University of Nantes
The Impostor Factory
Good morning everyone.
I would like to thank Permanente University
and Georges Fargas for this invitation.
Of course, it also came through my friend Thierry.
So, I will try to tell you about The Impostor Factory.
I will mix, to say it rapidly, at the same time
the sets of operations of a civilization of morals
of our society of norms, our society of control.
I will get back to this later.
I don't mean that today we see more impostors than in past societies.
It's just that each society has the impostors that it deserves.
Because what it specific to impostors, to imposture
is to be like a martyr of the social drama.
It highlights the values which organize our society at a certain time.
Impostors are somehow like living sponges.
They absorb the values
that organize our social drama.
Of course, I don't mean to say
that today we see more impostors.
But I would like to show how,
by insisting a lot on norms,
on how to measure behavior.
We promote, we encourage, somehow,
strategies of masking,
strategies of camouflage,
which relate to imposture.
If you want, it's like a cross look.
An anthropology of our society of norms and control.
And also, a psychopathological clinical study
of what we know about liars, fraudsters, impostors.
So, I will attempt to follow this thread.
I will not use any diagram, or PowerPoint.
I will start in a more classic way, because of my academic background,
by using quotes.
And you will hear quite a lot of them.
In the end, what we will discuss
it's our understanding of value.
What is the meaning of value today?
So, I will start with a quote.
A citation of a philosopher whom I appreciate very much.
Jean-François Lyotard
He writes: "In a world
where success is to gain time, thinking has only one flaw, but unacceptable: to make us waste time."
So, you get the idea. Today, all procedures of social initiation, all procedures of education,
health care, social work,
all these procedures aim to prevent you from thinking.
To save you the time of having to think.
It may seem obvious,
but you cannot imagine to what degree,
–and this can also be observed in clinical practice–
to what degree "having to think" is not something individuals wish to have.
To think, to decide as well, brings anxiety about things unexpected.
Anxiety about the future.
Anxiety about freedom.
Anxiety about taking a decision.
To decide, implies to give up on something, and we don't enjoy giving up on things
To decide means to give up, and to give up, somehow, with a sense of guilt.
This is probably the reason why we enter smoothly all these procedures of colonization of morals.
Programs, manuals somehow, of living.
Like carefully calibrated protocols.
I will get back to this later.
Especially because nowadays
discourses of social legitimation, the dominant ones,
–to say it rapidly–
discourses that make public opinion.
Discourses that make the thought of the day.
These discourses have moved away from big narratives,
mythical, religious, political narratives.
Today, social discourses of legitimation,
discourses which guide the government, the individuals, the populations,
are less on the side of narrative knowledge
of big narratives,
but on the side of non-narrative knowledge: numbers.
Maybe we will have time to discuss this later, during the Q&A, or later during this talk.
I never know in advance what I will say in a conference.
This is habit that I have had for dozens of years already.
I have pieces, but I am not sure what I will discuss.
But most probably I will tell you later
that evaluation systems,
whether it is the research evaluation agency,
in higher education etc.
Whether it is the health care evaluation agency,
or the quality of culture evaluation agency.
Whether it is the information evaluation agency.
All of them are based on the same model
which comes from the financial rating agencies.
It fixes the credibility that can be attached
to a company, a territorial community,
to a country, and so on.
I will try to show you, step by step,
how it ends up putting a limitation on our understanding of what "value" means.
"Value" becomes whatever can be dissolved in the law and business thinking.
What can be measured,
what can be financed,
what can be monetized,
or what can be aligned with standardized procedures.
You will see that this is not far away from the issue of imposture.
In my opinion, these procedures encourage imposture.
So, I promised that I would use some quotes.
The second citation is also a quote from a philosopher,
Giorgio Agamben.
"The free citizen of democratic-technological societies
–our societies–
is a being who constantly obeys
in the very act by which he gives an order."
We are caught in a production chain of behaviors
in a system that assigns us to places
which are functional places, instrumental places,
–and here comes the link with the previous citation–
these places do not require thinking.
They do not require a state of mind.
And this is the big problem of our technical societies.
The influence of technology is so powerful, that it does not require thinking.
It does not require that we think about things.
It does not require moral thinking.
It does not require soul-searching.
The technology requires an application.
Therefore, no matter where we are
within the social fabric
we are caught in this assignment to perform a function.
and even a command function is a servitude function.
So, the third quote.
I promised several quotes
so that they serve as a basis for my talk.
the third citation is from Camus.
I believe this one is very important.
I know that you study, at this university, the question of narratives.
This is a question that is very important to me.
Camus says, in a book entitled "The Fall"
which you probably know already.
A book that exposes what I would call "ordinary impostors",
with the story of this Parisian lawyer who then becomes a judge in a brothel in Amsterdam.
He realizes that, whatever the position he adopts, he is always playing a role.
He is always playing a role.
And here, there is something extremely important
with regard to social drama.
Finally, we are "all guilty of playing a role,
of taking virtue as the veil or the habit
of being indifferent to the world, superficial
without really participating in the fate of the world".
If you think about it
that's what people are asked to do today.
They are not asked for a virtue,
they are not asked for a state of mind.
They are not asked, I could say, of "being something"
They are asked to do something. Period.
So, it's this ordinary imposture that I was mainly interested in,
when I analyzed the functioning of our societies today.
Imposture, in "The Fall" by Camus,
is the judge Clamence. He is guilty,
and he is saved only by one thing.
By a painting that he has stolen.
A painting of Van Eyck, titled "The Judges",
which he had left to the owner of the brothel.
Only art, –I will get back to this later–
perhaps, can save us from imposture.
So... this sentence of Camus
in The Fall, seems very important to me.
We replaced the dialogue with the press release.
This is the reason why, I believe, that we are not yet in a democracy.
We are in degenerate forms of democracy,
democracies of expertise,
or democracies of opinion.
By democracies of expertise, I mean
that we entrust the experts to decide for us.
Even the politicians seek legitimacy on the side of expertise
This seems to me as fraudulent as the Nostradamus' predictions
coming from the financial rating agencies.
By democracies of opinion, it means also that
we govern under the pressure of the lobbies.
We govern according to public opinion.
As a result, democratic elections
are catch-up sessions of opinion polls.
We are in a place where the power of words, as constitutive of a democratic space, collapses.
What is democracy?
Since the beginning, democracy is nothing more than the possibility to govern through debate.
Govern through discussion.
To give credit, –and we will see the link with the issue of imposture–
to give credit to words.
To believe in words.
There are other powerful sentences by Camus on this topic, when he says,
in his editorial of Combat, on November 19, 1946.
He says, at some point,
"That eternal trust of man in the language of humanity
which makes him believe that human relations can be received from another man
from the moment that he speaks to him with this language."
The big question what we have to ask ourselves today
is if we are still using that language of humanity.
or are we in another kind of language.
A machine language.
A language established with a set of signals.
Interactive.
This is one of the questions that we will discuss.
I just say this quickly, then we will come back to this.
We will move forward step by step.
So, there is another sentence
from another philosopher.
His name is Georges Canguilhem.
I know that Thierry and Beatrice appreciate him.
He speaks about what is today
this power of the norm,
which comes with a certain view of the social world.
Canguilhem writes:
"To propose for human societies,
in their search for ever more organisation,
the model of the organism,
is to dream of a return not even to archaic societies
but to animal societies."
So, in short, the more we move today towards a society of the norm
–it's obvious, I will give you some examples later–
the more we rush to the abyss of a normative and controlling society,
the closer we get to animal societies.
We believe that we are perfecting ourselves.
We believe that we are improving.
But we are drifting cheerfully towards this animal design,
where each individual is only a spare part of the species for a collective produ ction.
We lose what makes the distinctiveness of the human being,
that is to say, his extreme vulnerability,
and his ability to make his vulnerability the very place of his dignity
So, since I promised to talk a little bit about my book, I will say a few words about that.
