Date: Sat, 29 Jul 2000 04:00:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Marwan Dalal <dmarwan-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: conversation between GRASS and  BOURDIEU 


The Nation
July 3, 2000

 A Literature From Below 
GÜNTER GRASS and PIERRE BOURDIEU 

The role of the public intellectual--and the moral
onus, assuming that one exists--seems ever to thread
the Scylla of celebrity and the Charybdis of
marginality. In a conversation printed in part
simultaneously in the French daily Le Monde and German
weekly Die Zeit, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Nobel
laureate Günter Grass discussed the role of
intellectuals in society, stylistic practices in
sociology and literature, neoliberal economics, the
emerging world order and other topics. The following
is adapted from a translation from the French by
Deborah Treisman. Bourdieu is a professor of
philosophy at the Collège de France, was founder in
1975 of the journal Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales, and is author of, among other works: The
State Nobility (1996), The Rules of Art (1996), On
Television (1998), The Weight of the World (1999) and
Pascalian Meditations (2000). Grass, a native of
Danzig (now Gdansk), defines himself as a "citizen
writer" and won the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1999. Among his works are The Tin Drum (1959), From
the Diary of a Snail (1972), The Rat (1987), Dog Years
(1989), The Flounder (1989) and My Century (1999).

Pierre Bourdieu: You have spoken somewhere of "the
European or German tradition"--which is also, by the
way, a French tradition--of "opening your big mouth."
I am delighted that you received the Nobel Prize, and
I am also delighted that you haven't been transformed
by receiving the Nobel, that you are as inclined as
you ever were to "open your big mouth." I am hoping
that we can open our big mouths together.

Günter Grass: It is relatively rare for a sociologist
and a writer to meet in a German setting. In my
country, it is more common for philosophers to gather
in one corner of the room, the sociologists in another
corner and the writers, all giving each other the cold
shoulder, in the back. A communication of the kind we
are undertaking now is the exception to the rule. When
I think of your book The Weight of the World or of my
last book, My Century, I see that our works have
something in common: We are trying to retell History,
as seen from below. We do not talk over society's
head; we do not speak as conquerors of History;
rather, in keeping with the nature of our profession,
we are notoriously on the side of the losers, of those
who are marginalized or excluded from society. In The
Weight of the World, you and your collaborators were
able to put your individuality aside and to base your
work on pure understanding, without claiming always to
know better: The result was a snapshot of social
conditions and the state of French society that could
easily be superimposed on other countries. I am
tempted, writer that I am, to mine your stories for
raw material. For example, the study of the young
woman who came from the country to Paris in order to
sort mail at night. The description of her job makes
one understand the social problems without harping on
them in an ostentatious manner. I was very pleased by
that. I wish that there were such a book about the
social conditions in every country.

The only question that struck me comes, perhaps, from
the sociological domain: There is no humor in this
genre of writing. It lacks the comedy of failure,
which plays such an important role in my stories, the
absurdity inherent in certain confrontations.

Bourdieu: You have written magnificently about a
certain number of the experiences we evoke. But the
person who hears these stories directly from the one
who experienced them is often wiped out by them or
overwhelmed, and it isn't always possible to maintain
one's distance from them. We felt, for example, that
we had to exclude a certain number of narratives from
the book because they were too poignant or too
pathetic, too painful.

Grass: When I speak of "comedy," I don't mean to imply
that tragedy and comedy are mutually exclusive, that
the boundaries between the two don't fluctuate.

Bourdieu: Absolutely.... That's true.... In fact, what
we aim to do is to make our readers see that raw
absurdity, without any special effects. One of our
rules was that there would be no turning of the
stories into "literature." This may seem shocking to
you, but there is a temptation, when one is dealing
with dramas like these, to write well. The rule here
was to be as brutally pragmatic as possible, to allow
these stories to retain their extraordinary, and
almost unbearable, violence. There were two reasons
for this: scientific reasons and, also, I think,
literary ones, because we chose not to be literary
precisely in order to be literary in another sense.
There are also political reasons. We felt that the
violence being perpetrated at the moment by the
neoliberal politics established in Europe and Latin
America and in many other countries--that the violence
of the system is so vast one cannot explain it through
purely conceptual analysis. Our critical resources are
no match for the effects of this political system.

Grass: We are both, the sociologist and the writer,
children of the European Enlightenment, of a tradition
that has now been thrown into question everywhere--or,
at least, in France and Germany--as if the European
movement toward Aufklärung, toward Enlightenment, had
failed. Many of its early aspects--we need only think
of Montaigne--have been lost over the course of the
centuries. Humor is one of them. Voltaire's Candide
and Diderot's Jacques le fataliste, for example, are
books in which the social conditions described are
equally horrifying. Yet, even in pain and in failure,
the human capacity for comedy and, therefore, victory,
comes through.

