In search of the lost or.., p.6
In Search of the Lost Orient, page 6
Chapter 6
POSTCARDS AND AMERICAN POOL
What were you looking for exactly through this compulsion to travel?
In the beginning, I bought into the culturalist illusion; I mean the idea that I was entering another world, another society that functioned according to a specific mentality and culture that was unique and exotic. It was a quest for the authentic—to see Afghanistan really and truly, with real nomads in real yurts, meet real tribes, and bring back authentic artefacts. In fact, since I had no money to buy real ones, I brought back plenty of fake stuff. I was a sucker for fake culture: smoking from a hookah in Istanbul above the Golden Horn, crossing a bit of desert on the back of a camel, or drinking burning hot tea while exchanging polite greetings with an elderly turbaned Bedouin. I had swallowed all the clichés from travel narratives and comic books. At bottom, as I’ve already said, my first trips to Afghanistan were the fulfillment of childhood dreams. But, obviously, at some point either the clichés don’t retain their magic or by dint of repetition simply become boring. So it was when, after returning from Yemen, I organized a slide show one evening at the Cité universitaire, and my Algerian friend Amina, the one who had written our fake diplomatic mission letter, reacted negatively when she saw the clichés I was projecting on the white wall. “Hey, your show is completely racist!” she blurted out. “Veiled women, armed Bedouins, camels, sailboats—what’s next canoes and crocodiles?” In fact, I would have loved canoes and crocodiles, was my first thought—but her remark made me think again. Looking over my slides, I realized she was right—I had been traveling in an imaginary Orient.
Two years later in 1973, arriving in Istanbul in my Renault 4L, I no longer wished to sip tea at the Café Pyerloti (written in Turkish on the sign) while watching the sun set on the Golden Horn. I changed neighborhoods, sat down on a bench, and waited. Two young Turks who were bored too came up and started conversing with me—in English. We went to a drive-in together and ate fried chicken and drank bottles of Coke inside my little car sandwiched between two Mercedes. Then we went to a local fair and rode bumper cars and later played some American pool at a youth club. As it turned out they were left-leaning and manifested easily and often their opposition to the Vietnam War. I also joined them in shouting, “Down with imperialism!” (in Turkish) on the shores of the Bosphorus when an American warship went by. Then they asked if I wanted to go to a bordello with them on Saturday night—something they did once a month, just as, most likely, the students in the generation before mine did in Paris in the 1950s. I had certainly left postcards behind. True life was beginning. It would become a constant preoccupation of my research: to avoid becoming a prisoner of cultural illusions and to better understand a society by paying attention to the banal.
The evolution of your interior thinking is clear enough, but concretely what did those changes amount to?
I found myself confronted in a very concrete way with a fundamental problem that has been the focus of an entire body of writing in the human sciences: What belongs to a universal framework that is common to all of humanity, and what belongs to a particular culture? Marxism was in this sense humanist insofar as, for it, class and not cultural background determines the individual; whereas anthropology, as antiracist and progressive as it may have thought of itself at the time (in the work of Lévi-Strauss, for example), privileged cultural specificities from the start. Put another way, the question is, How might one think of culture beyond cultures?
Everywhere I went, I encountered kindred spirits (young leftist students), and we had common reference points and identical conversations. People were talking about the same things everywhere: in Kabul, with a little group of Marxist-Leninists, we discussed the revolutionary capacities of rural inhabitants, comparing them to those in the working class; and the same discussion occurred in India and Yemen. It turned out I found myself in the same group I was familiar with—the circle of petit bourgeois intellectuals who felt like they no longer fit in and dreamed of revolution. Oddly enough, only literature and Marxism would be deployed in this universalist space—to discuss Mao or Hafiz in Tehran was to go beyond the culturalist boundaries and live in the universal.