To start, I'll tell you about someone I like.
Guy Debord
"The Society of the Spectacle and the Goods"
His analyzes remain today very visionary.
Guy Debord writes:
"Where the real world is transformed into simple images,
images become real beings,
and the motivations of a hypnotic behavior.
The spectacle is the opposite of the dialogue."
Today we are in a society of the spectacle.
We are no longer in  a society of dialogue.
Our democracy is dying cheerfully from that.
So, you understand my approach to this issue.
I don't know if I'm clear, since it's my first time here.
We always have to adapt, –and that too is a question of imposture
– to adapt to the expectation of the other.
What is an impostor?
It is the one who has found the perfect way to adapt to the expectations of the other.
Look at all the big cases of imposture.
Frédéric Bourdin
Frank Abagnale, etc.
It is the one who knows perfectly how to identify with the object of the desire of the other
And who knows how to respond to what the other person is waiting for.
I told you earlier, to start
As I still have not st arted yet, I go back.
I said something simple
and complicated at the same time
Every society has the impostors that it deserves
What does it mean?
It means that, for example,
if you take "Tartuffe, or the Impostor",
the great play of Molière.
You can easily see that
in order to meet the demand of the other,
which is of course a believer's request,
of someone who has faith,
it is an issue of producing all the signs,
of performing all the ritual,
all the ceremonial,
that supports the theory in the other
that I am a devotee
whatever my faith,
or the absence of faith.
We see very well
if you take stories of impostors, throughout the centuries,
it is very interesting. Because we can see
the strategy varies enormously depending on the values
of a religion of a certain period of time.
For instance,, according to the myths of the time.
If, at that time, it is about pretending to have faith,
at another time, it will be, to make people believe that we are the return, the reincarnation
of Joan of Arc.
In another time, we're going to borrow money
by telling people that we found in Mexico
or in New Caledonia, a treasure.
Therefore, we can lend money,
thanks to this treasure that will come later.
To give you another example
a well-known one
those people who sell pieces of Eiffel Tower to tourists,
by pretending that the state is in difficulty,
and decided to sell off a number of public monuments,
and that it's a good deal to buy pieces of Eiffel Tower.
We can see how,
if we do not fall into a kind of moral stygmatization,
of saying that it is very wrong to lie,
it is very wrong to defraud,
it's very wrong to be an impostor.
We realize that the impostor is the mirror of a society.
It somehow reflects
the values of a society.
The current values, the ones that matter.
Today, we can be surprised
that a budget minister in charge of combating tax fraud
could be himself suspected of lying,
and then be suspected of defrauding himself etc.
We can be surprised
that a rabbi,
who represents a moral authority,
had fake diplomas,
and had his books written by others,
who themselves plagiarized other books.
We can be surprised that
the former German Minister of Research and Higher Education,
close to Angel Merkel,
was forced to resign
because the university withdrew his doctorate
accusing him of fraud
for plagiarism.
We can be surprised that a very famous lawyer
who had defended Saddam Hussein
was himself a crook.
We can be surprised that an economist from Portugal,
who was on every media,
saying that austerity was a fundamental mistake,
making powerful demonstrations...
We can be surprised, but
in the end, if we think about it
they only reveal what the opinion expects.
They are only responding
to a service order.
If I have a message to convey,
it is to show that
this imposture
which, of course, can take very pathological forms,
is nothing else
than a magnified element
of an ordinary imposture
which is a respond to a social order.
When we are not asked to think,
when we are not asked to create,
when we are not asked to innovate,
when we just are asked to adapt.
Within the adaptation society that is ours,
the impostor is like a fish in the water.
If you remember that interview,
of a former Finance Minister,
where he says how bad he feels
to have lied to the President of the Republic, to his colleagues etc....
If you watch his performance, and I did that,
and you tell yourself: this guy, he's a genius.
He is a very good student.
He knows exactly, –I mean
you don't trust him more than at the time when he swore he did not have an account in Switzerland,
that is not the question.
You tell yourself,
he knows perfectly well how to perform the rhetoric that is expected of him.
In other words, what matters is not the truth.
This is why I quoted Guy Debord.
What matters is not the truth.
It is a show that provides credit
to someone who does not deserve it by what he did
or by his virtue
but simply by the performance he performs.
If you think about it,
later I can give you clinical examples of pathological cases,
if you think about it, this is our education model.
It's our social model.
Simply, the ability to do something
that is a response to a social order,
or a technical order, or a cognitive order.
and this is a very important point.
In my field,
during a very long period time
what psychoanalysis has brought
it did not always bring the best, this is another question
what psychoanalysis has brought
is this idea that
what matters is not what someone does,
but what that person is, in what s/he does.
If we use a big word, his or her "ontological presence"
in his or her behavior.
Basically, you could see a patient
who looked crazy like a rabbit.
But it did not make him psychotic in the psychiatric or psychoanalytic sense of the term.
He had very exuberant symptoms,
but the symptoms were an expression of memory injury,
an expression of suffering from his past.
It was noisy and disturbing,
it was a symptomatic fuss,
but structurally,
we could not consider him, in his subjective position,
as "crazy".
I schematize because
I am not sure about the level of detail you prefer.
On the other hand, if you had a patient
who experienced some minor problems.
Who seemed more or less normal
and through the work that you did with him,
you realized that this perfectly adapted person,
who seemed a little obessional, a little meticulous,
a little disaffected,
a little instrumental,
a little bit metallic in his contacts,
this person is psychically crazy.
That is to say, he is psychotic.
In short, it is called a white psychosis.
So, roughly,
what this perspective brought
is that what mattered was not the behavior of a patient,
but what he was in his way of behaving.
It was his subjective position.
This is a very important point.
In our society,
and I will give more examples later,
this is not what is evaluated.
What is evaluated, to repeat, it is not the virtue,
It is not the presence of the person, in what s/he does.
The only thing that matters
it is his or her behaviour
and how it can be measured.
How it can be evaluated quantitatively.
Only that matters.
Maybe I should tell you right now, it might be easier.
This is a certain conception of evaluation.
New forms of social assessments,
I spoke earlier of financial rating agencies,
all work on the same basis.
As you know, the financial rating agencies
never predicted the crises.
Neither in 1929, where, before Black Thursday, the shares were at the highest.
Neither in 1996-1997, or in 2000, or 2007-2008.
They never, never, had the ability to objectively predict a crisis that was about to emerge.
Each time, they missed it.
The very way in which they establish the credit that can be given to a state, a company, or a collective...
How do they work? Roughly,  it's an agreement of experts, who are mixing criteria
which are extremely different, including quantitative and qualitative criteria, opinions, rumors and other stuff.
And this will allow them to come up with a grade.
Once you have integrated this system,
–and we must not forget that there are conflicts of interest,
because since the 1970s, those agencies
receive funding from the very same people who have interest in their activities,
there is a change in how these agencies are funded
which impacts, of course, their conclusions.
Once you have taken that into account.
And if I had two more hours, I could show you that psychiatry is following this model as well.
Once you have understood this
you realize that it can not be predictive,
and it cannot be objective.
What is measured, roughly, it is the state
of something, a structure,
the state of a system.
Depending on how much credit one can give to it.
On the basis of rumors which are more or less formalized.
Of course, including some elements which are numbered, and so forth.
This is what happens in all sectors of social existence today.
This is the reason why I tend to think that today, in our society, impostors are like fish in the water.
Because, to make the form prevail on the merits,
value the means rather than the ends,
rely on the appearance and the reputation rather than work and probity,
prefer the audience rather than the merit,
select what may seem the most immediately profitable,
rather than the courage of truth...
These are transformations which we see
in our society today.
