Tag Archives: Politics

Tech – When Silicon Valley Changes the World (final part)

I advertise this book to my friends and colleagues. This is definitely the book I wish I had written. Everything is said, as we sometimes say! You will find previous articles here and there.

The workers of Silicon Valley

Chapter 6 is dedicated to developers, coders. Historian Alfred Chandler has shed light on how the centralization of information and decision-making by top and head managers, located at the top of separate divisions, constituted a comparative advantage for the leading companies that emerged in the 19th century in the fields of transport, energy and communications. Managers prevail as intermediaries between producers-suppliers and customers-demanders. They embody and concentrate power for functional reasons, because they allow the coherent, hierarchical and vertical circulation of information and decision-making within companies.
Through the writings and conclusions of F. Brooks ([in The Mythical Man-Month] shows an inverse pattern. According to him, to give free rein to the iteration process necessary for software production, the work must be coordinated horizontally, to favor support for the continuity of software development. He pleads in favor of small teams gathered around a central worker, whom he compares to a “chief surgeon” placed, no longer upstream and overhanging as in the large companies analyzed by A. Chandler, but at the heart of the action.
This mode of organization aims to adapt to the type of product that is the software and its characteristics in terms of production. Developers project themselves into a job without knowing the outcome, the time required, or the final properties of the production process. Software design thus necessarily proceeds via projections. If the developers can rely on scenarios, visions, schemes, diagrams, these do not allow a lasting and stable coordination unlike scripts in the cinema or scores in the field of music. This dimension explains the role assigned to managers in Silicon Valley companies. It is not a question of circulating information between managers at the top of different divisions to control the work of subordinates but of ensuring the coherence and coordination of the team within the framework of a project.
[…] If the developers cannot rely on downstream continuity supports, they mobilize a series of tools upstream of the production process [Pages 316-18].

Start a business

Founding a business is a more radical choice. […] This entrepreneurial move to action turns out to be paradoxical if we consider the treatment that developers are given within Silicon Valley companies and the low chances of leading a company to success, i.e., according to the criteria of investors, a sale or an IPO. For those who work for the big names in tech, leaving to start your own company means giving up, for an unknown period of tim,e a high salary, bonuses, health insurance, free catering and transport services, maternity and paternity leave, child care systems, etc., all for a greater amount of work. From this point of view, the creation of a business does not meet the criteria of rational choice within a professional group that is nevertheless attached to objectivity, reason and logic.
While many cite Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial culture to justify this shift, they also point to the desire to retain control of the value possibly generated by their work. Indeed, the creation of a business proves for the developers not the surest means of enrichment but the one which represents the greatest potential
[Page 335].

Burning man, an inverted carnival

When I started reading the last part of his book, I wondered why Olivier Alexandre devoted so many pages to this very special event that is the Burning Man festival. The chapter devoted to it therefore deserves careful reading, starting with a note on page 529: “The habitus is a set of enduring dispositions which consists of categories of appreciation and judgment and engenders social practices adjusted to social positions. Acquired during the early education and the first social experiences, it also reflects the trajectory and later experiences: the habitus results from a progressive integration of social habits. This explains why, placed in similar conditions, the agents have the same vision of the world, the same idea of what can be done and what cannnot be done, the same criteria for choosing their hobbies and their friends, the same clothing or aesthetic tastes” [Anne-Catherine Wagner in Les 100 mots de la sociologie].

It is from this remarkable point of view that the term “connection” finds multiple uses in Burning Man: connecting with others, reconnecting with oneself, connecting with the festival, connecting the different stages of one’s life (or according to Steve Jobs’ formula “connect the dots”) or take MDMA or LSD to better “feel the connection” (with other people, the environment, etc.), etc. This mode of engagement, which is based on immediacy and interaction, ultimately leads to bringing into play habits, stabilized and incorporated representations, including in terms of self-representation. This bringing into play of habitus proceeds from a series of tests [Pages 361-62].

As seen above, Silicon Valley is characterized by a significant turnover of workers. Their high geographic mobility poses uncertainty about the sustainability of relations. The idea that a departure almost overnight is within the realm of possibility remains deeply rooted in people’s minds. Especially since Silicon Valley has had one of the highest divorce rates in the country since the 1980s and expatriates rarely see their families. For these various reasons, the Burning Man represents for certain participants a “family” of substitution. In 2008, 67% of participants were in contact with Burners outside the festival [Page 380].

For the participants, the festival tends in different ways to enchant a world that they contribute the rest of the year to disenchant through the production of digital tools, measuring instruments, calculation methods and a rationalist approach. Art is not considered an object but a support for interaction. As a component of an environment, it allows the development of skills before, during and after the festival. The latter confronts the Burners with a series of tests whose learning and experiences are reinvested during the rest of the year, within the framework of projects. In this, the Burning Man is not a simple party, a festival or a laboratory, but a device that makes possible the interconnection between individuals, repertoires of skills and communities of practice. It leads to the construction of an ethos oriented towards change. [Page 382]

Silicon Valley, a political project?

