Album: Unpublished Correspondence and Texts by Roland Barthes
b. Very rich popular history. Great tradition of intelligence and liveliness among Paris workers; the industrial proletariat of the suburbs is grafted onto a very active and enlightened stock of old artisans, a special mix of factory workers and Proudhonian lower-middle-class artisans: that is what you find in the Bobino and Alhambra music halls. Special intellectual resourcefulness. A taste for irony, for fate; imaginative hearts and critical minds, mythological and fabular powers.
c. Role of the Parisian rue—street. Paris: narrow city, extreme density of the street; heightened street-sense; points of general sensitization: the Bastille, the République, the Chapelle, the Étoile (the smart set); points of particular sensitization: metro stations.
Common sight: metro station, for example, Barbès-Rochechouart. Three fellows wearing fedoras, sitting on stools, with a mandolin, an accordion, drums; all around them, a dense semicircle of Parisians; in the middle a man with a megaphone sings an old song (“Y’a pas de printemps”),112 a woman with no hat sells the printed text of the song with the music! And the audience? Characteristic phenomenon, paradoxical and touching: they do not sing. Or at most they sing to themselves, but these people, otherwise so cocky, do not dare sing all together. The onlooker’s complex: not to perform. Moving: they remain a long time, a compact quiet circle; they are collectively singing in silence.
[…]
Édith Piaf, Piaf “la môme.”
Tradition of realist singers + something. What?
A small woman, not very young, not very pretty, with a wicked little black dress; voice a bit raspy, not at all sweet, a little harsh and bitter. Enormous success, represents a deep enormous wave of people who want to sing. Why?
a. Direct poetry, language of the people, but without excess, without caricature; simplicity. Other realists (Damia)113 faking it: embody the people, realism, for the purposes of the rich. Piaf: a small woman like all the small women who take the metro four times a day and who, on Sundays, wash, iron, and resume their poverty.
b. Guts, courage. No softness, no sweet cooing after love. Other singers: the mentality of kept women, flatter the people’s desire to be rich: beautiful affairs, beautiful naive fairytales, a bit too easy, without character.
She: fully assumes her poverty, prefers love to money; does not believe in fairytales. Faces facts, serious.
c. Goodness: sings of the weak, the oppressed, the unfortunate; sings of the great inevitability of injustice. Sings of: the abandoned, the Negro, the poor daughters of the common people.
d. Sense of destiny, but with moderation, depth, truth. Direct realism with a strange harmonic, a kind of veil of dream. Tragic sense of fate. Other singers: melodrama, flatter the people’s ignorance. She: often rises to the level of tragedy. Expresses the tragic sadness of the people fallen victim to a fate that transcends them.
(“Voyage du pauvre nègre”)114
[…]
“L’accordéoniste”
Set: underclass living quarters; red-light district. Emotional theme: a prostitute’s love; wonderful success of this innocent story through rough, direct language. All that comes from the beloved is conveyed through his music, all that comes from her is conveyed by her gaze. “She listens, she looks.” There is an impulse, there is no contact.
“Y’a pas de printemps”
For the very poor (Piaf): no springtime, that is, the most vital of elements, the rhythm and cycle of Nature, that affects the slightest grass, the smallest creature, is denied to the man oppressed by work. Work cancels Nature.
But one thing triumphs over the City, over Work, one thing is equivalent to the Season and reintroduces nature into the city. One thing erases injustice, oppression, slavery: love (love always encountered by chance).
[…]
“Un monsieur me suit dans la rue”
Here is one of the strangest and most disorienting stories. A complete and tragic fate is expressed through this banal act: “I am followed on the street.” The image becomes the center of a strange reverie for this woman who reviews her life through the steps of those who followed her; the theme develops in a suffocating, almost epic way: first, it is a little street urchin that an old man follows down the street (but this is not just a dirty old man), then a second episode with the intrusion of a specifically urban element, a modern myth of terror: the Police: I am followed on the street. And finally, it is my funeral that someone follows down the street.
“Tout fout l’camp”
This is a kind of half-philosophic, half-realistic meditation on the insignificance of human fates. Viewed from above, we are nothing. Viewed from below, we are nothing; nothing remains stable; a kind of cry, paraphrase of an almost existential feeling about life, the heart’s justifiable compensation in a heartless world.
[…]
“C’est lui qu’mon coeur a choisi”
For example [love] compensates for the whole world, nature; it establishes an equivalence between the world and the beloved; it re-creates a world with all its dimensions and does so through absolutely direct eloquence, without metaphor: “He doesn’t need to speak, he only has to look at me, in his caressing eyes, I see the sky that’s falling apart, it’s good, it’s amazing.”
“From the other side of the street”
[Love] also compensates for money; and for the common people, that is the greatest victory. In the literature of the upper classes, there is an entire, very beautiful, fabulist tradition that shows us how love conquers death, for example; and this theme can be found again in the popular poetry of the Middle Ages when death actually was the harshest Master. But now, it is Money that is the harshest master; therefore there is no victory more beautiful for Love than to be stronger than Money.