So, to speak concretely, what you did not say, Georges, when you introduced me a moment ago,
if you allow me,
that we are a group of people who initiated something which you maybe heard of
which is called "The Call of the Calls".
This collective is a group of physicians, shrinks, nurses, speech therapists, social workers, judges...
journalists, educators, teachers, researchers,
cultural workers and so on.
This group is some sort of revolt, an insurrection of consciences as we called it,
of people who faced with reforms that completely broke their profession.
Reforms which broke down their job and recomposed it
with a certain understanding of evaluation.
A very formalized one,
a very quantative one,
a very procedural one.
I can explain this in very simple terms.
For instance, the value of a radio or a television show
the value of an article, it is not what it will bring to the education of a citizen.
It is not what she will bring as the very essence
that enable us to think, to ponder.
But, rather, the number of listeners,
the number of spectators, the number of readers
or, the number of comments
that you will add on the website
of the radio station.
Again, this is a very important point, the number of comments. It doesn't matter what they say.
Even if the comments say: "What a strange idea to invite this idiot who bored us for an hour."
It is not a problem, as long as you make people react,
you have what is called "auditory logic".
This is important. Roughly, it means
that quantity is what matters.
The reaction that you create matters.
The effects that you generate matter.
Today, a good journalist
is a journalist who can invite,
or who can produce a show,
on radio, on television, etc.
that generate reactions.
This is why I quoted Debord, about the Society of Spectacle and Goods.
What is a spectacle? It is the images
that are mistaken for the real things.
This audience ratings logic, what is it?
It is a Troyan horse
which act for a market logic
that is applied to segments of social life, which until now were protected from it.
In short, it's a about selling something.
It is about selling your show.
About selling your article.
It is about selling the service that you provide.
If we think about it for 30 seconds.
The first thing that we can say
is that this ability to sell appearances...
What is it?
It is the essence of imposture.
What is an impostor?
Maybe you noticed that "imposture" and "taxes" share the same etymology [in French].
The imposter is the one who takes
in someone else's purse
in order to meet his own needs.
"Tartuffe, or the Impostor", where Tartuffe
make signs, to make his faith visible to Orgon,
so that he can steal his goods, and his wife.
An imposter is also what used to be called a knight of industry,
who resorts to expedients,
at the expense of others, that is, at the expense of the credit he can obtain from others.
After he sold his appearances.
The impostor is, par excellence, the anthropological figure of the human in our society.
Because the impostor is an entrepreneur of himself.
Basically, he runs his small business.
It is the individual, as a liberal microenterprise,
self-managed, open to competition and competition,
in the market of existential enjoyment.
There is a great proximity between the way our society, our civilization
makes the human,
and the strategy of imposture.
So, I mentioned the audience ratings logic.
But we shouldn't think that this logic is active only within the field of information,
only in the fields of radio, of television, of the media.
The audience ratings logic is everywhere.
If you take the example of the hospital, and Thierry here I speak under your authority,
the hospital, relying on activity pricing,
the so-called "T2A", what does that mean?
It means that the value of an action
depends on what value it brings to the medical and surgical pole.
How much is a smile from a schizophrenic person? Zero.
How much is the hand that the nurse will put on your forearm,
when you  have to get in the scary machine for a MRI or a scan?
Zero.
What is the value of clinical work,
the tension when someone will ask you how the symptoms started? Zero.
What matters? What matters is whatever is technical.
What matters, is whatever is surgical.
What matters is what brings money to the medical and surgical centre.
What results does that produce?
It produces imposture strategies.
For instance, there is software to teach doctors
in hospitals, to optimize the acts of care.
What does that mean? It doesn't mean to optimize the care that you are given, or make it better.
It means that they are taught to overcharge for acts of care.
Which is obviously neither moral nor cost-effective.
It means that
when you have an approach of values that is entirely layered on quantity,
on protocols, procedure, compliance,
from that moment on you induce in the other strategies
which are designed to respond to what is being asked.
I will get back to this later, but
if you think of Greece, with the two international financial supervisors
who ask for a balanced budget.
Then, they receive a balanced budget. It's a fake budget, but it doesn't matter.
If you understood what I just said, then you can go, and this conference is done.
This is the idea: imposture is a solution.
I did not say that it is a moral solution, that is not the point.
It is a solution to normative requirements
that make individuals and peoples live beyond their means.
So, a kid who lies, who cheats,
what does that mean?
It means that this is a kid who respond to what is expected from him or her,
in terms of norms, of what is required to do.
Without the capacity, or the cognitive capacities, to achieve the task.
I'm not telling you it is good, I'm not telling you it is a fulfillment.
On the contrary, it's the worst thing, from the point of view of self-fulfillment.
That is not my point. What  I am trying to show you
is that we can not exonerate the environment from itself in the making of imposture.
That's what I mean.
So, if you see some people, at a some moment,
who show signs of devotion,
it means that you are in a society where religion plays an important role.
If you are in an environment where people tamper with numbers,
it means that you are in a society where numbers guide people
and organize social relations. And so on and so forth.
That is what I am trying to say.
I spoke earlier about hospitals, and I can continue because it is a field that I know well.
For instance, the academia.
Let's discuss the evaluation of academics.
It is the worst thing that you can imagine.
How does it work?
Whether you are a good or a bad teacher, nobody cares.
I was an expert for the Ministry of Research.
I worked 15 years for the  French Universities Committee,
where I was Vice-President and President of my section.
I saw the way the files are structured.
In short, what is a  good academic?
It is not someone who trains his students well.
It's not someone who helps them find a job.
It's not someone who supports them, and so on.
It is someone who publishes articles.
Someone who publishes articles.
Articles, but not just any articles.
Articles, in "qualifying journals".
What does that mean?
It does not mean "quality journals", as they are absolutely boring to read.
That is not the question.
These are journals "recognized as having a strong impact factor".
Journals in which the number of articles and the number of citations were correlated.
I may speak about that later as well.
But what I am trying to say is that
in short, the quality of a research work,
the quality of a research laboratory,
is the number of articles
per researcher –it doesn't matter who is the researcher or what kind of research–
–the more boring the better, that is another problem,
the less valuable the better.
It is the number of articles published in journals.
What journals? Brand journals.
It is a brand policy.
Brand policy, I am sorry to say, means imposture policy.
An impostor knows how to sell his or her own brand.
Besides, those who are the most successful are also those who are the most cynical,
the most opportunistic, those who have understood how to use the idea of brand.
What is today the value of an academic?
It is the value of someone who produces...
Unfortunately, I forgot to bring that book,
there was a nice quote from Nietzsche.
who produces best in the factory which makes articles that fit into a brand publication medium.
Let us think about it for a few seconds.
It is a conversation today.
I am not here to give a conference, that would be boring.
Let us try to understand, roughly,
what matters is not at all the content of an article.
What matters, is the location where it was published.
It is the medium.
It is better to publish a completely useless paper,
that no one will read. In any case, the articles published in our international journals
are absolutely not meant to be read.
I think there are 70 % that are not read, or 80%.
And it's not a problem. It is meant to be published.
It is meant to have a label.
"...has published in Nature... Science..." and so on.
At the same time it is a degree that measures
the conformity of your insertion in a network
of intellectual and linguistic hegemony.
If you take Science and Nature authors, you have 70% who have an address in the US or England.
So, what is measured is not the quality of the article produced.
What is measured is the location
where the article is published –the brand.
And at the same time, we measure its degree of proximity with editorial centers of power
For instance myself, I was –now I refuse, but I was during many years–
I was an expert for several academic journals.
It is interesting, because you receive
the same paper, from the same author
who doesn't cite the same references in the bibliography.
The person cites, of course, the authors who
might be the experts who will provide an opinion on whether to publish the paper or not.
Of course, this is ordinary imposture.
But it must be understood as a symptom.
A symptom of what? Of a disease of our civilization.