Olivier Alexandre ends his book with what the region represents from a political point of view. A place of experimentation par excellence, this region is also at the origin or development of movements such as libertarianism, transhumanism and long-termism, whose influences and relationships are shown in the following figure (see page 361 and original source dated 2013 on Julia Galef’s blog). They are themselves mixtures or synthesis of anarchism, liberalism and isolationism [Page 387]. Their political vision would be characterized by a lack of empathy as well as a willingness to go beyond the boundaries of mind and body [Page 388].

Once again, Olivier Alexandre gives a subtle description of the region: one can legitimately wonder about the novelty, the coherence of this constellation within a region which has a majority of pragmatist progressives, pro-government libertarians, liberals voting mostly Democrats, who (like Elon Musk) favor the investor state while demanding tax cuts [Page 394]. And adding in note 12, page 501: Libertarians are only a minority in Northern California. The Libertarian Party had 2,600 registered voters out of 468,000 voters in the city of San Francisco in the early 2010s.

I can’t resist adding here some additional references for my own archives:
– The vast majority of tech entrepreneurs are Democrats — but a different kind of Democrat. A big new survey tells us a lot about Silicon Valley’s politics by Dylan Matthews, Sep 6, 2017
– Techno-feudalism by Cédric Durand. See a review by Jérémy Lucas on Dygest (in French).
– Mouvement syndical et critique écologique des industries numériques dans la Silicon Valley (Labor movement and ecological criticism of the digital industries in Silicon Valley) by Christophe Lécuyer dans Réseaux 2022/1 (N° 231), pages 41 à 70
– Some articles with the #politics tag on this blog, including the recent work of Anthony Galluzzo who participated with Olivier Alexandre in programs on France Culture.

The impact on the region is known and is not new even if it has increased. The attractiveness of the region has left too many people behind and the observation already existed in … 1979. See for example Silicon Valley, more of the same that I published in the early days of this blog. The following extract deserves to be copied here again: “In 1979, I was a graduate student at Berkeley and I was one of the first scholars to study Silicon Valley. I culminated my master’s program by writing a thesis in which I confidently predicted that Silicon Valley would stop growing. I argued that housing and labor were too expensive and the roads were too congested, and while corporate headquarters and research might remain, I was convinced that the region had reached its physical limits and that innovation and job growth would occur elsewhere during the 1980s. As it turns out I was wrong” by AnnaLee Saxenian.

“I don’t necessarily blame the workers. […] By and large the real people in the tech industry don’t seek to do harm. In fact, they seek to do good, at least in the way they see it, especially the elders, the OPs [the Old Programmers]. But they are just one small piece in a larger system that is sinister. One of the things that I try to explain to people I work with about this industry is that one of the best parts of it is working with very smart people on projects you devote yourselves totally. When you work like that, there is something that happens… that makes you forget everything else. It’s like in a war… it causes people to develop a psychology where they become myopic to what surrounds them. That’s passionate work, and it’s wonderful. But if you go nearsighted, you can’t see anything outside your field of vision because you’re immersed in it. As a result, they are not against the right to housing, or more social justice. It’s just that it’s not part of their consciousness, they don’t feel like they have the ability to care or think about it, because they’re so focused on the task in front of them. When we started this organization, I had the good fortune to have a few experiences that opened my eyes to the corrupting influence of money. So we don’t do high-priced galas, I don’t go to wealthy family foundations, corporations or anything else to raise funds [Page 438, Brian Basinger, July 2016].

It is difficult to finish reading such a book and to review it. I can only encourage one last time to read it. I will limit myself to a few additional quotes: “The painful paradox of modern technology is that it has been so successful, but it has also failed miserably. We live in this paradox that challenges the very meaning of being modern” [Page 455, by Lee Bailey in The Enchantments of Technology].

This book is a description of an ultra-competitive but enchanted world, Balzacian in that the grandeur of ambitions meets the fragility of solutions. The analysis will serve those wishing to “change the world” as well as their critics determined to think of new models [Page 456].

Many thanks to Olivier Alexandre.

The myth of the entrepreneur – Undoing the imaginary of Silicon Valley

A friend mentioned this new book about Silicon Valley to me a few days ago and I quote: “The author’s argument is wrong (but it’s pernicious). […] Indeed, entrepreneurship generates excellence and independent-minded people, while [another view – opposition to liberal capitalism] creates a population of people dependent upon the state.”

I’m not sure I agree with my friend: on the one hand, the relationship between collective and individual is a key topic around entrepreneurship. Does a company create value without “outstanding” individuals? The subject is as old as the world. On the other hand, the distribution of this value is a second subject which belongs among other things to the field of taxation and Piketty has clearly shown that, for several decades, the distribution gap has greatly increased in favor of the richest to the detriment of the poorest.

Marianna Mazzucato has shown this imbalance in The Entrepreneurial State, which she finds all the more unfair as she shows the primordial role of the State in upstream funding (education, research, public services in general) which provides a favorable context for the creation of wealth.

In the beginning of his book, Le mythe de l’entrepreneur – Défaire l’imaginaire de la Silicon Valley (The Myth of the Entrepreneur – Unraveling the Imaginary of Silicon Valley), Anthony Galluzzo explains similar things but it seems different to me. I am only at the beginning and I will see later how closely it joins the criticism introduced above. The author is a specialist in merchant imaginary and the subtitle is convincing, namely that it is necessary to deconstruct the imaginary of this region, based on story-telling around the stars of the region, such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk (although Elon Musk has largely lost his aura). It shows us that Elisabeth Holmes tried the same approach but succeeded only very partially.

