Kater Moggin <kimmerian DeleteThis @fastmail.fm> wrote in message news:<kimmerian-CFF150.19303627092004 DeleteThis @news.verizon.net>...
> marko_amnell DeleteThis @hotmail.com:
>
> [Perry Anderson re Derrida, Foucault, et al.]
>
> > The reception of this effervescence abroad varied from country to
> > country, but no major culture in the West, not to speak of Japan, was
> > altogether exempt from it. This owed something to the traditional
> > cachet of anything Parisian, with its overtones of mode as much as
> > of mind.
>
> In a long tradition, more familiar even in the world
> of _haute couture_ than of literary theory, what is made
> in Paris is often thought of as more fashionable than
> sound. What is in fashion in Paris is tolerable only as
> window display, not for everyday wear. Yet, as we
> know from Baudelaire, fashion, _la mode_, is itself a
> highly significant and, precisely, aesthetic and
> historical category that historians should not
> underestimate. When it becomes fashionable to dismiss
> fashion, clearly something interesting is going on, and
> what is being discarded as _mere_ fashion must also be
> more insistent, and more threatening, than its frivolity
> and transience would seem to indicate.
>
> de Man, "Reading and History"
Thanks, Moggin. Interesting quote. The second part of
Perry Anderson's interesting essay on post-war France
is in the Sept 23 issue of the LRB. Here is his conclusion,
where he addresses the cultural conditions in France during
the most recent period of relative decline:
France also saw perhaps the most ambitious attempt so far to trace the
overall shape of the mutations in late 20th-century capitalism, in a
work whose title deliberately recalls Weber's classic on its origins.
Le Nouvel Esprit du capitalisme (1999), by Luc Boltanski and Eve
Chiapello, links industrial sociology, political economy and
philosophical inquiry in a sweeping panorama of the ways in which
relations between capital and labour have been reconfigured to absorb
the cultural revolution of the 1960s, and engender new dynamics of
profit, exploitation, and emancipation from all residues of the ethic
that preoccupied Weber. This critical synthesis so far lacks any
Anglophone equivalent. But, not unlike Bourdieu's work, it also
suggests a strange asymmetry within French culture of the past
decades. For although its theoretical object is general, all its
empirical data and virtually all its intellectual references are
national. Such introversion has not been confined to sociology. The
involution of the Annales tradition after Bloch and Braudel offers
another striking illustration. Whereas British historians of the past
thirty to forty years have distinguished themselves by the
geographical range of their work, to a point where there is scarcely
any European country that does not count among them a major
contribution to the sense of its own past, not to speak of many
outside Europe, modern historians of repute in France have
concentrated overwhelmingly on their own country. Le Roy Ladurie,
Goubert, Roche, Furet, Chartier, Agulhon, Ariès: the list could be
extended indefinitely. The days of Halévy are over.
More generally, if one looks at the social sciences, political thought
or even in some respects philosophy in France, the impression left is
that for long periods there has been a notable degree of closure, and
ignorance of intellectual developments outside the country. Examples
of the resulting lag could be multiplied: a very belated and
incomplete encounter with Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophy or
neo-contractualism; with the Frankfurt School or the legacy of
Gramsci; with German stylistics or American New Criticism; British
historical sociology or Italian political science. A country that has
translated scarcely anything of Fredric Jameson or Peter Wollen, and
could not even find a publisher for Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes,
might well be termed a rearguard in the international exchange of
ideas.
Yet if we turn to arts and letters, the picture is reversed. French
literature itself may have declined in standing. But French reception
of world literature is in a league of its own. In this area French
culture has shown itself exceptionally open to the outside world, with
a record of interest in foreign output no other metropolitan society
can match. A glance at any of the better small bookshops in Paris is
enough to register the difference. Translations of fiction or poetry
from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, Latin American and East European
cultures abound, to a degree unimaginable in London or New York, Rome
or Berlin. The difference has structural consequences. The great
majority of writers in a language outside the Atlantic core who have
gained an international reputation have done so by introductory
passage through the medium of French, not English: from Borges,
Mishima and Gombrowicz, to Carpentier, Mahfouz, Krleza or Cortazar, up
to Gao Xinjiang, the recent Chinese Nobel Prize-winner.
The system of relations that has produced this pattern of Parisian
consecration is the object of Pascale Casanova's path-breaking La
République mondiale des lettres, the other outstanding example of an
imaginative synthesis with strong critical intent in recent years.3
Here the national bounds of Bourdieu's work have been decisively
broken, in a project that uses his concepts of symbolic capital and
the cultural field to construct a model of the global inequalities of
power between different national literatures, and the gamut of
strategies that writers in languages at the periphery of the system of
legitimation have used to try to win a place at the centre. Nothing
like this has been attempted before. The geographical range of
Casanova's materials, from Madagascar to Romania, Brazil to
Switzerland, Croatia to Algeria; the clarity and trenchancy of the map
of unequal relations she offers; and, not least, the generosity with
which the dilemmas and ruses of the disadvantaged are explored, make
her book kindred to the French elan behind the World Social Forum. It
might be called a literary Porto Alegre. That implies a beginning,
with much fierce argument and discussion to come. But whatever the
outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections, The World Republic of
Letters - empire more than republic, as Casanova shows - is likely to
have the same sort of liberating impact at large as Said's
Orientalism, with which it stands comparison.