A civilization that focuses on norms.
As a paleontologist said,
during a workshop where I attended:
It's like when a guy found about ten teeth,
in the African rift,
teeth that are more than 8000 years old.
He won't publish one article in one academic journal to present his discovery.
He will publish eight articles, one per tooth.
This will increase its scientific productivity.
You laugh, but I swear it's absolutely depressing
when you are in there.
That's also why I left.
It is absolutely depressing, because you realize,
you see strategies that your younger colleagues
and not only the younger ones, also the old ones
develop to respond.
Respond to what? To the fact that you are asked to produce, to produce articles.
Interesting articles? Nobody cares about that.
Articles that add something to research? Nobody cares about that either.
Articles that bring something to the therapeutic practice? Nobody cares at all.
Articles that bring something to the research laboratory,
to enable it to be accredited, to have an expertise.
To get a good grade.
A+, if possible.
It will enable funding, positions, and so forth.
This is extremely important.
This is what comes first in our society of goods and spectacle.
So, maybe I should start my talk now...
You see, what I am trying to show you
is how imposture leads us
to reflect on the values that organize our society.
This is the idea that I am trying to share with you.
How, today, in a normative and control society
those who best respond to what our society expects
are the impostors, the strategy of imposture.
So, for instance.
Take the issue of financial speculative bubbles.
Besides, it is not only in finance that there are spec ulative bubbles. In research, there are too,
I garantee you.
It must be understood that in the approach that I propose to you,
these spec ulative bubbles are not errors or dysfunctions of the system.
On the contrary, it makes it work.
It is the tip of a whole system.
A system that consists, not to study things about their reality,
but to evaluate them on their appearances, and to sell these appearances.
What is an impostor? Whoever sells his image, his appearance
the shape of his/her behavior, pretending and faking the values of the social field.
That's what I started to tell you.
Now, if you think of...
What I said, for example, about the audience ratings.
If you think about it.
To believe, today, that what counts as value
is ultimately the opinion.
It's that. Popularity.
What is an impact factor?
It's a popularity rate.
A quote rate is a popularity rate.
Basically, you wrote a completely crazy article
which was published by a journal.
You're going to have a lot of quotes.
Because many people will argue that what you wrote is completely stupid.
And therefore, you are a productive researcher.
Because you have been cited many times.
On the other hand, if you do your simple work,
on your own, and you are not cited.
Then, you are not a productive researcher.
I do not know if it's clear, what I'm telling you.
But for me, this is very important.
Today, value is measured by the effects of opinion that it produces.
If we think of philosophy,
just a little bit of philosophy.
We realize that, from the beginning,
with Plato already,
truth is not as the same place
as opinion.
We could also discuss espistemology, with Bachelard and so forth.
But, whatever.
The truth does not belong in the same place as opinion.
This simply means that
today, those who would be the most successful
in our society would be the sophists.
And, in a way, we can say that the politicians who are the most successful today are the sophists.
The people who sell.
Not those who think.
Not those who have the courage of the decision.
Not those who carry values, whether democratic or otherwise.
But those who sell to persuade, to convince.
We are in a society of advertising and show business.
And if you make the connection with imposture,
an impostor is someone who taxes,
who takes a tax, to pay his debt by taking from others.
Living by collecting from others.
It is the one who taxes.
But, if you think about it,
isn't this the model that prevails in our society?
A person being taxed.
So,
now I will go into more detail,
especially since I do not know how long I have, but it doesn't matter.
What I am trying to tell you
is that we are in a society
that civilizes its lifestyle, it's a bit nasty to say it like that,
in the manner of the company Findus.
You probably heard this story, where horse meat was sold as beef.
Basically, it means that we measure the product path.
We  measure the labels placed on the boxes of the product.
But we do not try to find out what's in the product.
That's how we evaluate today researchers, teachers...
School evaluations, it's the same.
We know this for a long time, there has been a lot of research on this subject in education science.
As time goes by, students are more successful in passing school tests.
Which does not mean at all that they have learned more.
It simply means that they have adapted  more
through a pattern of behavior, a habitus in the sense of Pierre Bourdieu,
a way of behaving, a way of thinking,
They are more and more adapted to answering the questions they have been asked.
Do you realize what this means in terms of pedagogy, a destruction of the ability to think?
An annihilation of the desire for curiosity,
of the curiosity of the child.
And what it means as lack of confidence in the teacher.
We are in a society of widespread evaluation.
The former President of France said that, where there is no evaluation there is no performance.
In the end, this implies  that if you do not measure constantly what people are doing, they won't be able to do it.
It's like saying, if you do not measure someone's breathing capacity, then they can not breathe.
It's as stupid as that.
So...
How did we get there?
How come this way of thinking dominates today?
I will try to show you that it meets the requirements of the type of economy in which we operate.
This will be the second part of my talk.
But I would still like to comment on this first part.
Basically, we know very well, for example with multiple choice questions, in different disciplines, that it is not knowledge that is learned.
It does not meet, so to say, the needs.
Take, for example, Freinet pedagogy.
The idea of the Freinet pedagogy, which was great,
was not to distinguish the acquisition of knowledge
from the existential questions that the child could ask at a given moment in his life.
It is not at any moment that we will teach him the physics of fluids.
That's when he's going to ask himself questions about building a dam
in a river that he's going to build with friends.
It is not at any moment that we will teach him botany.
It's when he is interested in picking mushrooms.
And so forth.
Basically, we seize the desire, to be able, from this desire, to answer by an acquisition of knowledge.
Nothing to do with the stupid protocols that are currently used in education.
We must also see that this has a tremendous, terrible impact on the training of the citizen.
That's why I gave you all these quotes at the beginning.
How do you train citizens with this myth of an individual entrepreneur of himself.
who is  in competition with others,
and who must sell himself above everything else, by meeting the expectations of others.
We do not train a citizen there.
In addition, he must sell according to what, at a given moment, is in the market.
Basically he must seize, in his training, products that he will be able to make the most successful afterwards, in order to sell himself.
Let's remember, for example, what was the education of a young Athenian,
in the fifth century BC,
at the time of Pericles.
He could learn astronomy, physics, medicine, architecture, law...
Not to become an architect, doctor, astronomer ...
Not at all.
He will learn all this for what?
He will learn all this to be a good citizen
and make the best of his qualities
in the service of the city.
That is to say, basically, that the knowledge which he has acquired
is not there to meet the temporary requirements of the environment
but for his own training.
Intellectual training, moral training, philosophical formation, civic training.
So, who are the individuals in Athens who will be trained in specialized techniques
and specialized courses?
Who are the people who will learn astronomy to become astronomers,
medicine to become doctors,
pottery to become a potter?
The slaves.
So, to make it quick, and then I can say, I almost finished this conference.
We are today in a slave society.
Of voluntary servitude, since the difference with,
if I dare say, the ancient world is that we are asked to consent to servitude.
So that's what I'm going to talk about now.
To try to show you the connection with imposture, with fraud, with lies.
I don't know if I'll have time to talk to you about clinical practice, but otherwise
I will talk about it later during the discussion.
You see, wanting to train our young people to be the professionals we expect in the job market
is to consider that knowledge has value only as long as it can be sold.
That knowledge has value only as long as it can meet an expectation.
Then it's not very complicated, you see the consequence today
in the hierarchy of disciplines taught at the university.
If you pay attention to the prestige of schools, etc.
What ultimately sells best?
It's not the humanities.
So, we consider that the humanities, the social sciences, they have no value.
Art has no value. To have fun has no value.
Love has no value.
We create monsters.
Maybe just one word, and I will finish with that.
When you think of someone like the philosopher Walter Benjamin,
who spoke of the importance and the essential character of what is useless.
The essential character of the useless.
What did Benjamin say? He was talking about the gesture of the child,
who wants to catch the moon like a ball.
