Against the Pollution of the I

by Jacques Lusseyran

  This ego, this treacherous part of our I, is everyone’s avid concern — and especially that of the educators. In times past, schoolchildren — and even university students — simply were in the wrong when they did not do their work or were unable to understand something. It was their efforts, even their actual accomplishments, that were considered meritorious. Today everyone rushes to protect the pupil’s ego: heaven forbid that it should suffer harm! One formulates universally comprehensible truths and facts of middling complexity, so that not a single ego shall ever feel itself inferior. And since each discipline has a point beyond which most egos are unable to penetrate, these limits are set by decree as the end goals of learning.

  But that is not all, nor are educators necessarily the most guilty: advertisers have taken possession of the ego. Their entire activity consists of seizing upon isolated whims and, as soon as these have been parceled out to a sufficiently large number of clients, of transforming them into moral truths and legitimate and respected rules of conduct.

  What all of them forget is that the ego is not the I, but only the most transient, quivering, arbitrary surface of the I. By giving the ego free rein, the I is put to death.

  I told you that the I is fragile. It is not even something that we really own, a collection of faculties to which we could point with pride. It is a kind of vitality — yes, at most a kind of vitality. It is a force not far removed from its birth. It is a promise, if you will, given to man, that one day he will be as the universe, that one day he will see the world with eyes opened wide, that he will perceive himself and be able to recognize that there exists an ordered relationship, a necessary reciprocity between that world and himself. The I, in brief, is still so little that a mere nothing, as it were, suffices to rob us of it. And now I see it beleaguered and warred against!

  Let us speak of the I, the true I. At least, let us try. What I call the I is that animation, that impulse, that allows me to make use of the four elements, of this earth on which I live, also of my intelligence and of my emotions — yes, even of my dreams. It is, in sum, a force that imbues me with a power afforded by no other force on earth: the power to live without waiting for life to come to me. The ego needs things, the greatest possible number of things — be they money, fame, approbation, power, reward. The I makes no such demands. When it is present, when it is at work, it sets its own world up against the other world, the world of things. The I is wealth in the midst of poverty. It is vital interest when all around are bored. It is hope, when all rational basis for hope is gone. From out of the I springs man’s whole world of invention. And, finally, it is what we still have left when all else has been taken from us, when nothing comes to us from outside and yet our forces are sufficient to overcome the void.

  The I of man, it is true, has never been very strong — saving only in a very few isolated individualities — and our age is doubtless no more deprived in this regard than all that have gone before. But in our day a new fact must be reckoned with: the attempt is being made to drive out the I, to drive it out once and for all so as finally to be rid of it, this peculiar neighbor of ours, this confused indweller within. War is being waged against the I, the most dangerous of all wars, because it occurs to no one to declare it openly.

  WOULD YOU BE WILLING to try an exercise with me? Please do; there really is very little to it! So then let us agree to start today. Tonight, as we get ready for bed, let us stop for a couple of minutes. Two minutes will do; two minutes is a long time to be absolutely still. And let us ask ourselves what actually goes on inside us. What I am suggesting, in fact, is an examination of our consciousness. Yes, but an altogether concrete examination, a physical examination, if I might put it that way. For each of us has an inner space, and we have to cross it to take stock of its contents, just as we should have to walk through a room in a house if we wanted to examine the furniture.

  What we shall find is a confused jumble of images and sounds; sounds that arise and will not fall silent again, shreds of pictures that never succeed in developing into a complete form. But we shall also find things that are even less distinct, things of the nature of impulses, of stirrings that take on the force of compulsion. All this is no more than the ordinary flotsam of a normal consciousness, and there really is no reason to be astonished at it. But it should prompt us to ask an altogether different question: Those scraps of images and sounds, those fragments of desire — are they really my own? Are they really mine, or have they been instilled in me by others? Is it really my voice that I hear in this way, the voice with which I spoke to someone else just now? Is it the voice of my wife, of my children, of my friends, of a living being? And these pictures, do they bring to mind the things I have held in my hands, the places I have visited, the place where I work? That, surely, is most unlikely. Rather they will be scenes from television (even though I watched for barely an hour); they will be pictures from all the signs, posters, and placards that are thrust under my nose from earliest morning on, in the streets of the town; pictures like the ones on the front page of the paper, in the windows of the stores, even on the box of detergent I bought on my way home. As for the voices, they will be my own and those of my family, but never alone; always they will be mingled with other voices, strangely familiar and yet entirely impersonal — those of all the women and all the men whom I have never met, to whom moreover I would have nothing to say, and who in any case are not speaking to me. What am I saying? Of course they are speaking to me! They do nothing but speak to me — on radio, on television, in the cinema, over the telephone, on paper, on magnetic tape. They speak, yet nothing real takes place when they do. They do not know to whom their words are directed. They speak only because they know that in our day words are a saleable commodity.