Joseph Schumpeter is quoted extensively in the book at the beginning, in particular it seems to me, for a critique of the role of the entrepreneur and of creative destruction. Galluzzo prefers to use destructive creation to show the chronology of actions. But I didn’t see in the beginning of the book, at least, that Schumpeter adds that capitalism cannot exist without advertising. So without story-telling and imaginary.

This imaginary of Silicon Valley is therefore, I believe, only what allows capitalism to self-develop, to survive, with all the current paradoxes of destructive waste. But behind this imaginary, what is the reality? Galluzzo refuses to oppose entrepreneurs and businessmen. I understand the argument. Creators, stars at least, can make a lot of money. But I don’t know if the main reason is their ability to do business or if they are simply at the origin of a creation that makes it possible to do business. I am neither an economist, nor a historian, nor a sociologist and I find it very difficult to make sense of things, all other things being equal.

Anatomy of the Myth – the Heroic Entrepreneur

So here are a few things that I found interesting in the beginning of the book:

1- The solitary entrepreneur

Steve Jobs was not alone and worse is perhaps not critical to the initial success. The story is indeed quite well known while Jobs is seen as the only genius of Apple.
– Steve Wozniak is the real genius (Galluzzo will not like the term) behind the first computers from Apple.
– Steve Jobs is said to have “stolen” [Page 35] many ideas from Xerox to build his machines. The story is known but the term “stealing” is too strong even if many Xerox employees were shocked. Xerox received Apple shares in exchange for this rather unique deal in history.
– “Mike Markkula can be considered the true founder of Apple, the one who transformed a small, insignificant hobbyist operation into a structured and solidly financed start-up. » [Pages 19-20]
– “Arthur Rock, meanwhile, is one of the most important figures in Silicon Valley, he contributed to the emergence of the largest companies in the region – Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, then Apple. However, no biography has ever been devoted to him and his wikipedia page is starving”. [Page 20]

I will nuance Galluzzo’s remarks again. Certainly Wozniak, Markkula and Rock have not penetrated the imagination of the general public, but Silicon Valley connoisseurs are not unaware of them and the film Something Ventured (which Galluzzo does not seem to mention in his very rich bibliography) does not forget them at all. And what about this cover of Time Magazine.

2- The war for talent

“The functioning of the labor market in Silicon Valley, however, shows us a completely different dynamic. The industrial concentration in this region leads to significant personnel movements: an engineer can easily change company, without moving or changing his lifestyle. […] This high degree of labor mobility has been observed since the 1970s, when on average IT professionals only stayed in their jobs for two years [Cf AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage]. When circulating like this, employees, even bound by non-disclosure agreements, take with them their experiences and knowledge. The propagation of this tacit knowledge is at the heart of the ecosystem, it allows permanent collective tacit learning. » [Page 45]

Galluzzo gets to the heart of the matter here, which makes Silicon Valley unique. Not so much the concentration of talent, which exists in all developed regions. But the circulation of talent. Almost everything is said!

However, Galluzzo adds a significant nuance that I was less familiar with: “Therefore, problems arise for entrepreneurs relating to what has been called in business jargon the “war for talents”. To carry out his projects, he must succeed in appropriating the most precious commodity there is, the work force of highly qualified engineers.” [Page 46]

Galluzzo then mentions the stock options, the aggressive recruitment but also this: “Another court case illustrates well the issues of employee retention. In the 2000s, several Silicon Valley giants, including Intel, Google and Apple, formed a “wage cartel”, mutually agreeing not to attempt to poach employees. This tacit agreement was intended to eliminate all competition for skilled workers and to limit wage increases.” [Page 47 & see Google, Apple, other tech firms to pay $415M in wage case]

3- The invisibilization of the State

The subject is also known and I mentioned it above. We too often forget the role of the collective in the possibility of favorable conditions and context. But Galluzzo shows that too often there is even a certain hatred of the collective, illustrated by the growing visibility of libertarians. It is also known, Silicon Valley is afraid of unions. Here’s another example I didn’t know:

“I want the people who teach my children to be good enough to be employed in the company I work for, and earn $100,000 a year. Why should they work in a school for $35-40,000 a year if they can get a job here at $100,000? We should hire them and pay them $100,000, but of course the problem is the unions. Unions are the worst thing that has happened to education. Because it is not a meritocracy, but a bureaucracy. »

You have to read the entire excerpt and maybe even the entire interview with Steve Jobs. Excerpts from an Oral History Interview with Steve Jobs. Interviewer: Daniel Morrow, April 20, 1995. Computerworld Smithsonian Awards. We are there in the core American culture and the importance given to competition between individuals rather than to the equality of the members of the collective.

So are there geniuses or not? Is there only Darwinian emergence of talents a posteriori among those who will have survived? I don’t know or I don’t know anymore. Probably something in between. Or maybe it is an act of faith, as long as sociology does not have elements that will allow me to have a more convincing opinion…

To be continued…

The Plague Year – Leadership and Courage according to The New Yorker


I have regularly mentioned here articles by great magazine The New Yorker even if not directly related to the startup or innovation topics. The New Yorker publishes long and deep analyses which often take at least 30 minutes attention. Recently, it published a 40-page article requiring hours… it is about Covid and the USA: The Plague Year – The mistakes and the struggles behind America’s coronavirus tragedy written by Lawrence Wright, published online on December 28, 2020 and on paper in the Jan 4-11 double issue.