He said: "the gesture is not vain, despite appearances
because it nourishes an impulse of the hand, the heart, and the spirit."
And he continues: "what would a child be
that would be perfectly suited to his task?"
He says, "It would still be a child ,
but would not it have lost the naive joy of existence?"
That's what I have been trying to tell you
the anthropological model
of how we can heal, educate
and inform our fellow citizens.
This is somehow what I have tried to show you. Now, I'm going to move on.
What I was trying to show you is that today
the consequences of how we think about social ties
based simply on norms, on normative criteria.
Where we have to try to meet these standards, in every possible way.
And one of the most economical ways, of course, is to cheat.
To put it another way,
there is one point which is important.
It is that, imposture
is the Siamese sister of conformism.
In a very conformist society,
which conforms the behaviors, which conforms the behaviors, which conforms the way of thinking.
It is in this type of society that fraud is  flourishing.
Because what matters is the costume.
It's the clothes, not the man.
It's the ability to borrow.
This is very important, and very striking.
In the clinic of impostors
within it, of course, there is also the clinic of the liars
and in psychoanalysis and psychiatry, there are what we call "as if" personalities.
In English, "as if".
Those who are able to pretend.
It's interesting, because those personalities
when you meet them, they are normal.
They are quite capable of doing a number of things.
You ask them to paint something, they can paint very well.
You ask them to do music, they do music. You ask for literature, they do literature.
And yet, there is something wrong.
Something is not right.
They do what they are asked to do, but, the suffering is ontological.
We have the impression that they are not here.
They act, without being here.
We are facing an ontological vacuum.
If you think about it. I just make some proposals, and then we will discuss them.
You can see the connection here.
Basically, camouflage, masking, occurs when there is a vacuum.
When there is an ontological vacuum. When we have lost what constitutes the essence, the value
of an individual, or a society.
Remember this extraordinary film by Woody Allen: "Zelig".
Zelig is this gentleman who whitens with whites, blushes with reds,
blacks with blacks, yellows with yellows
Woody Allen has the genius to place him next to Hitler.
In a mass party, a totalitarian party, a Nazi party.
This type of personality, empty,
who has the ability to borrow any suit.
To feed himself ontologically, he needs the mass around him.
If you think about it, it's very important and it can help us understand today
the volatile nature of political commitments.
In short, these are not commitments that are made
in an appropriation of the values for which one would give one's life. It remains superficial.
Which explains why it can wander from one place of the political chessboard to another.
Because there is no appropriation.
For a very long time, in France and in the Western world,
almost family choices were made.
Options were taken. Some people were Gaullist from father to son,
communist from father to son, Maurisian from father to son, and so on and so forth.
Or the opposite, it doesn't matter. There was an appropriation.
There was a France for Dreyfus, a France against Dreyfus.
France for Vichy, France for London, etc.
There was something that was appropriate for each individual.
Today, not at all.
And this, it must be seen, not only from the point of view of the pathology of individuals,
it must be seen also at the level of the substance of society.
What does it offer to individuals to act as citizens?
So ... I also recommend you
a Canadian novel called Bizango, which is quite interesting.
It is a detective novel of the Haitian world in Montreal.
The Bizango is an extraordinary character who can take the appearance
of the person to whom the opponent thinks.
For example, if someone lost their mother
The Bizango is the one who is able to embody the lost object.
He becomes the mother of the one...
Of course, in a crime novel, you can imagine that it completely disarms the opponent
to see the object he is missing.
The object of which he is nostalgic
I believe this novel is a pretty fine analysis,  because it shows well...
I will not talk about it today, but I wrote a book called "The logic of passions"
focused on this issue
where I show how, in responding to the request of the other, there is deception, imposture and illusion.
In passion, it's not a sham, it's an involuntary imposture.
In passion, it's an illusion.
Remember Proust, "To think that I wasted years of my life, I wanted to die, I had my greatest love for a woman
whom I did not like, that was not my type."
That's the truth of love. That is to say we live the same love events,
but we are not in the same story.
Each one gives the other his answer on a stage, except that it is not the same piece
that is played for one and for the other.
But this is on the side of illusion, not on the side of imposture.
So, I would still like to start the second part of my talk.
What I really insisted on is
this idea, psychopathologically and socially speaking
imposture is a solution.
It is not moral, but it is a solution
to meet normative requirements
that make you live above your means.
The little lies, the little deceptions, the little frauds etc.
also fall under this order.
For example, in children, lying is almost normal in the development of the child.
It arises when the child needs to build an intimate space,
to avoid the intrusion of his environment.
Therefore, he hides himself, he masks.
These are little lies, but it's a way of getting out of the way of the other.
So, the impostor's own thing is that he evades the influence of the other,
but as he lives on the other, he offers himself at the same time to the other.
He offers himself in something that is alienation.
There is also ... well, I mention this quickly before moving on to my second part.
With impostors ... you will understand the connection with our society.
There is, with impostors, a kind of hyper-adaptation to the ideas of the other.
Hyper-adaptation to standards.
That is to say, he does not need to appropriate them.
Impostors do not need to change, they do not need to metabolize standards.
Just make the gestures, just pretend, and it works.
That's why I told you that speculative bubbles, financial bubbles, are the keystone of the system
and not at all a side effect.
There is a film that you must see. It's called "In the Beginning".
I do not know if you have seen this film by Xavier Giannoli, which is very interesting.
We can see how an impostor,
meets the desperate expectation of an unemployed population in a small town.
He starts building a road.
With full of false, completely fake stuff.
And what is extraordinary is that this road exists.
It is real.
It will be destroyed afterwards, it after he gets caught.
It does not meet the administrative requirements,
but it is interesting because the guy is known. He was caught a second time.
He was arrested for the first time in March 1997,
for a highway story, where people had stopped a construction site,
to protect a rare scarab species.
A whole population had became unemployed in the area.
The crook arrives, he makes people believe that he will resume the site.
He produces piles of fake papers.
Eventually, he gets the money. Eventually, he even starts to play his own game.
At first, he did it to get money for himself.
But he ends up putting his own savings into his business of deception.
He will create this road, which will then be destroyed and rebuilt some time later.
And he'll do the same, at the time of the storm Cynthia.
Where he will play the fake rescuer etc.
We have lots of examples like that. I'm not going to give them all to you,
but what the impostor shows, finally, is that it works.
It works, it produces things.
But the question that is never asked: where to go?
We build a highway, which leads nowhere.
I think we can not simply say that it relates to the pathology of individuals.
We must realize that it relates to a society that only looks at the meter, at the numbers.
A society that is not interested in the road,
who doesn't care about where this is going.
Anyone here attended my conference yesterday?
Raise your finger.
Okay, so I can tell you the little story I told last night.
It will end this first part.
It's about the notion of value, since I have little time
for the second part.
It is a story to denounce what is today a society
that only looks at numbers.
That only looks at the meter, and doesn't pay attention at the road, which is why
And that's why we get lost.
This is the story of the two Francis.
Francis the priest ... You already know this story?
You were there last night? No?
You looked at me as if ... Oh, you saw a video.
France Inter, or France Culture?
So, Francis the priest, and Francis the taxi driver.
They come from the same village.
By chance, they happen to die the same day.
First, Francis the taxi driver goes before God.
God looks at his records, and says to him:
"My son, you have deserved paradise.
Here is your platinum stick, and your silver tunic. You can go."
Then comes Francis, the priest.
God looks at his records, and says to him:
"My son, you have deserved paradise.
Here is your oak stick, and your linen tunic. You can go."
Francis the priest is a little surprised. He says:
"Lord, there must be a mistake, I don't understand.
I know the other guy, we are from the same village.
He is a terrible person.
I do not understand, I devoted myself to the cause, to faith ...
The Lord tells him, there is absolutely no error.