Bourdieu: Yes, but our sense of having lost the
tradition of the Enlightenment is tied to the complete
reversal of our vision of the world that has been
imposed by the neoliberal vision that dominates today.
I think (and here, in Germany, I can make this
comparison), I think that the current neoliberal
revolution is a conservative revolution--in the sense
that one spoke of a conservative revolution in Germany
in the thirties--and a conservative revolution is a
very strange thing: It's a revolution that restores
the past and yet presents itself as progressive, a
revolution that transforms regression into
progress--to the extent that those who oppose this
regression seem themselves to be regressing. Those who
oppose terror come to seem like terrorists. It's
something that we have both experienced: We
voluntarily classify ourselves as archaic--in French,
we are called ringards (old-timers), arriérés
(outdated).

Grass: Dinosauria...

Bourdieu: Dinosaurs--exactly. That is the great
strength of conservative revolutions, or "progressive"
restorations. Even what you're saying, I believe,
illustrates the idea. We are told: You're not funny.
But the era is really not funny! Honestly, there is
nothing to laugh about.

Grass: I have never claimed that we were living in an
amusing era. But the infernal laughter triggered by
literary means is also a form of protest against our
social conditions. What is peddled today as
neo-liberalism is a return to the methods of the
Manchester liberalism of the nineteenth century. In
the seventies, in most of Europe, there was a
relatively successful effort to civilize capitalism.
If you believe in the principle that both socialism
and capitalism are the charmingly spoiled children of
the Enlightenment, then you also have to admit that
they have had a certain way of keeping each other in
check. Even capitalism has been subject to certain
responsibilities. In Germany, we call this the social
economy of the market, and there was a general
consensus, which included the conservative party, that
the conditions of the Weimar Republic should never be
reproduced. This consensus broke down in the early
eighties. Since the Communist hierarchies fell apart,
capitalism has come to believe that it can do
anything, that it has escaped all control. Its polar
opposite has defaulted. The rare remaining responsible
capitalists who call for prudence do so because they
realize that they have lost their sense of direction,
that the neoliberal system is now repeating the errors
of Communism by creating its own dogma, its own
certificate of infallibility.

Bourdieu: Yes, but the strength of this neoliberalism
is that it has been applied, at least in Europe, by
people who call themselves Socialists. Whether it's
[Gerhard] Schröder or [Tony] Blair or [Lionel] Jospin,
these are people who invoke socialism in order to
further neoliberalism.

Grass: It is a capitulation to economics.

Bourdieu: At the same time, it has become extremely
difficult to create a critical position to the left of
the Social Democratic governments. In France, there
was the great strike of 1995 that mobilized a large
portion of the population--laborers, office workers,
etc., and also intellectuals. Then there were a whole
series of protests. There was the unemployed workers'
demonstration, the European march to protest
unemployment, the illegal immigrants' protest and so
on. There was a kind of continuous agitation that
obliged the Social Democrats in power to pretend, at
least, to be participating in some sort of socialist
discourse. But in practice this critical movement is
still very weak, for the most part because it is
limited to a national level. One of the most important
questions, it seems to me, in the political arena, is
to know how, on an international scale, to create a
position that is to the left of the Social Democratic
governments and that is capable of having a real
influence on them. But I think that any attempt to
create a European social movement at the moment would
be very unlikely to succeed; and the question I ask
myself is the following: What can we, as
intellectuals, do to contribute to that movement,
which is indispensable, because, despite what
neoliberalism holds to be the case, all social
victories have been won through battle? If we want to
create a "social Europe," as they say, we must create
a European social movement. And I think--it is my
impression--that intellectuals bear a great deal of
the responsibility for the creation of such a
movement, because the nature of political domination
is not only economic but also intellectual; it lies
also on the side of belief. And that is why, I
believe, we must "open our big mouths" and try to
restore our utopia; because one of the defining
qualities of these neoliberal governments is that they
do away with utopias.

Grass: The Socialist and Social Democratic parties
also believed somewhat in that idea, when they claimed
that the downfall of Communism would also wipe
socialism off the globe, and they lost confidence in
the European workers' movement that had existed, mind
you, much longer than Communism had. If one abandons
one's own traditions, one abandons oneself. In
Germany, there have only been a few timid attempts to
organize the unemployed. For years, I have been trying
to tell the unions: You cannot content yourselves with
supervising only the workers who have jobs--and who,
as soon as they lose them, fall into a bottomless
abyss. You must found a union for the unemployed
citizens of Europe. We complain that the construction
of Europe is taking place on a purely economic level,
but the unions themselves have made no effort to find
a form of organization and action that goes beyond the
national framework and has an impact across borders.
We must create a counterweight to this worldwide
neoliberalism. But, to tell the truth, most
intellectuals today swallow everything, and it gives
them nothing but ulcers. Which is why I doubt that we
can count exclusively on intellectuals. In France, it
seems to me, one speaks always, without hesitation, of
"the intellectuals," but my experiences in Germany
have shown me that it's a mistake to believe that all
intellectuals are on the left. You can find proof to
the contrary throughout the history of the twentieth
century, the Nazi era included: A man like Goebbels
was an intellectual. For me, being an intellectual is
not a proof of quality. Your book The Weight of the
World shows how those who come from the working world,
who are union members, often have more experience in
the social domain than intellectuals do. Those people
are now unemployed or retired and no one seems to need
them anymore. Their potential is lying fallow.