[…]
The Politicization of Science in Romania
Cultural attaché for the France legation in Romania
to
The Minister of Foreign Affairs (Department of Cultural Relations)
c/o The Minister of France in Romania115
After a few months’ delay, Romania has just fallen into line with Soviet Russia with regard to an area that was relatively independent until now, science. This alignment conforms to taking the position adopted by the Soviet Union concerning the recent Mitchourine affair.116 In its structure and terminology, the campaign of the Romanian press faithfully reproduces the campaign of the Soviet press.
The Romanian press recently published (June 29–30, 1949) two reports from the Academy of the Romanian People’s Republic on scientific activity and trends in the RPR.117 The first report was written by the Department of Medical Sciences at the RPR Academy; it contains eighteen typed pages. The second report is simply a commentary on the first; it was written by the president of the Academy, Professor Trajan Savulescu, and contains twenty-two typed pages.
The reports take as their subject two issues of the Romanian ophthalmology review edited by a well-known university professor, Dr. Blatt. The review is accused of containing “the poisoned vestiges of the ideology of the former exploiting classes.” More precisely, it ignores Romanian medical science and only publishes the texts of specialists “in Western capitalist countries.” It ignores the use of the national language and prefers English and French; it passes over the works of Soviet scientists. This last grievance is expanded upon the most. One of the reports explains at length Filasiev’s role in the discoveries of cornea grafts and therapeutic tissue; the ophthalmology review made the mistake of contrasting Filasiev to the Swiss scientist Franceshetti, whose works, according to the report, are much superior to those of Felasiev. The ophthalmology review also published an article by the “Western” professor Biett on trachoma, without mentioning the Soviet scientists K. Trapenzentzeva and Tchirkovski. This offensive attitude toward Russian science, moreover, has earned the implicated review encouragement from the “imperialist circles of the West,” in the form of an approving article by the American Journal of Ophthalmology. The individual responsible for such reprehensible de
* * *
It is obvious that for those behind these reports, such an unnecessary attack on Doctor Blatt’s review is only of interest because it allows certain general themes to be established and presented for general circulation.
The first of these themes is apparently simply a matter of principle: it maintains that there is no universal science. Believing in science with no homeland is “a prejudice spread like a virus by bourgeois education.” It is even worse; it is “heresy,” “falsehood.” In fact, the “cosmopolitan” theory of universal science conceals the interests of the bourgeois class in its efforts to subjugate the countries of the people’s democracy.
Thus one can replace the theme of universal science with that of class science (as there is class justice and class culture). It goes without saying that such a distinction inevitably sets Soviet science in opposition to Western science in the minds of the report writers.
This first theme, then, is only a simple introduction to the second theme, much less ideological than political: the real motive for these reports is, in fact, to affirm the preeminence of Soviet science, which is, it seems, the “most advanced science.” Soviet scientific production “dominates and exceeds that of the most advanced capitalist countries.” “It occupies first place today, vibrant, healthy, bold, in contrast to the decadent bourgeois science pledged to capitalist interests.” Russian scientists of the past and Soviet scientists of the present were and are innovators and forerunners in all areas: in the eighteenth century, M. V. Lomonossov discovered the law of the conservation of matter; V. V. Petrov established the bases for modern electrotechnology; A. S. Popov invented radio long before Marconi; N. N. Jukovski is the creator of modern aerodynamics; M. Butlerov founded modern organic chemistry; D. C. Tchernov created metallography. “Physics in the USSR has experienced progress unknown in other countries.” “Soviet scientists are playing a decisive role in answering the important questions in nuclear physics.” Mitchourine and his students have raised biology to a superior level of knowledge, interpretation, and application. Soviet biology is clearly superior to Western science. In short, “Soviet scientists have indisputable priority when it comes to the most important scientific discoveries in recent times.”
If the question of the relationship between science and the State seems at first to be treated in an abstract, conceptual, and ideological way, we can see that the solution is hardly disinterested dogma. Claims for the Marxist method are presented here in a fleeting and cursory way. The report writers consider themselves in line with those principles when they maintain that only Marxist-Leninist science combines theory and practice and only such science understands that “there where death is imminent, life is born” (cornea graft). Marxist ideology is superficially present in the vocabulary; it is not at the core, which is, in reality, only an entirely political matter of Romanian scientists following orders, their turn having come to place themselves under the yoke of Soviet State science.
* * *
It is useful to list the processes brought to light by these two reports because they constitute the invariable elements of all Stalinist writing.