Picture from Tyler Comrie

The reason I decided yersterday to blog about it is a short section close to the end: Pottinger’s White House experience has made him acutely aware of what he calls “the fading art of leadership.” It’s not a failure of one party or another; it’s more of a generational decline of good judgment. “The élites think it’s all about expertise,” he said. It’s important to have experts, but they aren’t always right: they can be “hampered by their own orthodoxies, their own egos, their own narrow approach to the world.” Pottinger went on, “You need broad-minded leaders who know how to hold people accountable, who know how to delegate, who know a good chain of command, and know how to make hard judgments.”

You should try to read it, it’s really mesmerizing, but this short section reminded me of French philosopher Cynthia Fleury and her book “La fin du courage” (The end of courage). You may want for example to read To be Brave is sometimes to Endure, sometimes to Break up which I find quite close to what is written above.

The Ideology of Silicon Valley by Fred Turner and Jean-Pierre Dupuy (among others)

Excellent issue of the famous French review Esprit on The Ideology of Silicon Valley. You’ll find contibutions by Emmanuel Alloa, Jean-Baptiste Soufron, Fred Turner, Shoshana Zuboff, Antonio Casilli and Jean-Pierre Dupuy.

I was especially struck by the surprising interview with Fred Turner: Do not be Evil. Utopias, borders and brogrammers. This is in fact a translation from LogicMag, which you can find here: Don’t Be Evil. It is really worth reading! It is his explanation of the roots of Silicon Valley that surprised me the most and how they still influence today this region which in the end is not very ideological, even if the other authors have different points of view.

For example: “It owes its origins to 1960s communalism. A brief primer on the counterculture: there were actually two countercultures. One, the New Left, did politics to change politics. It was very much focused on institutions, and not really afraid of hierarchy. The other—and this is where the tech world gets its mojo—is what I’ve called the New Communalists. Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.” Then on the influence today: “It varies depending on the company. Apple is, in some ways, very cynical. It markets utopian ideas all the time. It markets its products as tools of utopian transformation in a countercultural vein. It has co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture, starting as soon as the company was founded. At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world. Whether their practice matches their beliefs, I don’t know. About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa. And that is a challenging space to live in.”

Jean-Pierre Dupuy in “The New Data Science” brilliantly explains there is no data science. Science is about causes, data are more about correlations which can not really help in predictions (I hope I understood his message!). Let me quote one sentence: “The ideology that accompanies big data, meanwhile, announces the advent of new scientific practices that, putting the theoretical requirement in the background, endanger the advance of knowledge and, more importantly, undermine the foundations of a rational ethic.” Really brilliant!

Le bonheur, une idée neuve dans les entreprises ? (selon France Culture)

(Sorry I was too fast, this should have been posted on the French version… where it is also now. For non French-speaking readers, this post is about new management techniques that were born in Silicon Valley…)

J’étais invité ce matin à débattre des méthodes de travail et de management (y compris “l’utilisation du bonheur”) importées de la Silicon Valley. Je mets plus bas (après les tweets) les notes que j’avais prise pour préparer cette émission

Voici les notes que je m’étais préparées.

On ne peut pas mettre dans les même paquet tous les GAFAM. Tout d’abord Amazon et Microsoft qui par coïncidence ne sont pas basées dans la Silicon Valley, mais à Seattle ne sont pas connues pour un management original. Ni Bill Gates, ni son successeur Steve Ballmer, ni Jeff Bezos ne sont connus pour des styles de management innovants. Par contre Google, Apple et Facebook ont sans doute des similarités:
– ce sont des méritocraties et le travail est la valeur “suprême”, plus que le profit, au risque de tous les excès: recherche de performance, concurrence et risque de burn-out. On ne tient pas toujours très longtemps chez GAF
– on y recherche les meilleurs talents (sur toute la planète et sans exclusive, au fond le sexisme et le racisme n’y existent pas a priori)
– le travail en (petites) équipes est privilégié.
Du coup le management a innové pour permettre cette performance et reconnaître les talents (par le fameuses stock options mais aussi une multitude de services pour rendre les gens toujours plus efficaces)

J’aimerais vous mentionner 3 ouvrages (sur lesquels j’avais bloggé pour 2 d’entres eux)
– Work Rules décrit le “people management” chez Google (ils ne parlent “plus” de ressources humaines). L’auteur Lazlo Bock qui fut le patron de cette activité a quasiment théorisé tout cela. Vous trouverez mes 5 posts sur ce livre par le lien: https://www.startup-book.com/fr/?s=bock. C’est un livre en tout point remarquable parce qu’il montre la complexité des choses.