In saying that, are you evoking the spirit of a particular time—the mutations of the young students over the 1960s and ’70s—or are you making a general claim, namely, that particular cultures are always surpassed by a human universal? And that therefore one ought to be on one’s guard against all culturalism?
At that time, I mostly bought into the paradigm of syncretism, which in reality remained always present in the culturalist vision; in other words, I thought Afghans, Turks, and others had integrated elements of Western philosophy and culture, and that we were all moving toward an intermingling of cultures, until after a while I realized that it was absurd to speak of syncretism—the real people on the ground don’t live it that way. It’s just their life, period. In fact, when I came across it much later, I didn’t really like Edward Said’s book devoted to a deconstruction of Orientalism—so sure of having the last word, while the native had only revolt.1 But it’s true that I too was stuck between, on the one hand, an abstract universalism (whether it was Marxism or later the social sciences) and, on the other, fake culture (by that I mean reduced to clichés—even if clichés, like caricature, may convey a certain truthiness). The Marxist universalism that totally ignored culture stood alongside phony Orientalism that sought out authentic culture, and the two put together didn’t work at all. My question, at bottom, was that of modernity in action, or in the process of happening, and I was interpreting it with old schematic ways of thinking.
Finally, isn’t it being on the ground, or an extended presence on the ground, that allows one to see though the mirages and false perceptions of another’s culture?
Certainly, my local knowledge changed things considerably. My Persian got much better over time, and so eventually I was able to have “serious conversations” in Afghanistan—about the existence of God, the meaning of life, and so on. I even remember people telling me their dreams and asking me to interpret them. This was rather embarrassing since, as my professor in khâgne used to say, psychoanalysis is a little obscene, and so I’d fall back on some Jungian yarns.
I considered myself to be in the humanist tradition: man is the same everywhere, despite the difficulties of communicating together and even if, one-by-one, each person has an imperfect interpretation of another person’s body language—the way of sitting, eating, talking, et cetera. These customs and habits probably had an influence on one’s thinking, but how? For example, if I can jump ahead a bit, moments of war are always moments of truth. When you share that experience with Afghan mujahideen—when, for example, you find yourself together in an irrigation ditch in the middle of winter after just escaping an ambush—you begin by bursting out laughing. Then you chatter on, and you all feel very close to each other. And yet in my little notebook, I wrote down everything that had preceded the attack and how the military behavior of my companions remained, to my eyes, deeply marked by cultural attitudes (not sending a reconnaissance group and flipping suddenly from a carefree attitude to panic; whereas we, the two Westerners present, felt gradually more afraid, a slow increase of anxiousness that led us to anticipate the worst). But, of course, from their perspective, they were wondering the same thing about us and were noting to themselves what struck them as bizarre and exotic in our reactions. Later we were able to put our two sets of reactions side by side through conversation.
You spoke of a “culture beyond cultures,” but is that simply humanism or does it suppose a mastery of particular cultures?
I think that taking an interest in specific cultures sometimes leads to overestimating the “cultural barrier,” and to making intercommunication be dependent on mastery of the language and cultural codes such that at some point one may, to use McLuhan’s terminology, confuse the message and the medium. One risks losing the content and falling into a fetishism of the code and neglecting the meaning. Later I will speak of the figure of the militant communist and the evangelical missionary for whom there is no problem of cultural codes because one is immediately at the heart of the truth of the other—his class status or his soul. But the relation to art also raises the problem of the necessity (or not) of access codes: are they necessary, or are they post hoc social constructions to “reserve” access to the corpus? I don’t have the answer. But as often with me, I have a story to tell.