The first of these processes is to “stuff” the report with all the official clichés, tried and true in propaganda, that must appear word for word (transposing a single word constitutes a deviation) in all written output, whatever the subject. Thus we find in these texts on science all the phrases, the bits of phrases, and the terms that together constitute the “basic” language of communism: construction of socialism—historical task—to guide the people—reactionary and antipatriotic tendencies—the working class armed with the reliable weapon of Marxism-Leninism—the realities of life—heresy—deviation—nations targeted by Anglo-American aggression—the struggle for peace—national independence and socialism—decadent cosmopolitanism—decline of bourgeois society in decay—warmongers—deep socialist content—the camp of peace and progress, the camp of war and reaction—noble patriotic spirit—Tito’s Trotskyist clique, etc. These clichés are present at every turn of phrase, without any logical necessity, as so many clausulae in this new rhetoric. But we should not underestimate the incantatory power of this process, meant to gradually impose upon the reader’s critical thinking the desired automatisms.
The second process is made up of a kind of nominalism in which each word implies both its subject and the judgment brought to bear on it; the history of the words “nationalism” and “cosmopolitanism” are good examples. These two pejorative words are reserved for “Western” feelings; when the same feelings become “eastern,” they change names, are assigned a euphemistic meaning, and become “patriotism” and “internationalism.” Thus each word constitutes an abuse of trust because it is the vehicle for a deliberate equivocation meant to confuse any critical reaction.
Another process, related to the preceding one, lies in the use of crude tautologies. Thus, one passage in the text states that true scientists, like Joliot, are fighting on the side of the people; but the authenticity of these scientists does not need to be demonstrated independent of their political convictions—since there is only politicized science. It must therefore be understood that the true scientists are precisely the ones who fight on the side of the people. In other words, scientists who fight on the side of the people fight on the side of the people. The absurdity here hardly matters as long as the reader yields to the text and accepts the desired blurring of scientific value and communist conviction.
Moreover, these processes are only one aspect of a more general mechanism, which is the basic process of all Stalinist statements: petitio principii. The reasoning is always stated, the terms are always chosen beginning from an initial postulate that transcends all criticism and initially separates the world into Good and Evil: Soviet Good, Western Evil. The most frequent example of this attitude is the notion of “Western decay.” That decay, so often mentioned, is never described or analyzed; its obviousness comes solely from the—theoretical—existence of its causes. A hypothetical etiology replaces positive investigation. Clearly it is a matter of a combat position that believes it possesses a universal truth and does not back down in the face of partial defects. Again, the pervasiveness of this process must be noted, and the extent to which it stamps all thinking and all art with Soviet obedience, so that it is no exaggeration to speak of the East as a veritable civilization of the Postulate.
Finally there is an obligatory process that gives the text thus constructed a kind of publicity that develops according to a systematic design: sudden and simultaneous publication of texts throughout the press on the same day; daily commentaries taken up by each newspaper over many weeks (the campaign connected to this business has still not ended); organized meetings in the Institutes and Universities, where resolutions adopt, with the same violence, the terms of the initial reports and become basic texts for this vast campaign. Stalinist propaganda proceeds deliberately through the launching of a “theme” signified by a word-type and imprinted in minds, nonstop, through all possible means. Positions for critical thinking are thus taken through successive campaigns, true tactical operations, each of which has a name. There was, for example, a “principality” campaign; here it is a matter of a “cosmopolitanism” campaign. This word is now in fashion; proposed as the subject of newspaper articles, repeated in all the exposés, it becomes—through this deliberately spectacular process—the new term that has just increased the lexicon of orthodox communism.
* * *
The very wide campaign against the ophthalmology review and “cosmopolitanism” in science is affecting, or is going to affect, Romanian scientists. Already the linguistics review edited by Rosetti, the rector at the University of Bucharest, had been the object of similar reproaches.118 But the case of these scientists is, in the end, less tragic than that of Romanian intellectuals who subjugate thems
That part of the Romanian intelligentsia so embroiled in servility is, in the end, the saddest element of this whole affair. Trajan Savulescu’s fate recalls the words of Vauvenargues: “Servitude debases men to the point of making them love it.”
aAnd also because, like Singevin and Régnier, whom he hates, we were sent by Cultural Relations.
bBy which I mean: financial support in praxis, that is to say—the fate of the intellectual!—essentially in works.
cWe know the method: to gather all useful documents for illuminating the writings—works by predecessors, contemporaries, and successors, letters, satires, journals, official papers, etc.—in short, to control the subjective reaction of taste through contact with documents. Gustave Lanson, Méthode de l’histoire littéraire (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1925), first notebook.
dWe now begin to see that the traditional skills of the scholar can become part of the historical process; it is less clear that the discoveries of science are consistently due to the strict application of scientific scruples as understood by Hippolyte Taine, Charles Seignobos, or Gustave Lanson.
eLargely by putting to good use the eminent work of Ferdinand Brunot [1860–1938, French linguist and author especially of the very important Histoire de la langue française, published by Armand Colin in 1925].
fA given social class here functions exactly like geniuses. We know the importance of the cliché in language; each group has its clichés (its rhetorical figures); no one will dispute that the active thinking of many people is reduced to a series of formulas. The commonplace acts as a driving force; it leads to others. This is what Prévert, for example, remarkably observed and parodied.