July 3, 2000 The Nation.

25
B O O K S & T H E A R T S
The role of the public intellectualand the moral onus, assuming that one exists
seems ever to thread the Scylla of celebrity and the Charybdis of marginality. In a con-
versation printed in part simultaneously in the French daily Le Monde and German
weekly Die Zeit, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Nobel laureate Gnter Grass dis-
cussed the role of intellectuals in society, stylistic practices in sociology and litera-
ture, 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 Collge 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).
A Literature From Below
GNTER GRASS AND PI ERRE BOURDI EU
Grass: To tell the truth, most intellectuals
today swallow everything, and it gives them
nothing but ulcers.
Pierre Bourdieu: You have spoken
somewhere of the European or German
traditionwhich is also, by the way, a
French traditionof opening your big
mouth. I am delighted that you received
the Nobel Prize, and I am also delighted
that you havent been transformed by re-
ceiving 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.
Gnter 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 communica-
tion of the kind we are undertaking now is
the exception to the rule. When I think of
your book The Weight of the Worldor 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 societys 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 claim-
ing 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 with-
out harping on them in an ostentatious
manner. I was very pleased by that. I wish
that there were such a book about the so-
cial 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 ab-
surdity inherent in certain confrontations.
Bourdieu: You have written magnifi-
cently about a certain number of the ex-
periences 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 isnt al-
ways possible to maintain ones distance
from them. We felt, for example, that we
had to exclude a certain number of narra-
26 The Nation. July 3, 2000
Bourdieu: A conservative revolution is a very
strange thing: Its a revolution that restores
the past and yet presents itself as progressive.
tives from the book because they were too
poignant or too pathetic, too painful.
Grass: When I speak of comedy, I
dont mean to imply that tragedy and com-
edy are mutually exclusive, that the bound-
aries between the two dont fluctuate.
Bourdieu: Absolutely. Thats
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 deal-
ing 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 rea-
sons 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 per-
petrated at the moment by the neoliberal
politics established in Europe and Latin
America and in many other countriesthat
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 En-
lightenment, of a tradition that has now
been thrown into question everywhereor,
at least, in France and Germanyas if the
European movement toward Aufklrung,
toward Enlightenment, had failed. Many
of its early aspectswe need only think of
Montaignehave been lost over the course
of the centuries. Humor is one of them.
Voltaires Candide and Diderots 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, there-
fore, 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 revo-
lutionin the sense that one spoke of a
conservative revolution in Germany in the
thirtiesand a conservative revolution is
a very strange thing: Its a revolution that
restores the past and yet presents itself as
progressive, a revolution that transforms
regression into progressto the extent that
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, be-
cause, 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 thinkit is my impressionthat intel-
lectuals bear a great deal of the responsi-
bility 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; be-
cause one of the defining qualities of these
neoliberal governments is that they do away
with utopias.
Grass: The Socialist and Social Demo-
cratic 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 ex-
isted, mind you, much longer than Commu-
nism had. If one abandons ones own tradi-
tions, 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 jobsand who,
as soon as they lose them, fall into a bottom-
less abyss. You must found a union for the
unemployed citizens of Europe. We com-
plain that the construction of Europe is tak-
the idea. We are told: Youre 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 in-
fernal 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 Eu-
rope, 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 keep-
ing 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 con-
sensus, 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 re-
maining 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 them-
selves Socialists. Whether its [Gerhard]
Schrder 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 be-
come 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 populationlaborers, office work-
ers, etc., and also intellectuals. Then there
were a whole series of protests. There was
the unemployed workers demonstration,
the European march to protest unemploy-
ment, the illegal immigrants protest and
so on. There was a kind of continuous ag-
itation that obliged the Social Democrats in
power to pretend, at least, to be participat-
those who oppose this regression seem
themselves to be regressing. Those who
oppose terror come to seem like terrorists.
Its something that we have both experi-
enced: We voluntarily classify ourselves as
archaicin French, we are called ringards
(old-timers), arrirs (outdated).
Grass: Dinosauria
Bourdieu: Dinosaursexactly. That is
the great strength of conservative revolu-
tions, or progressive restorations. Even
what youre saying, I believe, illustrates
ing 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
July 3, 2000 The Nation. 27
resent a unanimity of voices. In order to
fight it effectively, we must insure that the
criticisms reach the public. We are con-
stantly invaded and assaulted by the dom-
inant discourse. A vast majority of jour-
nalists 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 estab-
lished 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 be-
cause 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 be-
cause 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 Cen-
tury, you evoke a series of historical events
and a certain number of them touched me
very muchI am thinking of the story of
the little boy who goes to the Liebknecht
demonstration and pees on his fathers
ing 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 its a mistake
to believe that all intellectuals are on the left.
You can find proof to the contrary through-
out the history of the twentieth century, the
Nazi era included: A man like Goebbels
was an intellectual. For me, being an intel-
lectual 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 experi-
ence in the social domain than intellectuals
do. Those people are now unemployed or
retired and no one seems to need them any-
more. Their potential is lying fallow.
Bourdieu: Let me go back for one sec-
ond 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 writerand Ive witnessed this
in the countries of North Africais some-
one 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 intellec-
tuals; they are primarilythough not al-
wayspeople 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 neoliberal-
ism. 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 maximiza-
tion of profit.
