Grass: It’s unusual in Germany for a sociologist and a writer to sit down together. Here, the philosophers sit in one corner, the sociologists in another, while the writers squabble in the back room. The sort of exchange we’re having here rarely occurs. But when I think of your The Weight of the World, or of my most recent book, My Century, I see that our work has one thing in common: we tell stories from below. We don’t speak over people’s heads or from the position of the victor; we are notorious, within our profession, for being on the side of the losers, of those excluded or on the margins of society.
In The Weight of the World, you and your co-authors managed to suppress your own individuality and focus on the notion of understanding, rather than that of superior knowledge—a view of social conditions in France that can certainly be applied to other countries. As a writer, I’m tempted to use your stories as raw material—for example, the description of ‘Jonquil Street’, where often third-generation metalworkers are now unemployed and shut out of society. Or, to take another case, the story of the young woman who leaves the countryside for Paris and sorts letters on the night shift. All the other young women there were recruited on the promise that, after a couple of years, they could fulfil their dream and return to their villages to deliver the post. This will never come to pass: they’ll remain letter-sorters. In these descriptions of the workplace, social problems are clearly evoked without recourse to slogans. I liked that very much. I wish we had a book like this on social relationships in our country. In fact, every country should have one. Or perhaps a whole library, gathering detailed studies of the consequences of political failure—politics having now been entirely displaced by the economy. The only question in my mind perhaps relates to the discipline of sociology in general: there is no humour in such books. The comedy of failure, which plays such an important role in my stories, is missing—the absurdities arising from certain confrontations. Why is that?
Bourdieu: Recording these experiences directly from those who have lived them can in itself be overwhelming; to keep one’s distance would be unthinkable. For instance, we felt obliged to omit several accounts from the book because they were too poignant, too full of pathos or pain.
Grass: When I say humour, I mean that tragedy and comedy aren’t mutually exclusive; the boundaries between the two are fluid.
Bourdieu: What we wanted was for readers to see this absurdity in a raw, unvarnished form. One of the instructions we gave ourselves was to avoid being literary. You may find this shocking, but there is a temptation to write well when faced with dramas such as these. The brief was to try to be as brutally direct as possible, in order to return to these stories their extraordinary, almost unbearable violence. For two reasons: scientific and, I think, literary, since we wanted to be un-literary in order to be literary by other means. There were also political reasons: we believed that the violence wrought by neoliberal policies in Europe and Latin America, and many other countries, is so great that one cannot capture it with purely conceptual analyses. Critiques of neoliberal policy are not equal to its effects.
Grass: This is reflected in your book—the interviewer is often struck dumb by the reply he receives, so much so that he repeats himself or loses his train of thought, because what is being related is expressed with the force of inner suffering. It’s good that the interviewer doesn’t then intervene to assert his authority or force through his opinion. But perhaps I should elaborate a little on my earlier question. Both of us—you as a sociologist and myself as a writer—are children of the Enlightenment, a tradition which today, at least in Germany and France, is being called into question, as if the process of the European Enlightenment had failed or been cut short, as if we could now continue without it. I don’t agree. I see flaws, incomplete developments in the process of Enlightenment—for example, the reduction of reason to what is purely technically feasible. Many modes of its imagination which were present at the beginning—here I’m thinking of Montaigne—have been lost over the centuries, humour among them. Voltaire’s Candide or Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, for example, are books in which the circumstances of the time are also appalling, and yet the human ability to present a comic and, in this sense, victorious figure, even through pain and failure, perseveres. I believe that among the signs of a derailing of the Enlightenment is that it has forgotten how to laugh, to laugh in spite of pain. The triumphant laughter of the defeated has been lost in the process.
Bourdieu: But there is a connexion between this sense of having lost the traditions of the Enlightenment and the global triumph of the neoliberal vision. I see neoliberalism as a conservative revolution, as the term was used between the wars in Germany—a strange revolution that restores the past but presents itself as progressive, transforming regression itself into a form of progress. It does this so well that those who oppose it are made to appear regressive themselves. This is something we have both endured: we are readily treated as old-fashioned, ‘has-beens’, ‘throwbacks’ . . .
Grass: Dinosaurs . . .