He argues: but still, I do not understand.
This guy was drunk all the time, he had car accidents.
In the village, everyone was afraid of him.
I don't understand. You give him the platinum stick,
and the silver tunic. Me, you give me the oak stick
and the linen tunic. There must be an mistake.
The Lord tells him: "No, there is no mistake, no error.
We have changed the way we do assessments.
Every time that you
gave the Mass on Sunday,
everyone fell asleep.
Whenever he was driving, everyone prayed.
I believe that...
It sums up, better than I have done so far,
what I am trying to tell you
about our assessments today.
In a society, where only the score, and the effect produced in the short term, have value,
we create incentives to find strategies that meet expectations.
Without questioning the purpose of these behaviors.
What I'm trying to show you is that behind the notions of evaluation,
there is really a philosophical machine.
There is truly a metaphysics of values.
There is truly a vision of the world.
And, we create an ethical subject, through social evaluations.
I will move on to the second part. But...
There are two operations that have contributed to establishing a society of imposture.
The first one is, without any doubt, the disengagement of the State,
as a general will, as a sovereign will.
And the metamorphosis of his functions and his missions.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has shown us how the state performs functions similar to religion,
with rites, theodicy.
And when the state abandons its prerogatives, when it abandons them to the market,
what does it produce? It increases a policy of sanctioning value by opinion.
It is the disorganization of the State,
it turns itself more and more into,
not just a market as an economy, but a market as a worldview.
The state that sees itself as an entrepreneur.
It transforms public services into entrepreneurial benefits.
There is a disengagement from the state in its public service missions, but at the same time
there is a commitment of the State in its will to conform its missions, its officials, its populations,
in an entrepreneurial way.
It's a fake entrepreneur, of course.
This produces a lot of things.
That is... what have I told you so far,
I said that the value of an article, or a show,
or the value of an act, a pedagogy, etc.
What is this value? It doesn't relate to the efforts it requires, it doesn't relate to the virtues it mobilizes.
It doesn't relate to the thought that it produces.
It relates to the sanction of a plebiscite.
It relates to the sanction of a popularity.
We are in an opinion market.
And this market of opinions does not only reach this doctor, that teacher, this researcher etc...
This opinion market reaches the politicians themselves.
The political word today is condemned to seduction and deception.
That is, it has to sell.
To put it simply, we are witnessing
a proletarianization of political speech.
Opinon and economy are the two udders of liberalism,
and I will talk about later.
The second set of operations is that
today, it is less the law that organizes our society,
I mean roughly the division between what is permitted and what is forbidden,
it is less the law, and even if there is inflation of laws, as I will try to show you later.
This inflation of the laws does not correspond at all, in the minds of jurists, to the law.
It's more like a circular letter.
And so, we calibrate behaviors, as we calibrate tomatoes.
We are in a normative mesh that is increasingly large,
with a densification that is more and more normative.
In addition, this is made easier by the massive increase
of technology.
I don't know if I will find this quote, but it doesn't matter.
The technology is not just an instrument we use.
It is also what makes the individual.
This is what makes his or her humanity.
I give you a quick quote from the sociologist Adorno.
"What is not said is that the land on which
technology acquires its power over society
is the power of those who dominate it economically.
Nowadays, technical rationality
is the rationality of domination itself,
it is the coercive nature of alienated society"
To speak the language of technology, as we do today,
is not just talking about instruments.
It is to think the world and the living
as a stock of energy to exploit to infinity.
We talk about human capital, human resources,
stock of information...
We even talk about "managing your grief"
there is nothing more appalling than this expression.
We make each individual a sort of machine,
to produce profit,
from which we extract the energy to produce this profit.
That's a very important point, and that's what I'm going to talk about now.
Maybe, one more word about this,
so that you can understand better.
I will use two... Where is Georges?
I don't see him (voice: you have 15 minutes)
Ok, 15 minutes.
In this case, the second part will be very short, but I will still take two minutes for the first part.
Obviously, I will speak about the second part during the Q&A.
So, it's quite simple.
I mentioned this earlier: the technology does not require that you think about things.
It does not require you to have moral thinking.
It simply requires an execution.
When you think about big genocides.
The mass killers.
The Nazi criminals.
When you read the texts that have been written about them.
What do we see?
They performed their acts professionally.
They have done their job technically.
This is the defense of Eichmann
"I only obeyed the orders,
I did what I had to do."
The station master near Auschwitz, who is asked:
"You did not notice that there were strange things happening?"
He replied, "My job was to make sure that trains left on time and arrived on time."
This is extremely important.
Of course, I'm not saying that we are here in the West within a Nazi system, it's not what I mean.
I mean that technically thinking about the world
is not innocent.
This does not exempt us from intellectual, philosophical, and moral thinking.
That's what I mean.
If you read information about the massacres in Rwanda.
Everywhere, you find the same comment: I accomplished the act that I had to do.
And you have terrible details.
For example, a Nazi commando, responsible for executing the Jews.
At some point, they report back to the authorities
a report that is very surprising
It could be an union claim report.
In short, they protest from suffering, because they have to kill themselves the Jewish girls with whom they slept.
They ask: could someone else do that?
Could we have a cross organization, more rational?
It is very surprising.
Basically, "death is their job", as the saying goes.
And they do their job.
So you see, a technical world –I do  not have time to talk about it because I only have fifteen minutes, but
A technical world is a world of dehumanization.
I'm not technophobic, I'm technophile, I love technology, that's not the question.
It is a world that is dehumanized.
This is the second small piece, before I begin with the second part.
About proletarianization.
It will be the small piece of the small piece.
I will quote Marx.
He says something terrible.
Marx says: "We should not say that one man's hour
is worth another man's hour,
but rather that one man during an hour
is worth just as much as another man during an hour.
Time is everything, man is nothing:
he is at the most time's carcass.
Day after day, quantity decides for quality.
This is crucial.
Because it means that...
Quantity is a great thing.
Math, numbers are just great...
But if we're not careful,
there is a homogenizing power
that decontextualizes, dehumanizes
An educator is worth an educator.
But what is the relationship between this educator and the working group? We do not care.
Children like this one and not that one? We don't care.
One is worth one, in the table.
And this is very important.
Obviously, I don't say that we should not have
a mathematical, rational, or financial vision of the world.
That's not the problem.
But if there is only that,
we become a robot society or a termite society.
That's just what I wanted, again, to say.
To show you this hold of technology
on our lives right now
- I'm finishing my small piece - this is
what I call the "widespread proletarianization
of existence". What do I mean by that?
According to Marx, when does the craftsman become a proletarian?
When does the worker become a proletarian?
The worker becomes a proletarian
not only by the miserable conditions of his existence produced by urbanization and industrialization.
The worker becomes proletarian, from the moment when his craftsman's knowledge
has been confiscated by the instructions of the machine.
Everything happens as if
the location of decisions moved from the being of the worker
to the user's manual of the machine.
At that moment, truly, there is proletarianization.
But this proletarianization is not material.
It is symbolic.
It is human.
The great philosopher Simone Weil,
Alain's pupil [as she is sometimes called], said:
"So, we resign ourselves to feeding men to serve machines".
I would add that the proletarianization of the peasant
comes from the moment when his peasant knowledge,
his peasant culture, his know-how,
are confiscated by the requirements of the agricultural industrial production
that prescribed him what he had to plant, where, when, etc.
This is proletarianization.
Another little effort to be Republican, or "Gorean":
The proletarianization of the doctor,
the proletarianization of the teacher,
the proletarianization of the researcher,
the proletarianization of the journalist,
etc.
It operates from the moment when the craftmanship
which was ours,
- in "artisanal" [craftsmanship], there is "art" -
This artisanal know-how was confiscated
by these immaterial but very real machines:
standardized, compared protocols.
The EBM,
the guides of good practices,
the rules of good conduct etc.