Bourdieu: Yes, unfortunately, it is not
simply a matter of opposing and thwarting
the dominant discourse that claims to rep-
28 The Nation. July 3, 2000
Second-Wave Soundings
ROSALYN BAXANDALL AND LINDA GORDON
THE WORLD SPLIT OPEN: How the Modern Womens Movement Changed America.
By Ruth Rosen. Viking. 446 pp. $34.95.
IN OUR TIME: Memoir of a Revolution.
By Susan Brownmiller. Dial Press. 360 pp. $24.95.
T
he womens liberation movement, as it was called in the sixties and seventies,
was the largest social movement in the history of the United Statesand
probably in the world. Its impact has been felt in every home, school and
workplace, in every form of art, entertainment and sport, in all aspects of
personal and public life in the United States.
Like a river overflowing its banks and seek-
ing a new course, it permanently altered the
landscape.
In fact, contrary to the punditry, which
claims that the womens movement is dead
and that the public has turned against it,
public-opinion research shows the oppo-
site. In 1998 a Time/CNN poll found that
51 percent of Americans believe that fem-
inists have been helpful to women; 53 per-
cent of women that feminists are in touch
with the average American woman. A sep-
arate poll among blacks found that 65 per-
cent think black feminists help the black
community.
The movements impact cannot be eas-
ily encapsulated. Its judicial and legislative
victories include the legalization of abortion
in 1973, federal guidelines against coercive
sterilization, rape-shield laws that encour-
age more women to prosecute their attack-
ers, affirmative action programs that aim to
correct past discriminationalthough not
the Equal Rights Amendment, which failed
in 1982, just three states short of the re-
quired two-thirds.
But the most salient accomplishments
occurred not in law but in the economy and
the society, involving an accumulation of
changes in the way people live, dress, dream
of their future and make a living. Feminists
turned violence against women, previously
a well-kept secret, into a public political
issue; made rape, incest, battering and sex-
ual harassment understood as crimes; and
got public funding for shelters for battered
women. Because of feminist pressure,
changes in education have been substantial:
Curriculums and textbooks have been re-
written to promote equal opportunity for
girls, in the universities and professional
schools more women are admitted and
funded, and a new and rich feminist scholar-
ship has, in some disciplines, overcome
opposition and won recognition. Title IX,
passed in 1972 to mandate equal access to
educational programs, has worked a vir-
tual revolution in sports. As regards health,
for example, many physicians and hospi-
tals have made major improvements in
the treatment of women; about 50 percent
of medical students are women; women
successfully fought their exclusion from
medical research; and diseases affecting
women, such as breast cancer, now receive
better funding thanks to womens efforts.
In supporting families, feminists organized
daycare centers, demanded daycare funding
from government and private employers,
developed standards and curriculums for
early childhood education, fought for the
rights of mothers and for a decent welfare
system.
F
eminists have also struggled for better
employment conditions for women.
They won greater access to traditionally
male occupations, from construction to
the professions and business. They en-
tered and changed the unions and have been
successful at organizing previously non-
union workers such as secretaries, wait-
resses, hospital workers and flight attend-
ants. As the great majority of American
women increasingly need to work for wages
throughout their lives, the feminist move-
ment tried to educate men to share in house-
work and childrearing. Although women
still do the bulk of the housework and child-
rearing, it is also commonplace today to see
men in the playgrounds, the supermarkets,
PTA meetings.
Considering the enormity of these sea
changes, astonishingly little has been pub-
lished about this now thirty-five-year-old
Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon are the
editors of Dear Sisters: Dispatches From the
Womens Liberation Movement, a collection
of primary documents, forthcoming from Basic
Books in September.
back. I dont know if it is based on a per-
sonal memory, but in any case it shows a
very original way of learning about social-
ism. I also very much liked what you said
about Jnger and Remarque: you say, be-
tween the lines, many things about the role
of intellectuals and their complicity in
tragic eventseven in those they appear to
criticize. I also liked what you said about
Heidegger. Thats one more thing we have
in common. I have done a whole analysis
of Heideggers rhetoric, which has had a
terrible effect in France almost to the pres-
ent day.
Grass: What is important for me in that
story about Liebknecht is that you have,
on one hand, Liebknecht, the agitator of
youtha progressive movement in the
name of socialism is just beginningand,
on the other hand, the father who, in his
enthusiasm, doesnt realize that his son,
who is sitting on his shoulders, wants to
get down. When the little boy pees on his
fathers neck, his father gives him a fierce
spanking. This type of authoritarian be-
havior later causes the boy to enlist vol-
untarily when troops are being mobilized
for the First World Warin 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 philos-
ophy 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 biog-
raphy of the era. In the sixties, I was caught
up in events. The student protests were
necessary and they set more things in mo-
tion than the spokespeople of the pseudo-
revolution of 68 wanted to admit. That is
to say, the revolution didnt 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: Prog-
ress 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 dont
know what its like in FranceI dont think
its any betterbut I believe that the young-
er generation of German literature has
proven to have little inclination or interest
in perpetuating the traditions of the En-
lightenment, 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 tra-
dition will also be lost. I