– I’m feeling Lucky décrit de l’intérieur ces manières hétérodoxes de “foncer”. Un pro du marketing montre comment Google a tout chamboulé par conviction / intuition plus que par expérience. https://www.startup-book.com/fr/2012/12/13/im-feeling-lucky-beaucoup-plus-quun-autre-livre-sur-google/

– Enfin un livre hommage sur Bill Campbell vient de sortir écrit par l’ancien CEO de Google Eric Schmidt. https://www.trilliondollarcoach.com. Comme je viens de commencer ce livre, je peux en parler plus difficilement mais il serait dommage d’oublier cette personnalité qui fut le “coach” de Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt et Sheryl Sandberg, trois personnes majeures pour justement les GAF! Or ce Bill Campbell, décédé il y a 3 ans, fut une personne essentielle à cette culture du travail et de la performance. Ses valeurs sont décrites dans https://www.slideshare.net/ericschmidt/trillion-dollar-coach-book-bill-campbell. Bill Campbell revient de temps en temps sur mon blog pour des anecdotes assez étonnantes. (https://www.startup-book.com/fr/?s=campbell). Par exemple, chez Google on a souvent pensé que les managers étaient inutiles. L’autonomie d’individus brillants devait suffire… mais ce n’est pas si simple! – voir https://www.startup-book.com/fr/2015/09/01/google-dans-le-null-plex-partie-3-une-culture/.

A nouveau excellence des individus et travail en équipe, reconnaissance des talents à qui on donne autonomie, responsabilité(s) avec peu de hiérarchie semble être le leitmotiv… Tout cela on pas pour rendre les gens heureux, mais pour leur permettre d’être plus efficace parce qu’ils sont “heureux” au travail. “People First”. L’objectif c’est de fidéliser, de rendre plus productif, mais c’est aussi une mise en pratique de la confiance en les autres.

Alors comme je l’avais lu chez Bernard Stiegler, à toute pharmacopée sa toxicité. Les excès dans des valeurs conduisent à des abus. Trop de travail, de concurrence, de pression conduit au burnout. J’ai l’impression que la politique et même le sexisme y jouent moins de rôle qu’on pense, même s’il y en a comme partout. Quant au racisme, il me semble limité (et on est aux USA!) Le sexisme est un vrai sujet, mais je vois plus des nerds qui ont peur ou ne connaissent pas les femmes que des “old boy clubs of white men” qui dirigeraient les choses comme je l’ai lu (même si cet élément existe j’en suis sûr). La polémique sur la congélation des ovocytes chez Facebook peut être lue de manière contradictoire j’imagine. J’ai aussi abordé le sujet dans le passé, https://www.startup-book.com/fr/?s=femmes ou https://www.startup-book.com/tag/women-and-high-tech/. L’autre sujet de diversité, est plus clair: il y a tellement de nationalités dans les GAFAs et les startup en général que le racisme est dur à imaginer. Indiens, chinois surtout sont présents et jusqu’au somment (les CEO de Google et Microsoft aujourd’hui). Seule la minorité “African-American” est sans doute sous représentée et on peut imaginer que tout cela est corrélé avec le problème de l’accès à l’éducation (qui existe moins en Asie)

Voilà, c’est déjà beaucoup pour ne pas dire trop… je trouve que commencer par Bill Campbell est une manière simple et efficace d’entrer dans le sujet. Et maintenant que j’y pense tout cela est d’autant plus facilement que vous verrez que mes lectures récentes sont liées au “sens du travail” (Lochmann, Crawford, Patricot) https://www.startup-book.com/fr/?s=travail

Cynthia Fleury : To be Brave is sometimes to Endure, sometimes to Break up

I have already mentioned Cynthia Fleury on this blog, for example some of her books on Transhumanism is Science Fiction. I just read an interview of her on Telerama, Cynthia Fleury : “Etre courageux, c’est parfois endurer, parfois rompre”. It is so great, I just decided to translate it my way…

MesLivres-Cynthia-Fleury

Translated from Juliette Cerf. First published on Telerama on 30/08/2015, updated on 01/02/2018.

A philosopher and a psychoanalyst, she insists on how important it is for anyone to build her or his own destiny. It is a condition to protect democracy.

When she was a young doctoral student in philosophy, Cynthia Fleury dreamed of living on a back seat, to devote herself to research and writing, far from the hubbub of the city … Life decided differently and the young woman learnt with time how to live on stage. To be all round. She is now in her early 40s, used to debates and much appreciated by the media for her sharp speech and clear vision. Cynthia Fleury combines many activities: a researcher in political philosophy and a psychoanalyst, she teaches at the American University of Paris. She is a member of the advisory board of the National Ethics Committee, she is also part of Nicolas Hulot Foundation’s think tank for nature and humankind and she is contributor to the Paris medical and psychological emergency unit (Samu). From these different positions of observation, the philosopher watches the drifts and dysfunctions specific to the individual and democracy, at a time when, because of the crisis, everyone withdraws into oneself. How to cure this? How to bring back into the heart of the collective? It is these questions that she addresses in her new essay, Les irremplaçables (The Irreplaceable), which follows her reflection begun in The Pathologies of Democracy and The End of Courage.

Why this title, The Irreplaceable, which sends the reader towards a literary fiction horizon?