The wider puzzle remains: what explains the strange contrast between a
unique literary cosmopolitanism and so much intellectual parochialism
in France? It is tempting to wonder whether the answer lies simply in
the relative selfconfidence of each sector: the continuing native
vitality of French history and theory inducing indifference to foreign
output, and the declining prestige of French letters prompting
compensation in the role of a universal dragoman. There may be
something in this, but it cannot be the whole story. For the function
of Paris as world capital of modern literature - the summit of an
international order of symbolic consecration - long precedes the fall
in the reputation of French authors themselves, dating back at least
to the time of Strindberg and Joyce, as Casanova demonstrates.
Moreover, there is a parallel art that contradicts such an explanation
completely. French hospitality to the furthest corners of the earth
has been incomparable in the cinema, too. On any day, about five times
as many foreign films, past or present, are screened in Paris as in
any other city on earth. Much of what is now termed 'world cinema' -
Iranian, Taiwanese, Senegalese - owes its visibility to French
consecration and funding. Had directors like Kiarostami, Hou Xiao Xien
or Sembene depended on reception in the Anglo-American world, few
outside their native lands would ever have glimpsed them. Yet this
openness to the alien camera has been there all along. The brio of the
New Wave was born from enthusiasms for Hollywood musicals and gangster
movies, Italian Neo-Realism and German Expressionism, that gave it
much of the vocabulary to reinvent French cinema. A national energy
and an international sensibility were inseparable from the start.
Such contrasts are a reminder that no society of any size ever moves
simply in step with itself, in a uniform direction. There are always
cross-currents and enclaves, deviances or doublings back from what
appears to be the main path. In culture as in politics, contradiction
and irrelation are the rule. They do not disable general judgments,
but they complicate them. It is not meaningless to speak of a French
decline since the mid-1970s. But the current sense of the term, that
of Nicolas Baverez and others, which has given rise to le déclinisme,
is to be avoided. It is too narrowly focused on economic and social
performance, understood as a test of competition. Postwar history has
shown how easily relative positions in these can shift. Verdicts based
on them are usually superficial.
Decline in the sense that matters has been something else. For some
twenty years after the end of the trente glorieuses, the mood of the
French elites was not unlike a democratic version of the outlook of
1940 and after: a widespread feeling that the country had been
infected with subversive doctrines it needed to purge, that healthier
strands in the nation's past needed to be reclaimed, and - above all -
that the forms of a necessary modernity were to be found in the Great
Power of the hour, and it was urgent either to adapt or adopt them for
domestic reconstruction. The American model, more benign than the
German, lasted longer. But eventually even some of those addicted to
it began to have doubts. At the end of this road, might there not wait
a sheer banalisation of France? From the mid-1990s onwards, a reaction
started to set in.
It is still far from clear how deep that goes, or what its outcome
will be. The drive to clamp a standard neo-liberal straitjacket onto
economy and society has slowed, but not slackened - Maastricht alone
ensuring that. What could not be achieved frontally may arrive more
gradually, by erosion of social protections rather than assault on
them; perhaps the more typical route in any case. A creeping
normalisation, of the kind the current low-profile government led by
Raffarin is pursuing, risks less than a galloping one of the sort
admirers look to from Nicolas Sarkozy, the latest d'Artagnan of the
right, and in French conditions may prove more effective. It will not
be the Socialist Party, in office for 16 out of the last 24 years,
that halts it. Its cultural monuments, the shoddy eyesores of
Mitterrand's grands travaux and vulgarity of Jack Lang's star-shows,
rightly detested by conservative opinion, were the epitome of
everything signified by the progress of banalisation.
Outside the country, attitudes of passionate francophilia that were
still quite common between the wars have virtually disappeared. Like
most of its neighbours, or perhaps more so, France arouses mixed
feelings today. Admiration and irritation are often expressed in equal
measure. But were the country to become just another denizen of the
cage of Atlantic conformities, a great hole would be left in the
world. The vanishing of all that it has represented culturally and
politically, in its pyrotechnic difference, would be a loss of a
magnitude still difficult to grasp. How close such a prospect is,
remains hard to fathom. Smith's dry rejoinder to Pitt comes to mind:
there is a lot of ruin in a nation. The hidden stratifications and
intricacies of the country, the periodic turbulence beneath the
pacified surface of a consumer society, sporadic impulses - gathering
or residual? - to careen fearlessly to the left of the left, past
impatience with democratic boredom, are so many reasons to think the
game is not quite over yet. After explaining, lucidly and at length,
why France was no longer subject to the revolutionary fault-lines of
the 19th or early 20th century, and had at last achieved a political
order that enjoyed stability and legitimacy, Aron nevertheless ended
his great editorial of 1978 with a warning. 'Ce peuple, apparemment
tranquille, est encore dangereux.' Let us hope so.
<a style='text-decoration: underline;' href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n18/ande01_.html" target="_blank">http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n18/ande01_.html</a><!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
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