of the profession of researcher. Authors with little regard for investigation and who are more intent on surprising or provoking are promoted to the height of celebrity and churn out books which delight the fashionable academic circles and a certain type of journalism always in the perpetual quest of new ideas; efforts to wipe out or play down the importance of the recent past of the discipline; purely lexical innovations which come along to replace the fundamental conceptual work and the investigations which underpin it; the sense of fashion which tosses the interests of knowledge to the mercy of the winds; a parallel reduction of scientific ambitions by a technocratic specialization of knowledge stripped of any reflexivity and theoretical issues; administrative bodies governing research which measure ‘talents’ only on the basis of bibliometric criteria, reduce quality and meaning to quantity and swear by the virtues of the article rather than the book; the proliferation, at the same time, of useless books, quickly and badly put together, of conferences, congresses or seminars which are no longer the intermediary means to more ambitious ends but ends in themselves in a regime of popularization or rather of the constant need to communicate research; to which must be added the recent mental diversification of ‘researchers’ on Facebook, Twitter or in personal blogs or on internet forums: taken together, all these sometimes contradictory traits of behaviour, approaches and injunctions end up creating a deleterious atmosphere which hardly inspires the production of great works – an expression which would be mocked, here or there, for its supposed grandiloquence, in an intellectual milieu marked by a regrettable anti-intellectualism.
In this general climate, we nevertheless continue to adore – though for how much longer? – the great writers (and their work), who from Marx, Weber or Durkheim to Elias, Lévi-Strauss, Foucault, Dumézil, Braudel, Kantorowicz or Bourdieu, have laboured relentlessly to produce great works and to advance knowledge of the social world. It seems, however, as though the notions of work, of progress, of the advancement of knowledge, of reason or, worse, of truth, have been weakened by the lack of scientific ambition, or even by the explicit or insidious attempts to discourage those who want to have it.23 It will no doubt fall to the historians of the future, or to sociologists courageous enough to defy all obstacles, to study the reasons behind this global state of affairs and mentalities and behind the gradual dismantling of the institutions of learning.
The only way to succeed in resisting this general movement is to renounce, almost totally, any desire for power over others (by controlling and manipulating institutions, journals and people), instead focusing all available energy on the desire for knowledge, and prioritizing work over any other form of self-publicity and self-promotion. Kafka believed that, paradoxically, the true artist is the one who at first sight appears to be the weakest, the most fragile, but who sets out to do whatever he does with the intention of doing it fully, intensely. And the same is true, it seems to me, of the scholar. The scholar, like the artist, is not a powerful being, energetically embracing the world as it presents itself to him. He can be defined, still in Kafka’s terms, by his awkwardness, his marginality and his position of isolation from those who walk light-heartedly and without asking questions on the paths of active life. Yet he is the person capable of executing this famous ‘leap out of the ranks of murderers’.
From the places of knowledge, when these function soundly, we can learn to see the relations of domination and the forms of the sacred that accompany them and cast new light on them. We can also learn to be wary of what is taken for self-evident and of unquestioned beliefs. None of which results immediately in revolutions or even reforms of course.
In Book 2,24 I have analysed the processes involved in the separation between works of art and the public and between performances and spectators, and a little self-reflection and intellectual honesty leads me, in turn, to turn a critical eye on the confinement of knowledge in the sacred places of culture (universities, libraries, academies, etc.) and the neutralizing effects of the critical dimension that such a separation produces. Taking their place in the great caesura between culture and ordinary life, how can scholars hope that their texts can have some kind of power to act in the social world and exert any liberating or emancipating effects?
It is indeed this paradoxical situation that Merleau-Ponty highlighted when he described how learning had become increasingly bureaucratic and academic:
The modern philosopher is frequently a functionary, always a writer, and the freedom allowed him in books admits an opposite view. What he says enters first of all into an academic world where the choices for life are deadened and the occasions for thought are cut off. Without books, a certain speed of communication would be impossible, and there is nothing to say against them. But in the end they are only words expressed a bit more coherently. The philosophy placed in books has ceased to challenge men. What is unusual and almost unsupportable in it is hidden in the respectable life of the great philosophic systems. In order to understand the total function of the philosopher, we must remember that even the philosophical writers, whom we read and who we are, have never ceased to recognize as their patron, a man who never wrote, who never taught, at least in any official chair, who talked with anyone he met on the street, and who had certain difficulties with public opinion and with the public powers. We must remember Socrates.25
The monumentalization of knowledge is thus, whatever our view of it, a way of annihilating its critical force. Social science sees its capacity to expose and to transform in an emancipatory way neutralized by the fact that it operates in essentially academic, cultural and media-dominated spheres. The question of knowing how to re-inject social force into critical ideas is therefore fundamental to the practical consequences of any study of the processes of separation and autonomization.
No book has ever succeeded in changing the course of history on its own account. The only thing that can reasonably be hoped for is that some of them can end up finding social forces – groups or institutions – who know how to make use of them to oppose the game of the powerful. The truth in general, the truth about domination in particular, would then succeed in forging a path, even in the face of all the obstacles, internal and external, which constantly lie in wait for those who seek, in even the smallest way, to extend the realm of freedom.