Literature is much more poweful than philosophy since it does not produce a doctrinaire, frozen discourse. With a title of a novel, I wanted to evoke the story of the self, the creative power of each. An irreplaceable being is indeed someone committing to a process of individuation, in other words in the construction of her or his own destiny. The book is published in the Blanche collection by Gallimard, which outside of fiction, has always been known for a tradition of philosophical existentialism, with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, etc. It meant to invest the theme of irreplaceability in an existential and open way, while philosophical theorizing gives a sense of closure. What was at stake was to enter in a dynamic commitment and to create a responsibility for each of us: how does this individual destiny feed a more collective destiny? This is the essential question.

You enroll in the field of political philosophy; democracy is at the center of your thinking.

Yes, and the irreplaceable, at first, were for me the democrats. If I precisely talk about commitment, it’s because I do not live in the illusion of democratic durability. At a time when fundamentalisms, fascisms and populisms proliferate, how can we protect democracy? How do we make sure that individuals are concerned about preserving the rule of law? I realized that any individual who has not worked to develop a fair individuation will not care about preserving democracy. Self-care and concern for the city are intimately linked.

How?

Individuation and democracy work, I think, like a Möbius strip, as the two faces of the same reality. Of course, the rule of law produces the conditions the emergence of an individual, but it does not last if not revitalized, reinvented, reformed by free subjects. If the rule of law remains only a formal reality, it creates huge disappointments that threaten it. It is therefore necessary that it incarnates, and this body of the rule of law is that of the different individuals it gathers. But in recent years, neoliberalism has distorted the rule of law and disintigrated the subjects. The rule of law signs its death sentence: only a well-individuated subject cares about its preservation, and not the alienated subject we meet today.

“The construction of the rule of law is the adventure of this gap between principles and practice.”

You thus evoke the “entropic” drift of contemporary democracies. What is this about?

In thermodynamics, entropy measures the state of disorder of a system: it grows when it evolves towards an increased disorder. However, for thirty years, western democracies experience dynamics of disguise, delirious and unprecedented merchandising, which makes of us interchangeable, replaceable entities, servicing the “growth” idol. Everyone can experience it, whether in the world of finance, consumption, or ecology, through all these phenomena of capture, extreme rationalization, obscene profitability that do not question either their presuppositions nor their expectations. But the expression of democratic entropy is something else, it refers to the internal disorder of democracy, its dysfunctions that are of its very nature. This, Tocqueville has analyzed it perfectly when he defined democracy this way: good principles, theoretically correct and ethically acceptable, which produce perverse effects. The construction of the rule of law is the adventure of this gap between principles and practice.

Could you give an example?

According to Tocqueville, principles change into passions; thus, the passion of the principle of individuation is individualism. The individualistic subject is passionate about himself, self-centered, withdrawn, intoxicated by the intoxication of the self, while the individuated subject sets up a look at the outside world, unfolds and ensures a base, a foundation, which allows her or him to enter into a relationship with what is surrounding. The adventure of irreplaceability, the path to individuation, thus looks like, in many features, that of depersonalization. It’s not about becoming a personality, to put the ego on stage. On the contrary, the challenge is relational: it is a matter of decentering oneself to bind oneself to others, to the world, to meaning.

How to access this individuation?

To give time for oneself is not easily guaranteed. It is a never-ending requirement. To know oneself and to access the quality of being that one owes to the world, the subject must go through three dynamics of knowledge and behavior, which are as many fire tests: imagination, pain and humor. With the first one, the imaginatio vera, the subject produces a true imagination, which is an “agent”, which creates reality. This faculty of soul and heart, at the border of the sensible world and the intellectual world, has an unheard-of power of creation. In this respect, the imaginary, literary space is really the configuration space of reality; it is in no way avoiding reality, as we sometimes think. The imaginary, literary space allows us to verbalize and understand what reality is. The second faculty, pretium doloris, the price of pain, teaches us that the act of thought has a price and that access to the truth can be a painful experience. The trial of Socrates is the very symbol: knowing and knowing oneself mean being at risk.

What about humor?

The vis comica, the comic force, operates an effect of decentering, of distancing which makes the reflexive consciousness arise. The power of humor allows us to grasp the absurdity of reality, as well as our own inadequacy and shortage. While one discovers the absolute inanity, vanity, stupidity of the subject, one manages nevertheless to do something about it. This is essential for the process of individuation, which is primarily a consciousness of shortage, while individualism, infatuated by its pseudo-omnipotence, has totally forgotten that it was short. Individuation is a test of reality, an access to the truth. It is a saying that is obligatory and does not force, and thus renders the subject faithful to herself or himself, irreplaceable. It is a given word, an effort that the individual deploys to bind oneself to the discourse one states.

The brave, at the center of your essay The End of Courage, was already an irreplaceable subject for you?

Yes, irreducible to others, since the brave does not delegate to others the task of doing what is to be done. In The End of Courage, the reconquest of a democratic virtue, I show how ethics of courage are a way to fight against democratic entropy. This virtue, which brings together ethics and politics, is at the same time a tool for protecting the subject and for regulating societies. In the deep intimacy that the brave subject has with his conscience, there is the quality of a public commitment, for others. One can be alone, even against others, when one makes a courageous act, but this gesture always preserves a quality of connection with the community. In everyday life, to be brave is sometimes to endure, sometimes to break up; it may be leaving a job when you are entangled in a perverse situation. On a more historical level, the spectrum goes from political leaders like Nelson Mandela to whistleblowers today.