Today, all our professional acts are fragmented,
rationalized, organized.
and prescribed
by something other than our own profession.
That is why we are witnessing nowadays a destruction of professions that is extremely important.
That's why the professionals are suffering.
Because they are in a conflict of loyalty,
between the ethics of their profession
and the managerial standards
that are required, prescribed,
and that must be incorporated into professional acts.
That's what I told you about earlier.
So, Georges, I have ten minutes left, right?
So, ten minutes for the forty pages of the second part.
This is tough.
Maybe I can start with a quote from Michel Foucault.
He's one of my mentors, you probably guessed that.
When Foucault says:
"The norm carries within it a pretension to power."
You see,
the technical norms, we understand what it is for.
But, social norms?
They are neither natural nor technical.
"The norm carries within it a pretension to power.
The norm is not simply and not even a principle of intelligibility;
it is an element on the basis of which a certain exercise of power is founded and legitimized.
Foucault continues: "Polemic concept said Canguilhem (who was his master),
maybe we could say political.
"In any case, the norm carries with it,
at the same time a principle of qualification,
and a principle of correction.
The norm does not have the function of excluding or rejecting,
it is, on the contrary, always linked to a positive technique of intervention and transformation,
to some kind of normative project."
Let's think about this quote.
I told you that
social and cultural norms are different from technical norms.
If I have to plug a socket,
it is better if it is adapted
to the socket that will receive the plug, etc.
If one thinks about biological standards.
For instance, when the German association for the fight
against arterial hypertension and cardiovascular diseases, lowers by one point
the standard of blood pressure in 1974,
the number of potential consumers of hypotensives is multiplied by three,
but there is a limit.
Of course, it's debatable. Of course, there are conflicts of interest with the industry.
Of course, there are doctrinal conflicts.
But we can not extend them to infinity.
But in the field of the social, in the field of politics, in the field of the psychological,
If I wanted to discuss the example of psychiatry, it would take me three hours.
In this field,
standards are not natural.
It is not obvious, it is not technical.
It is also, of course, very random.
When, in 1980, homosexuality was removed from the list of sexual behavior disorders,
millions of patients were cured.
When in 1994 was included
in the list of sexual behavior disorders,
mood disorders women before menstruation,
it involved a lot of people who were not patients before.
What I mean is that there is a field,
which implies that, by simply changing the criteria,
between 1979 and 1996, in France, there are seven times more diagnoses of depression.
This doesn't mean that we are dealing with seven times more depressed people.
This means that the social threshold of tolerance for depression is changed.
By changing the criteria, more patients are included in the group of people to be treated.
In 1952, the first version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
a hundred concerns behavioral disorders.
In 1990, you have 400.
In 2013, DMS-5, more than 400.
This simply means that by changing things a little
we can include more and more people.
And that's what I am trying to show you.
Why are we including more and more people?
It's not at all to isolate them.
We are no longer in this time of exclusion.
This is no longer the leper period of time,
where we send people to hospitals, etc.
Not at all.
Today, and this will be my last point,
in order to show the connection with imposture
Today, we include more and more people
within the at-risk population group.
The people that have be watched, controlled, and normalized.
And that's where all our professions change,
that's where our way of relating to each other
is changed.
Where does this come from?
I still have ten minutes, is that it?
I will start with Max Weber,
the great sociologist and anthropologist of capitalism.
He said, and I will quote:
"We continue to see
–including for life habits that evolve independently of each other–
that it is in the West,
and only in the West,
that certain modes of rationalization have developed."
I continue:
Linked to the rationalization of technology
and law,
the emergence of economic rationalism
was indeed also dependent
on the ability and disposition of men
to adopt specific forms of practical and rational life conduct."
Let me explain.
What does Max Weber tell us?
There is everything here. My three books are summarized in five lines.
What is he saying? Basically,
Basically, so that capitalism can develop in its different forms –it is not a dirty word,
it is a mode of exchange, a mode of social relations, a mode of economy–
For capitalism to develop in its different forms,
it is not only important that there be
a struggle for the downward trend of surplus value, etc.
There are not only economic problems.
There are cultural, psychological, and anthropological problems.
These problems are:
individuals must behave in a certain way.
And this way must be normalized.
It must be rationalized, according to a way of thinking.
This way of thinking
is what I call the practical-formal rationality.
What does that mean?
It means a way of thinking
based on calculation
or on law.
"Practical" means business thinking.
Thinking about solving problems of business, commerce, etc.
"Formal", that means, the technique of law.
It is the conformity of a behavior to texts, or the conformity of texts between them.
It's okay? It's clear?
In the West, everything happens as if there was no other logic.
As if there were no other forms of rationality.
Which is actually an imposture.
Because myth is a form of rationality.
Ethics, what Max Weber calls substantial rationality,
is a form of rationality.
When today, we see the clash
between unleashed neo-liberalism,
under the Anglo-American magisterium,
and on the other side religious fundamentalists, etc.
Whatever the religion, it doesn't matter.
What do we see? A clash between
a mode of practical-formal rationality and a mode of substantial rationality.
It's not a clash of civilizations, it's a clash of forms of rationality.
I do not know if I express myself clearly, but in short, this is my argument.
There are other forms of rationality. Systemic rationality,
theoretical rationality, etc.
Everything happens as if,
according to the requirements of the economy, according to the requirements of capitalism,
we privileged and selected
one only way of thinking about the world,
and thinking about the individual as human capital.
Do not be mistaken.
All the conservative reforms that have been going on for thirty years,
destroying the gains of the welfare state,
destroying social protections,
destroying what Supiaut aptly calls the Philadelphia spirit,
all these conservative, right-wing reforms, etc.
were inspired by the same program: the program  of the Chicago School.
Where man is nothing but a commercial entity.
Gary Becker's book,
who received a Nobel Prize in economics, one of the leaders –with Friedman– of the Chicago School,
is about human capital.
Man is nothing but human capital.
From there,
as he shows us –but I do not have time to develop it here–
the way to divorce, the way of getting married,
the number of children, fashion,
immigration policy,
pension policy, etc.
For Gary Becker, everything is calculated
based on economic models. And there is no behavior
no social or psychological element that can be exonerated
that can escape, or evade,
from this grid of economic intelligibility.
This way of thinking is practical-formal rationality.
We must see that we are prisoners of this software,
and we can't get out.
And what is lacking today is a political discourse.
There is no political discourse.
I was thinking of this great sentence of Rousseau,
in The Social Contract:
"There will always be a big difference
between submitting the multitude
and governing a society."
We are today in a political incapacity to govern society.
Because the government has the same software, to which it is completely alienated.
Completely alienated.
It is a practical-formal software.
Five minutes?
Social submission today,
what I call the factory of new servitudes,
social submission today,
doesn't occur in a disciplinary manner, or in the name of the law.
Or in the name of the chief, this is over.
Social submission is made,
not at the level of the transcendence of authoritarian discourses, religious discourses,
or sovereign discourses, but by techniques of subjugation, by normative techniques
that capture bodies, direct gestures,
and model behaviors,
in the name of the discourse of a scholarly institution.
In the name of expertise.
Basically, how are we subdued today?
After all, we are in a democracy.
Even if it is degenerate, and believe me, it is degenerate.
If I had two hours, I could show you how it is degenerate.
But, we are still in a democracy,
therefore, people need to be subdued by consenting to their submission.
How do we make them agree?
We make them agree through expertise of behavior.
You are told how many times a day you must eat vegetables and fruits,
how many times a week you must have sex,
with what kind of dim light, or without it,
how many hours of jogging ... Everything is calibrated.
The human is measured as we measure tomatoes.
The laws themselves
suffer from this inflation and swelling of the norm.
This is what Jean Carbonnier says,
and he is not a leftist. He is the dean of a Law School, he is rather center-right.