In 1969 I was taking first-year Chinese classes at the Censier campus in Paris, a night class, and I rediscovered the same odd mix of students as at Langues orientales. We were considered dilettantes, and we were given the most recently hired teaching assistant, Mlle Masako, who must have been about twenty-five years old. She was Taiwanese, had a Japanese father, and didn’t speak a word of French. So you can imagine class time wasn’t very productive, and by 10 P.M. we were usually worn out and chatting among ourselves. The course took place in a building that was already run-down, graffiti-covered, drafty, and poorly lit. There were about fifteen of us gathered at the bottom of a large amphitheater, and only the lights of the first row and one over the podium were turned on. One winter evening, Mlle Masako cracked up—but we didn’t even notice at first. She was speaking with her lips pursed in a voice that even in Chinese sounded monotone (Chinese is a tonal language). She was vehemently reproaching us for our disrespect, but we didn’t understand her language, her gestures, or her feelings. We didn’t see her anger. Then she fell silent, stood up straight on the podium, took a deep breath, and started singing a capella:
Du meine Seele, du mein Herz
Du meine Wonn’, O du mein Schmerz
Du meine Welt, in der ich lebe2
What we didn’t know was that she was a singer, a specialist in Schumann’s lieder, and gave Chinese lessons to pay for her studies.
She sang five or six songs one after another. When she stopped singing, we remained stone silent. Suddenly, a round of loud applause erupted behind our backs. We all swung around at once to see at the very top of the dimly lit and deserted amphitheater a line of women. It was the team of cleaning ladies, in fact, women whom one never sees usually because they arrive at night and leave again before the school day begins. They were all black African or Maghrebi women, and they had put down their brooms and mops and stood there standing behind the back row of seats, not daring to sit down. And with deep sincerity they applauded something beautiful.
Chapter 7
PROFESSOR AT DREUX
Leftist, Away from Paris, and Happy
So you continued traveling, but always in the summer because you had to carry out your assignment within France’s civil service to teach in Dreux, fifty miles west of Paris, in the years “after the gunpowder,” to use the expression of Hamon and Rotman.1
It was the 1970s under President Pompidou but especially marked by his successor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. It was a very interesting time. The Left was not officially in power but was culturally dominant. In Dreux, which was my home from 1973 to 2009, there existed a leftist countersociety, with city hall controlled by the Right; a lively secular association (cercle laïque); public debates; and peaceful demonstrations. We had teaching salaries that were fairly decent for our convivial and frugal way of life. We lived in subsidized housing, drove the iconic French people’s cars—a Renault 4L or Citröen 2CV—preferred camping under the stars to three-star hotels, couscous and Chinese food over restaurants in the Michelin guide, and we had potluck parties among ourselves. By we I mean the milieu of professors, association activists, amateur intellectuals, nurses, apprentice union members (though the apparatchiks of the Communist Party and the CGT union didn’t belong), and maybe a few additional cultivated types like a young doctor or lawyer before they started taking themselves too seriously.
That was also the time of the beginning of the second wave of immigration that had begun in the 1960s. I began to have beurs (slang for North Africans) in my terminale classes. At the time, of course, the unquestioned social model was assimilationist. There was no discussion of an overly “visible” Islam or of “Français musulmans” (Muslim-French); the term designated only the harkis then.2 We spoke then of immigrants or Maghrebis, not of Muslims, or even Arabs. I was involved in local associations and the cultural life of the town. Most of us were not, or no longer, Marxists; but we were left-leaning in a way that was less and less politicized and more and more libertarian or rather soixante-huitard—the spirit of ’68. Of course, we voted for the candidates on the left—no matter what—but with little or no involvement in party activism.
What were the political forces in Dreux?
