Interview with Jacques Attali

Abstract

Jacques Attali is one of the most influential economic theorists in the French Socialist Party today and a close personal adviser to President Mitterand. He is also a distinguished scholar, the author of a dozen books whose subjects range from political economy to euthanasia and music. As varied as these books may seem, share a common focus and a common problematic: the sense that something new is in full emergence all around us, a new economic order in which new forms of social relations can be discerned in the interstices of the old, and of which new forms of cultural production can often give us the most precious symptoms, if not the prophetic annunciation. Attali's varied and complex reflections thus rejoin, from a unique perspective, the now widespread attempts to characterize the passage from older forms of capitalism (the market stage, the monopoly stage) into a new media and multinationalform, a passage which can be marked on the technological level as a shift from the older forms of industrial production of the second Machine Revolution to the newer cybernetic, informational, nuclear forms of some properly Third Machine Age. The theorists of this new great range from anti-Marxists like Daniel Bell to Marxists like Ernest Mandel (whose work Late Capitalism remains the most elaborate and original Marxian model of some new stage of capital). For the most part, such efforts including those of French post-structuralists like Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard have necessarily remained historicist, in the inevitable positing of distinct stages of social development, whether the sequence of the latter is formulated in terms of evolutionary continuities or of breaks, ruptures, and cataclysmic mutations. Not all of Attali's own work will escape this temptation, but it is worth noting that one of his most recent syntheses, called les trois mondes (The Three Worlds), seeks to de-linearize the description of distinct social stages by modeling each in terms of a distinct $world of representation such that all three survive together in our own time, in a kind of synchronic overlap of the residual and emergent. The three worlds of Attali's title are not the more familiar geographical zones of the system (the third world positioned between the capitalist and the socialist countries), but rather three distinct theoretical paradigms (ultimately generated, to be sure, by three distinct moments of history and of social organization). The first of these paradigms is that of regulation, conceived in mechanical terms of determinism and reversibility a theory ultimately linked to the classical market. The second is that of production, whose strong form is clearly classical Marxism. The paradigm Attali calls that of the organization of meanings and signs, and his varied proposals for describing this new moment in which we find ourselves will be sufficiently indicated in the course of the interview. The positioning of Marxism as an older paradigm clearly marks Attali's affinities with certain post-structuralisms and post-Marxisms at the same time that it expresses the new Socialist Party's complicated relationship to its Marxian tradition. But unlike some of the more complacent celebrations of post-industrial society in the United States, Attali, as an economist in a socialist France in many ways the passive victim of a new (American) multinational order and of a world-wide economic crisis that transcends the old nationstates, remains an essentially political thinker intent on discovering and theorizing the concrete possibilities of social transformation within the new system. His Utopianism is thus materialistic and immanent, like that of Marx himself, who observed, of the revolutionaries of the Paris Commune of 1871, that they have no ideals to realize but to set free the