Bourdieu: Let me go back for one second to the book
The Weight of the World. It is an attempt to attribute
a much more modest and, I believe, more useful
function than one usually does to the efforts of the
intellectual: the function of "public writer." The
public writer--and I've witnessed this in the
countries of North Africa--is someone who knows how to
write and who lends his talent to others so that they
can express the things they know, on one level, far
better than the person who writes them down.
Sociologists are in a position that is unique. They
are not like other intellectuals; they are
primarily--though not always--people who know how to
listen, how to decipher what they hear and how to
transcribe and transmit it.

Grass: But that means that we must also call on the
intellectuals who situate themselves in the proximity
of neoliberalism. There are those among them who are
starting to ask themselves whether this circulation of
money around the globe, which eludes all control,
whether this form of madness that follows in the wake
of capitalism might not be about to collide with some
kind of opposition. Mergers, for example, without
purpose or reason, that cause the "redundancy" of
2,000, 5,000, 10,000 people. All that counts for
stock-market valuations is the maximization of profit.

Bourdieu: Yes, unfortunately, it is not simply a
matter of opposing and thwarting the dominant
discourse that claims to represent a unanimity of
voices. In order to fight it effectively, we must
insure that the criticisms reach the public. We are
constantly invaded and assaulted by the dominant
discourse. A vast majority of journalists are often
unconsciously complicit in the process, and it is
incredibly difficult to break down that illusion of
unanimity. First, because, in the case of France, it
is difficult for anyone who is not very established
and very well-known to get access to the public. When
I said, at the beginning of this conversation, that I
hoped you were going to "open your big mouth," it was
because I think that established public figures are
the only ones, in a sense, who can break the circle.
But, unfortunately, they are often established
precisely because they are unquestioning and
soft-spoken and because we want to keep them that way,
and there are very few who make use of the symbolic
capital their position gives them to speak out, to
speak frankly and to make sure that the voices of
those who cannot speak for themselves are heard. In My
Century, you evoke a series of historical events and a
certain number of them touched me very much--I am
thinking of the story of the little boy who goes to
the Liebknecht demonstration and pees on his father's
back. I don't know if it is based on a personal
memory, but in any case it shows a very original way
of learning about socialism. I also very much liked
what you said about Jünger and Remarque: you say,
between the lines, many things about the role of
intellectuals and their complicity in tragic
events--even in those they appear to criticize. I also
liked what you said about Heidegger. That's one more
thing we have in common. I have done a whole analysis
of Heidegger's rhetoric, which has had a terrible
effect in France almost to the present day.

Grass: What is important for me in that story about
Liebknecht is that you have, on one hand, Liebknecht,
the agitator of youth--a progressive movement in the
name of socialism is just beginning--and, on the other
hand, the father who, in his enthusiasm, doesn't
realize that his son, who is sitting on his shoulders,
wants to get down. When the little boy pees on his
father's neck, his father gives him a fierce spanking.
This type of authoritarian behavior later causes the
boy to enlist voluntarily when troops are being
mobilized for the First World War--in other words, to
do exactly the opposite of what Liebknecht was hoping
to inspire young people to do. In My Century, I
describe a professor who reflects, during a Wednesday
seminar, on his reactions in 1966, '67 and '68. At the
time, his point of departure was a philosophy of high
ideas. And he has come back to it in the end. In
between, he had several spurts of radicalism, and he
was one of those who publicly tore Adorno to pieces
from the podium. It is a very typical biography of the
era. In the sixties, I was caught up in events. The
student protests were necessary and they set more
things in motion than the spokespeople of the
pseudo-revolution of '68 wanted to admit. That is to
say, the revolution didn't take place, it had no
basis, but society did change. In From the Diary of a
Snail, I describe how the students yelled when I told
them: Progress is a snail. Very few wanted to believe
it. We are both now at an age where we can, I agree,
be sure to continue to open our big mouths, for as
long as we retain our health; but our time is limited.
I don't know what it's like in France--I don't think
it's any better--but I believe that the younger
generation of German literature has proven to have
little inclination or interest in perpetuating the
traditions of the Enlightenment, the tradition of
opening your big mouth and interfering. If there is no
renewal of that, no changing of the guard, then this
aspect of the good European tradition will also be
lost.



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