“There is no democratic project without an educational project”

Individuation, courage: your research intersects with the individual and the collective, psychoanalysis and political philosophy. How did you become a psychoanalyst?

I first started a psychoanalysis at a rather young age, around the age of 17. I did not think about becoming an analyst at all! Then my work as a teacher-researcher in political philosophy focused on the issue of dysfunctions, especially when I wrote Pretium doloris and The Pathologies of Democracy. Reflecting on the suffering at work and on the actions that sometimes accompany it, I have had to collaborate with occupational physicians and clinicians. I wanted to probe more directly the word of the individual. That’s how I became a psychoanalyst. I started my clinical activity in 2007 and have been receiving patients on a regular basis since 2009. I soon realized that the sessions were dedicated to a discourse about reality, society: work, globalization, terrorism, religions, etc. It was necessary to dig to find a discourse about parents, family.

What role does this activity play in your daily life?

I consult every late afternoons as well as weekends. It’s a decisive part of my work today, and it will come even deeper into my writing in the future. I have the feeling that the research I do in the morning or the teaching in the afternoon, in the evening, I hear it formulated in another way, more clinical, as if philosophy suddenly was endowed of a piece of land, while it usually does not. The democratic entropy we were speaking of, I measure its effects every day as a psychoanalyst: individuals feel discouraged, crushed by the rule of law that would be supposed to protect them. To become aware of it is already to extract oneself from it.

Is being a well-publicized philosopher influencing your work as a psychoanalyst?

This necessarily interferes, with very different results depending on the patients. With those who already know you, a phenomenon of transfer precedes you. But the transfer, the emotional projections that the analysed makes on the analyst, is almost magical … Even if this situation requires readjustments, it can be very efficient because it suddenly gives a kind of speed to the analysis, since all the work was done elsewhere. Conversely, there are those who do not know you outside the confessional field of the session and then rediscover you in a field of social and, there, the reactions are diverse. As we are living in an era in need of recognition, it seems to me rather to help; there is also a phenomenon of transfer – my psychoanalyst being recognized, I feel myself caught up in this sphere of recognition. There are misunderstandings, misapprehensions, but it does not really matter, they are always entry points into the analysis. This is very true for young patients under the age of 18, with whom it is always complicated because, if some come by themselves, others do it because their parents want it.

The end of The irreplaceable is devoted to education. Why ?

There is no democratic project without an educational project, both at family level and the social level. As intimate as it is, linked to the irreplaceable love that unites parents and children, education remains the major public enterprise. In this respect, the time of transmission is a very special time, a stretching time. The teachers are well aware of this: you only have two hours, you feel that it is ridiculous, but, in fact, you switch to another space-time which is a symbolic space. There is a click, the beginning of something; attention, empowerment, emancipation, critical awareness. It is in this space that the first fruits of individuation arise. But do not be deceived: it requires work, discipline. Discipline is not submission that transforms us into a sheep, into a link, into a follower: it is a skill, a technical gesture, a way of being, which makes us freer.

Cynthia Fleury in a few dates
1974: Birth in Paris.
2000: PhD in philosophy on the “metaphysics of the imagination”.
2005: Publishes Les Pathologies de la démocratie – the Pathologies of Democracy.
2010: Researcher at the National Museum of Natural History. Publishes La Fin du courage – The End of Courage.
2013: Member of Comité consultatif national d’éthique – Advisory board of the National Ethics Committee.
Wikipedia page (in French).

To read:
Les Irremplaçables, Gallimard, 218 p. €16,90.
La Fin du courage, Le Livre de poche, 192 p. €6,60.

Why was I offered that book? Humor and bureaucracy

While reading Hammer And Tickle: A History Of Communism Told Through Communist Jokes by Ben Lewis, I began to wonder why a colleague would offer me such a book. Because I would be a stalinist? Because on the contrary, I should be careful about being too critical? Or more simply because big institutions would always have a tendency to become bureaucracies. Well i do not know and it does not matter as much as the fact I enjoyed reading these jokes despite the terrible background which explains their existence…

In a similar style, I would also encourage you to watch Une exécution ordinaire (in French) [see the IMDB link here], a beautiful and terrible movie. Here is the trailer.


The jokes mentioned below from the book might push you to read more.

What is colder in Romania than the cold water? The hot water. [Page 3]

‘There was another joke that was almost true – true to life. Ceaușescu is very angry because he is not hearing any jokes about him. So he orders a huge mass meeting, and announces, ‘from now on you are going to work without pay.’ And nobody says anything. ‘Okay,’ he continues, ‘and from now on you are all going to work for me.’ Nobody says anything. ‘Tomorrow everybody is condemned to death by hanging,’ he adds. Nobody says anything. ‘hey,’ he says ‘are you crazy? Don’t people have anything to say? Aren’t you going to protest?’ there’s is only one tiny guy who says, ‘Mr President, I have a question: do we bring our own rope or is the trade union going to give it to us?’ [Page 3 again]

After the October Revolution, God send three observers to Russia: St Marc, St Peter and St Matthew. They send him three telegrams.
‘I’ve fallen into the hands of the Cheka – St Marc.’
‘I’ve fallen into the hands of the Cheka – St Peter.’
‘All’s well. Doing fine. Cheka Superintendant Matthias.’