We encountered Communist Party members at demonstrations and cultural events, or at the lycée, where some teachers were members. But in Dreux it was more primary school teachers who were likely to be Communists than middle school or high school teachers. We had cordial relations with militant activists, partly because some might have personal relations with them as well, but ideological discussions were often very tense. For us, they were Stalinists. We were neither Maoists nor Trotskyists anymore but, as I said, gaucho. In concrete terms, that meant we voted Socialist against the senator-mayor3 of Dreux, Jean Cauchon, a very open and upstanding Christian-Democrat. We operated within the polarizing logic of the time where, grafted onto the division Left-Right, there was the divide between laïcs (secularists) and cathos (Catholics), something that has disappeared today, or rather morphed into laïcité (of the Left and the Right) versus Islam. Like in many cities in the West of France, social life was organized around two networks of socializing: the cercle laïque (secular circle) and the Catholic patronage network, in this case emanating from the Centre Saint-Jean. Each network had its vacation camps, sports clubs, cinema, dance and theater groups, and lecture series. There were hardly any mixed marriages. This system or division of the social space began to disappear after May ’68, first with the departure of the leftist priests—I think several from Dreux got married in the years that followed—and then with the victory of the Socialists in 1981. But it’s likely that May ’68 itself did much to shake up the chasm between the “two Frances”— Catholic and laïque—and, of course, there was also the Second Vatican Council that revolutionized the Church, especially the clergy.
The National Front, which irrupted onto the political scene in 1983, arrived from outside when Jean-Pierre and Marie-France Stirbois settled in the outskirts of the city. Oddly enough, he never had an activist base in the city itself, only a very versatile voting block. On the other hand, the Gaullist RPR (Rassemblement pour la République) had a solid base but no leadership.
Was your family on the left?
No, my family was not a famille de gauche. No one at my house talked about politics. My mother absolutely refused and would not tell us how she voted. The truth is my parents’ lives were deeply affected by the Second World War. My mother’s father, Augustin Barraud, was the Protestant minister of La Rochelle during the war. He had stood up very courageously, notably during the siege of La Rochelle, one of the pockets along the Atlantic coast held by the Germans right up to the final surrender. For example, even though it was, strictly speaking, forbidden by the Germans, he presided over a special service in honor of the dead mayor, Léonce Vieljeux, himself Protestant, who had been shot by a Nazi firing squad. The funeral homily began with a verse from 2 Samuel 3:38: “Do you not know that a prince and a great man has fallen this day.” My grandfather also provided fake baptism certificates, for Jews I suppose, since I don’t see how anyone else would need one, and most likely organized escapes into the unoccupied zone in collaboration with the managers of the train station restaurant, who were also Protestants. He never wanted to talk about any of that—true to Matthew 6:3: “Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” He and the local Catholic priest were often called on by the Germans to provide assistance to resisters before they were executed. My grandfather was a friend and colleague of Father Trocmé of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon—they had graduated the same year from the theological seminary at Montauban. He also played a role in the secret negotiations between the FFI (Forces françaises de l’intérieur) and the German garrison. The three main actors—Admiral Meyer for the FFI, Rear Admiral Schirlitz for the Kriegsmarine, and my grandfather—were all Protestants. The purge was very severe after the liberation of La Rochelle. It was the headquarters of the Sidos family, the founders, later on, of the extreme Right group L’Œuvre française—but my grandfather also visited with collabos in prison just as he had done with resisters. He placed his moral duty above all politics.
Returning to your teaching, you said you did not dislike teaching philosophy at the high school level, even at a technical lycée.
More than that, I adored it. For twenty-five years, I was pleased to teach philosophy in every type of lycée—technical, general, professional—and to students in every category from A to G. It was an atmosphere that favored close bonding, it should be said, for the simple reason that when I started I was twenty-three and the youngest students I had were seventeen and the oldest twenty. In short, we were very close in age, but our thinking was far apart, as though we were of different generations. My background was fairly puritan, and my schooling was all male. The students, on the other hand, were post–May ’68 children, used to coeducation, and in the case of some, mostly girls, used to a sexual freedom that I had never experienced. Therefore, we lived in a sort of state of grace where codes and norms were tossed aside—at least until the emergence of a new set of normative codes arrived, this time from the Left, in the 1980s. The latter gave rise to a vast public debate—exemplified by the heavily mediatized accusations of pedophilia against Daniel Cohn-Bendit4—that one could say was a normative anachronism!