He says that the law suffers today,
legislation suffers from inflation and swelling.
So, the law is no longer the law, it is tinkered.
We take it back, we tinker it without stopping.
He says, the law is now only a circular letter.
I think that's what we need to see. And this has something to do with what I told you earlier.
This way of manufacturing the human subject,
the citizen subject. This way of making it.
It is a way of conforming it.
Confronted with this situation, we see those who rebel,
and also those who submit apathetically.
We don't really speak about it, we say "the abstention, my God, ..."
But abstention is the symptomatic response to a government that is not political anymore.
An apathy, a lack of interest.
It is a kind of resistance, a hateful kind, in response to this policy.
There are other hateful responses, extreme ones, but there is a form of hateful response which is apathy.
And there is imposture. What is imposture?
It is the perfect fit.
It's the perfect conformism.
And it can change: this person will vote far-right tomorrow, and far-left the day after tomorrow.
And another day s/he will vote in the center.
No problem at all.
No problem. Why? Because s/he is perfectly adapted.
The person is adapted to the current trend.
An impostor is a person who takes the colors of his environment.
That's what you have to understand.
Basically, what is it sending us back?
Thierry can talk about it better than me.
The question of the spectrum of light.
Basically, it sends back what is not absorbed.
He sends the colors of our time.
I don't want to take too much of your time.
The major problem is,
that this society of the norm,
this society of control, as Deleuze said,
constantly requires a surveillance system,
a control system,
This system is not disciplinary, we are not in fascism.
Or, it is soft fascism, cultural fascism, of course it is not political fascism.
So, a constant visibility,
a permanent classification of the individuals,
a hierarchization, a qualification,
the setting of limits, a diagnosis, etc.
So, you see, the norm becomes somehow
how to say that... the counter
with which we guide individuals
by making them believe that it is for their own good,
by making them believe that it is for their health.
We are within what Foucault called "security societies".
You have to see that these security societies...
How can say that...
The ramifications of this security power
are at the ends of –and this is a major problem–
ends of institutions that are not designed for security.
The power of control of individuals,
the power of normalization of individuals today,
is not the police or justice, not at all.
It is located at the end of institutions such as hospitals,
research, information, family etc.
It is at the end of these institutions, where the objective was other than to control or standardize individuals.
This is very important.
This is what we need to understand.
The school, the teacher, their purpose is to awaken a curiosity to learn from the student.
To start from the student's desire to know, to respond to it by providing what is essential.
For a doctor, it's medical treatment, or doing research.
The task of a journalist is to inform, to participate in the education of the critical thinking of the citizen.
But, what I have told you, during this babbling conference
I tried to tell you: you see, the auditory logic, the evaluation logic...
What is their role?
It is not to improve the journalist's performance.
It is not to improve the performance of the teacher.
It is not to improve the performance of the caregiver.
We don't give a shit. These evaluation systems have never improved anything.
With one exception: the submission of individuals.
The performance of evaluation today
is its ability to persuade,
lies in its performative capacity to make happen what it dictates.
And here we find the model of financial rating agencies.
They fulfill a self-fulfilling prophecy
They produce what –like Cassandra– they announced.
This is very important.
Because...
This society of the norm
requires systems of surveillance, control and government,
different from those we have known so far.
This is one of the big problems. Even in politics.
The opponents of this system are confused,
they are mistaken about which society they are in.
It's the wrong period of time.
They are opposed to totalitarian, disciplinary systems, which no longer exist.
What they lack is a real opponent,
who would allow them to position themselves.
Hence, this confusion today in political thinking.
I will finish. Don't worry Georges,
I will finish with someone I like very much.
Jaurès.
I could finish my talk with Jaurès, or with Camus.
Finally, I finish with Jaurès.
What I believe is very interesting, with Jaurès...
Everything that he promotes,
–you need to remember that Jaurès, since his second thesis in higher education,
I'd say that he held two hand-rails.
On the one hand, the hand-rail of a materialist conception of history,
some sort of Marxist analysis of society.
But on the other hand, and this is
what puts him out of balance with the Socialists at that time. He says:
"We will not go out of humanity to stay in socialism."
It's a beautiful sentence.
The second hand-rail, it is
an idealistic conception. He recognizes the need for spirituality of the human.
This seems to me very important. Jaures, like Camus, they don't give up, neither on one side nor the other.
We find in Camus also powerful sentences.
"I do not believe in God, but I am not atheist." For example.
You see, this is really important because
Their understanding of education, culture, politics
is in opposition to this factory of a individual entrepreneur of himself.
Who sells himself.
The impostor –I didn't tell you as much as I expected about that–but an impostor is simply
the magnified figure of that.
He is just an enlargement
of the "normal man" created by our societies.
So, what they insist very much on is the making of a citizen who is emancipated by culture.
Who is emancipated by moral thinking, who is emancipated by critical thinking.
And, to finish with my babble, we must understand this:
There is no creation without transgression of norms.
In the evolution of species, or genetic mutations,
they enable evolution.
These are transgressions of norms.
In the field of research,
in the field of care,
in the field of information ... In all fields,
there is no real creation without transgression of norms.
And precisely, the pathology of an impostor is that s/he is a normal person.
It's to be a normal person.
It is to be in the repetition of values.
This is very important. I don't have time,
but I could show you, at the level of linguistics,
–I speak under the authority of Professor Bourne–
I could show you that catachresis, an extremely important figure of speech,
is the ability to transform the meaning of a word
into a new reality.
Even within language,
as we do not have all the words to describe all that will happen, and that we do not know yet,
so we transform the meaning of the words,
by using an old word.
For example, we will talk about the wings of an airplane.
Since we had not built a plane before, we had not built this part.
By analogy with the bird, we will call it the wings.
So, we transform the meaning of a word to describe a new reality.
Catachres are constantly being made.
If I do that, it is a catachresis. My watch was not designed to scratch my ear.
But I use my watch to scratch my ear.
This capacity for invention,
this capacity for innovation,
we don't have it through a normative adaptation
–we leave it to the conformists, the impostors, and the apathetic– but rather by a transgression of norms.
By something that is of the order of the place, of the site –and I will conclude with this
of the site of humanity. And I conclude with Jaurès.
It is obvious that for Jaurès, for example, humanity is not a transcendence,
humanity is not an individual, it is not every individual.
Humanity, says Jaures, is a piece of humanity.
It is a piece of humanity, within each of us, that refuses to make us a simple tool of living.
What Aristotle called "an animated instrument".
That's humanity.
Jaurès has a very beautiful sentence, he says: "
"Humanity carries in itself a prior idea of justice and law.
it is this preconceived ideal which it pursues as a form of civilization to a higher form of civilization.
What is humanity? It is precisely what resists
that we make of man simply something that is used.
Whether an instrument use or a function.
He also shows, I quote again:
"The whole movement of history results from the essential contradiction
between man and the use made of man.
Whether this movement tends, at its limit,
to an economic order in which use will be made in accordance with this order,
it is humanity which, through economic forms which are less and less repugnant to its idea, establishes itself.
You see, this is really important.
What does it mean? It means that
with regard to the notion of value, which I mentioned earlier. For Jaurès, what is value?
It is what he calls the value of human being.
It is what resists to any fatalism, biological or economic.
It's very important.
In any society,
it is not at all obvious that one cannot
resign oneself to the state of things.
Today –if Georges gives me two hours, I tell you about it– we are in a society of resignation.
A society of fatalism.
Basically, we consider that we cannot do anything
about the fatalism of the economy,
about geopolitical fatalism and so on.
But, for Jaurès as for Camus, there is this idea.
This idea that a human being is precisely not
what is submitted to fatality, biological or economic,
the human is what resists to
this fatality, whether biological or economic.
Thank you very much.
Images and editing: Thibault Grasset - ITC Producion