[Page 25]

Anti-Semitism is unfortunately never very far, but as the Jews themselves are often the authors … I allow myself to quote two:

A Jew talking to his friend: ‘My son Moses and I are doing very fine. Moisha works in the Comintern as a black African Communist, while I sit in the Kremlin, at the top of Ivan the Great Bell Tower, waiting to ring the bell for the World Revolution.
‘Well it must be a rather dull job to wait for the World Revolution,’ his friend says.
‘Oh yes, but it is a job for life.’

[Page 27]

A stagecoach full of passengers is travelling from Zhitomir to Kiev when a band of robbers attacks. Their leader commands, ‘Halt. Nobody move. Hands up!’ All the passengers obediently climb out of the stagecoach and put their hands up. One of them turns to the bandits’ leader and says, ‘Mr Chief, you’re gonna take everything from us in a couple of minutes. Let me go into my pocket with one hand for a moment. I have to give something to the guy standing next to me.’
‘Hurry it up!’ he points the barrel of his revolver at the traveller.
The passenger goes into his back pocket, takes out one hundred roubles and, turning to his neighbour, says, ‘Solomon! Didn’t I owe you a hundred roubles? Here, take it. And keep in mind that we’re even now.’

[Page 29]

A classic: What were Mayakovsky’ last words before he committed suicide? ‘Comrades, don’t shoot!’ [Page 50]

Humour in Absurdistan: A flock of sheep are stopped by frontier guards at the Russo-Finnish border. ‘Why do you wish to leave Russia?’ the guards ask them.
‘It’s the NKVD,’ reply the terrified sheep. ‘Beria’s ordered them to arrest all elephants.’
‘But you aren’t elephants!’ the guards point out.
‘Try telling that to the NKVD!’

[page 58]

About progess and innovation [Page 66]
– Who discovered the electric razor?
It was discovered by Ivan Petrovich Sidorov … in the dustbin behind the American Embassy.
– There were two portraits on the museum wall, one of the scientist Ivanov who invented the locomotive, the steamship and the aeroplane, and the other of scientist Petrov, who invented the scientist Ivanov.

A teacher asks his class ‘Who is your mother and who is your father?’
A pupil replies: ‘My mother is Russia and my father is Stalin.’
‘Very good,’ says the teacher. ‘And what would you like to be when you grow up?’
‘An orphan’
[Page 89]

More to come… and here it is (on June 15)

One housewife to another: ‘I hear there’ll be snow tomorrow!’
‘Well I’m not queuing for that.’
[Page 132]

A man dies and goes to Hell. THere he discovers that he has a choice: he can go to Capitalist Hell or Communist Hell. Naturally, he wants to compare the two, so he goes over to Capitalist Hell. There outside the door is the devil, who looks a but like Ronald Reagan. ‘What’s it like in there?’ asks the visitor.
‘Well,’ the devil replies, ‘in Capitalist Hell they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.’
‘That’s terrible!’ he gasps. ‘I’m going to check out Communist Hell!’
He goes over to Communist Hell, where he discovers a huge queue of people waiting to get in. He waits in line. Eventually he gets to the front and there at the door to Communist Hell is a little old man who looks a bit like Karl Marx.
‘I’m still in the free world, Karl,’ he says, ‘and before I come in, I want to know what’s it like in there.’
‘In Communist Hell,’ says Marx impatiently, ‘they flay you alive, then they boil you in oil and then they cut you up into small pieces with sharp knives.’
‘But…but that’s the same as Capitalist Hell!’ protest the visitor. ‘Why such a long queue?’
‘Well,’ sighs Marx, ‘sometimes we’re out of oil, sometimes we don’t have knives, sometimes no hot water…’
[Page 133]

Why is it not possible to control the birth rate in Soviet Bloc countries?
Because the means of production remain in private hands.
[Page 145]

Is Marxism-Leninism a science?
No. If it was, they would have tested it on animals first.
[Page 145]

Khrutshchev is walking through the Kremlin, getting worked up about the Soviet Union’s problems, and spits on the carpet in a gesture of disgust.
‘Behave yourself, Nikita Sergeyevich,’ admonishes his aide. ‘remember that the great Lenin walked through these halls!’
‘Shut up’, responds Khrushchev. ‘I can spit all I like here; the Queen of England gave me permission!’
‘The Queen of England?’
‘Yes! I spat on her carpet in Buckingham Palace too, and hes said, “Mr Khrushchev, you can do that in the Kremlin if you wish, but you can’t behave like this here…”‘
[Page 154]

Why do Vopos always travel in three?
One who can read, one who can write, and one to keep his eye on these two intellectuals.
[Page 158]

‘Hmm’, he says opening the letter, ‘he told me if things were going badly out there, he’d write to me in red ink.’ The letter is in blue ink. He reads it: ‘Dear Ivan, I am having a wonderful time in Kazakhstan. The weather is warm, I have a big apartment and plenty to eat…’
He interrupts the letter, turns to his son and says ‘you see, we are progressing along the road to Socialism…’ The he reads the last line of the letter: ‘There is only on e problem – I can’t find any red ink.’
[Page 164]