  My inner space does not belong to me: that is the unpleasant discovery I am forced to make. Certainly I still come across a few personal effects here and there, but rather as one comes across a needle in a haystack. Nor does my inner space belong to these others: I have not consciously made it over to them. It belongs to no one! It is littered with things. We already have automobile cemeteries; I complain about them because they ruin the countryside. And here I am becoming a cemetery myself of words, of exclamations, of music, of gestures that no one makes quite in earnest, of information and instructions, of word sequences repeated a hundredfold without one consciously wanting them.

  Granted that I have been preoccupied all evening. I have not paid much attention to the television, and although the radio was on, I was not listening. As for the background music in the cafeteria at lunch and in the elevators, I really could not say anymore whether it was even turned on. And for a long time now I have not had the slightest idea what all the advertisements are about. How, then, could I possibly have been affected? The trap is there, but it has not caught me; at least, I think not.

  And yet there can be no doubt that all these noises, all these images flashing through my head, are not my own. My I can ignore them; it can look for a way to live without them. But where will it live? All available space is already taken; the outside world has scattered its rubbish everywhere.

  This is where courage is called for: the courage to say what at heart we all know, but what we no longer have the strength to affirm. A human being to whom I give the right to speak to me, without my being in a position to reply, is not a human being at all; he is not a human being, but he affects me nonetheless. Music which I have not myself chosen to listen to builds forms within me; it does so even when I am not at all conscious of listening. And these forms are no longer music: they gallop about without order; they shape me without my knowledge. As for all my armchair picture-traveling — from Harlem to Peking, from Suez to Cuba — I did not go there in actual fact, nor did I even want to. On such trips one does not move by so much as a foot; they are and remain utterly useless.

  Soon there will not be an inch of our inner space that is not trampled underfoot each day. Love, even love (and who would have thought that love wo
uld one day venture out from the most intimate refuge of all?) is becoming a spectacle: the sex act itself is beginning to be performed in public.

  All this would not be particularly serious if men were no more than machines. But it turns out that they are really something quite different, for they possess an I. And this I has its own rules. Or to put it differently: the I has certain quite specific conditions under which it will grow. It nourishes itself exclusively on its own activity. Actions that others take in its stead, far from helping, serve only to weaken it. If it does not come to meet things halfway out of its own initiative, the things will push it back; they will overpower it and will not rest until it either withdraws altogether or dies. All this is quite elementary, though objective psychology would no doubt be hard put to prove it. But what does psychology have to do with it? The dying of the I is a matter of direct experience. And if the majority of our contemporaries can no longer experience that for themselves, is it not because their I has already left them?

  The conditions necessary for growth are stringent. They are stringent for all that lives: we have made that discovery with animals and plants, with air and with water. But the I, the human I, is the most unstable of all our possessions, and the ravages that pollution inflicts on it gain so rapidly that we no longer even identify them by name. Worse, we call them by other names.

  Everyone today, for example, respects public opinion — or at least pretends to. We all know that opinion surveys are well on the way to replacing conversation. People are polled on every subject under the sun. But first they are arranged according to social class, age group, profession, place of residence. And then their answers are published, all neatly tabulated by percentages. One day, we may be sure, there will be an opinion survey to determine whether or not people should still get married; and on some other day slightly further removed (but perhaps closer than we think), to establish whether life is still worth living. For people believe in the answers: they really believe. Among those I meet, no more than a handful — one here, one there — have any inkling that statistics are not answers.

  A majority, an average — they are not anything real! They are real only for the abstract intellect, which is to say for the manipulation of the masses — by which I mean, for the manipulation of their unconscious minds. For the I, they are nothing, hardly worth the computing. If it is not altogether asleep, the I knows that truth never consists of what the majority of people do or say. It knows that truth is what appears at the farthest limit of each experience, of those experiences that are lived through personally and to the very end. It knows that the usefulness, the legitimacy, of an attitude does not depend in the slightest on the number of times it has been held before.

  It seems to me that we live by nothing but numbers, and that we endow each one with the privileges of a god. What a strange mythology is ours! If only we realized that it is a mythology, and a very primitive one at that!

  The average man does not exist. Everyone knows it, and first and foremost the statisticians. Yet it is on this non-man that we lavish the greater part of our care and attention. The other man, the one who is capable of change, the one who could not bear it if he were to discover that he was the average, the one who only says “I know” when it is really he who knows — that man suffocates. Each day he is buried deeper under the avalanche of cumulative events. And soon, if we do not set to work with all the desperation due a matter of life or death, the truth will be nothing more in fact than whatever the greatest number thinks, and the good whatever the greatest number does. For once I, who am never one to advocate fear, say: “Let us be afraid!”

  Make no mistake about it: war is being waged against the I. And just those who have traditionally been closest to the I, who have been as it were its guardians and prophets — the intellectuals and the artists — we now see going over by legions to the armies of the aggressor.

