6 Over-Complex Thinking and Writing (Part 1)

The following comprises two spectacular interviews with Jean Pierre Dubost, which I published in the Berliner Newspaper die taz in the 80s. Die taz was, in its early phase, very experimental, insolent, politically undogmatic; its exemplar was the Parisian daily Libération: Question every kind of power, battle against every dictatorship in the world (foremost the Stalinists over in the East), and the reader should also have something to laugh about every now and again. Provocations were always on the agenda, also in matters of sex and feminism (see my contribution in Part 2). In any even it got on very spiritedly in the editorial offices on Kochstraße, and you were always on the verge of financial ruin. 

Jean Pierre Dubost was assistant to François Lyotard, later he moved to the Institute for Romance Languages and Literature at Stuttgart University. He was one of the few representatives of the new French thought in the German diaspora. Stuttgart was a city that had recently produced the especially beautiful and distinctly postmodern new wing of the State Gallery. With the result, that the local Bauhaus-architects accused the English architect James Stirling of “Protofascism.” In the very active and lively Swabian metropolis of the time there formed a small Francophile community which, together with Konkursbuch and Tumult magazines, as well as the Merve publishing house, raised the banner of the new thought. 

The interview, and my questions, were actually “semio-dadaist,” provocative, ironic, sometimes absurd. Dubost answers in a well-known over-complex manner (cf. my blog entry No. 5, “On Understanding and Speaking Proficiency”). The first, seemingly needless journalistic question from me, what a good newspaper would strike these days, he counters with a subtle shift of meaning, as if I had asked about the form, the layout, the design. In reality, I wanted to know what makes for success of a newspaper in respect of content and not how it should look. This weakness in the formulation was exploited rather cleverly by Dubost. – Such subtleties can be found continually throughout the discussion. But my questions are also ironic snares (especially in the second interview), as if I’m not capable of taking the topic seriously, and make a parody of the idea of an “interview,” question it. What, in fact, also comes to pass (see the question on women’s movements in the 2nd interview). 

All interviews with Dubost were posed; that is, the philosopher received the questions from me in written form, and answered them in written form as well. See also my series “Conversations with Contemporaries,” in which I will re-publish in loose order a series of interviews with Niklas Luhmann, François Lyotard, Olivier Messiaen, Helmut lachenmann, Bob Wilson, Wolfgang Rihm, etc. (there are more than 25 articles all together). Advance publications will appear singly on this blog. 

With the Dubost interviews, a single page suffices for one’s daily studies. The sentences have to be disassembled like Latin grammatical structures. That is, in fact, a powerful challenge to our usual attitudes regarding reading or information-conveyance. But only such a language, and such text, are sustainably effective in my opinion. And with reading, or rather studying, always bear in mind, that much is ironically exaggerated and provocatively formulated. I have to laugh myself, again and again, when I read this text. And I marvel at the courage of the editors at the time (Christiane Peitz, Arno Widmann i.a.), who printed this text. Everything was possible back then, in the glitteringly saturnine divided Berlin. 

And Everyday the Aurora of Yesterday

Philosopher Jean Pierre Dubost on newspapers, the underground work of words, on politicians on  ego trips, smiling butchers, Sudanese and Genevan Rituals…

How should a good newspaper look?

You are correct, the “look” is everything. It would even be desirable, if le mot and la chose would recall their origins. That is, they should temporalize, namely the day itself: in the evening the day’s events, mornings the aurora of yesterday. That is: a newspaper shouldn’t look so as to put you to sleep. If I’m in Paris, I’m awake with the first joke of the day from Libération. That horror is around you every day, is inescapable, need not necessarily concoct some goulash of fear and compassion in my stomach. I find the discharging via humor more decent than the logic of the worse, I mean of apathy. That’s something other than boredom. Or, to express it in the manner of Literary Studies: if the highest narrative information comprises the abstention of representation, then the newspaper must temporalize exactly this, what the narrator withholds. The majority of bowtied information-poets seem really to believe that they are magnificent bards. On the brutal violence of informational abstention I’d rather not say anything. I hope this is a good answer to your question.

Does not the reader last but not least rediscover his secret narcissism during the “long dark night of writing” more in the writing than in the written?

I believe the problem of this unhappy youth was rather the mirror. Light, and reflective surface, are a part of it. If you expect to find more light in the reflecting, than the mirror is insufficient. Assuming I find the place, where I might encounter my own face in the night, then I would really lose myself in this encounter. As you see, it might entirely be the case, that this nice little fairy tale might be plopped into its own water in an incurable manner. Let us thus rather prefer the drowned drown the drowning.

Can the ecstasy of journalism, as it is manifested in, say, the Springer Press, in Zeit or in Spiegel, still have some kind of meaning? Expressed differently: can the lies in the language or in the bizarre ego trips of politicians like Genscher and Vogel have any sort of bearing for the individual? Is not politics, as it is conveyed in the media, already pure fiction, every hope of change or improvement an illusion?

In the Sudan there is a the following ritual between the storyteller and his circle of listeners:

I’m going to tell you a story
Okay, okay!
It won’t all be true.
Okay, okay!
But it won’t all be false.
Okay, okay!

The Sufi of banality sing wrong, and make music with absurd flea-market jewelry. Concerning the butchers, they’re always polite, have you not noticed? My butcher, at least, is always smiling; but I believe, almost all of them smile. The word “meaning” sounds  a little bit semio-dadaistic. It has not to do with meaning, but with ritual.

Whether the risible scenes of political selfie-videos “bear out”? Seemingly so, otherwise cabaret would have declared bankruptcy long ago. Whether politics is “pure fiction,” we could first decide whether we would have a solid critique of a pure fiction at our disposal. Perhaps we’re on the way, but there’s still much to do. I don’t believe politics is “conveyed in the media;” rather, I believe that the medium itself is politics. The sacred distance of a secret conversation at an open fire in Geneva is the video installation that brings the double of the militaristic global network to light. The fiction is pure insofar as the best scenarios are leftover coffee grounds. “Convey” is saying too much. Rather, you’d have to construe the public secret language as the tippling whimpers of the modern-day cravat-Caesar, if he relates them with short sentences or with waddling yet adroit positions, to be photographed in front of his own aura.

Hope is no longer sufficient, we have to prepare ourselves for a long underground labor of words. The thing makes haste, let us take our time. Let nothing pass us by unpaid, word for word. Thinking is the terrain of a diffuse recapturing. Whosoever has not yet reached this cruelty catches himself still sucking his thumbs.

To what extent do you agree with this thesis, that daily papers are only ever conceived for the past, less for the present or the future?

Very few days do I have the time to read the paper. Most of all I’d prefer to call in sick on a regular basis, to read this novel for months on end. I don’t know what you mean by present, past, and future. The most-archaic has a future nowadays; where is it? Postmodernism is the age of ghosts, it has no age and is no time. Tomorrow reverts yesterday through today; we should forget the geometric line and remain at the height of complication.

I wish from the daily paper the trace of an unimaginable future.

Translated by Andrew Walsh