  Throughout the centuries a writer, a musician, a painter, was someone who expounded a particular point of view to the world. His point of view was his own, and not that of others. It was his own with such intensity and power that at times he was able to find his way back to the realm of the universal. Even the realists, though they might try to make themselves as inconspicuous as possible in the face of the factual world, never excluded themselves entirely from their work. But now, for about the last fifteen years, we see men of creative bent whose express wish it is not only to make themselves as invisible as possible, but to exclude themselves from their work altogether. In place of the I there is to be only the act of seeing, only a consciousness to register impressions. Events and even people are no longer to have any relationship whatsoever to the one who sees them or creates them out of his imagination. Is that an honest undertaking? Honest I believe it to be. But can it be taken seriously? Is it conceivable that such an impersonal gaze could be anything other than a concept, an abstraction? When Alain Robbe-Grillet, to take an author from my homeland, writes a novel such as La Jalousie, is he unconnected with his story in actual fact, or does he only pretend to be? Is not the mere act of choosing words, of including certain objects and insights in the narrative while setting aside others, already a choice and, of necessity, an affirmation of the author’s presence?

  But never mind. I have no intention here of taking up the cudgel against the “nouveau roman,” and moreover every creative venture of the spirit is fascinating. What interests me much more than the success or failure of these undertakings is the underlying intent. Artists today are afraid of the I. They do all they possibly can do to avoid its being drawn into the act of knowing. They open the door wide to anything that is not of themselves, anything that in their view does not belong to anyone personally. I mentioned Alain Robbe-Grillet. We could just as well think of the American composer John Cage. For his part, Cage builds structures of sounds of which not one has been invented, but which are all borrowed from the domain of outside noises. And today Cage just as much as Robbe-Grillet commands critical attention. To be sure, the public does not much like their work, but it feels that they bring to expression the essential temper of our times.

  Eugene Ionesco and Samuel Beckett go even further: they stage-manage the disappearance of the I. Ionesco does so without further comment and, if I may say so, quite brutally. With Beckett the I is dispatched no less violently, but its absence takes on the keenness of nostalgia, the unbearable intensity of a physical pain. With Beckett, there develops a metaphysics of I-lessness that seems to some like the promise of a return. Nonetheless, it is a metaphysics of absence, and not of presence.

  Intellectuals by the dozens no longer concern themselves with the content of thought, but merely with its form. They no longer care about the connection between the one who thinks and the things that are thought about, but only about what, according to them, exists independently of us: about methods and structures. And that preference has consequences that can be traced right down into concrete detail. I see ever-increasing areas of pedagogical inquiry in which teachers and students no longer exist but only a third reality, one that is devoid of I: an arrangement of phenomena, a system.

  In short, we are getting ever closer to the mere object, the machine. We would like to forget for whom the machine was made — even when it comes to the mechanism of the universe. We would give much to rid ourselves finally of that cumbersome accident, that stubborn unpredictability that is man, and particularly of that unprogrammable risk that is the I in man.

  TRUE, THE YOUNG PEOPLE PROTEST. For several years now they have carried their protest into the streets. It would seem that they have no love for this world without whimsy, without dreams, without shade, without leisure, without anything that is useless. Recently, and particularly in America, these young people have come to be referred to as a “counter-culture.” I cannot help myself; to me, there is an element of salvation in their rejection, even when it takes on despicable forms such as physical brawling and confusion of thought. They have an I, and suspect as much themselves. They have
not yet been persuaded to the contrary. Perhaps they want to keep it. Perhaps they are better able to do so than we are.

  And so there are barricades in all the major cities of Europe, and on the campuses of all the major American universities. In the same vein — and why not? — there is Woodstock and all the “rock festivals” from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and all the way to Provence. But nonetheless I cannot help asking myself, is all this really a manifestation of the I?

  For if these tens of thousands of young people have a real yearning to get to know their inner needs — the truths that are not for sale and that they cannot buy — they also, and almost always at the same time, spontaneously and utterly abandon themselves to something quite foreign to their I. We all know it: they are hardly off the street before they have drugs close to hand.

  And first in line is that most ordinary of drugs, which we do not even think of as a poison: the collective outpouring of emotion. Personal oblivion lies at the roots of the rock festival. It is staged to heighten awareness of the moment, to break down all barriers, to give free rein to the individual impetus for love of others and the joy of being alive. Yet to achieve these ends it makes use of special incantations, it glorifies rhythm, it proclaims the anonymity of the body, and in a kind of exorcism drives out all individual differences; which is why I fear that such festivals pave the way for the reign of the “non-I.” I have seen joy-drunk hippies in the streets of San Francisco who were so absorbed in their own bliss that for days on end they ignored the passers-by entirely. But their gaze was not turned inward to their true selves, and their music was escapist in its relentless monotony.