I. Structuralism and deconstruction

You can find powdered sachets packaged in cardboard packets in the pastry preparation section of supermarkets, enabling you to prepare milk and egg flan in just a few minutes. The principle is simple: heat the milk, add the powder, pour into a salad bowl or ramekins, and leave to cool.

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The packaging for these flan preparations obviously doesn't represent the product that's being sold, the white powder packaged in sachets, but the product that's being made, the flan, embellished with a red fruit, a boudoir or a cat's tongue. Without shape or color, the flan is hardly photogenic in itself, and requires the extra shape, taste and color provided by the fluting of the mold, the dazzling red of the fruit, the notch of the dry cake.

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The inscription that accompanies the image differs between the major brands that share the market: one focuses on the powder's composition, "Vanilla fragrance" and "Recipe unchanged", while the other, more unexpectedly, more deviously perhaps, highlights what's not in the sachet: "80% milk". The fragrance and the recipe evoke a manufacturing process in which everything is done to ward off the worrying industrial machinery: the recipe is "unchanged", "preservative-free"; in the background, the milk or cream is arranged in an antique stoneware pitcher. The promotion of milk, on the other hand, erases the manufacturing process to establish an equivalence: it's not powder, it's milk, a simple, natural food, whose benefits for children are unquestionable.

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These two sales strategies for the same product are exemplary opposites:

Recipe strategy: the structural model

Selling a powder, a perfume, a recipe, means detailing the product according to its structure. The approach is structural, placing the object in a taxonomy¹: vanilla flan, chocolate flan, strawberry flan, pistachio flan, flan according to this or that recipe, and for this flan a mathematical equation: "4 sachets = 16 parts". The structure introduces a counting, a sharing that is both of matter and of time. At the bottom of the packet, we can read from left to right, in the form of a table, the following apparently illogical sequence: "4 sachets = 16 portions", then "Ready in 5 minutes", then "Keep cold for 2 hours", finally "Add ½ L of milk per sachet". The temporality of the manufacturing process, 5 minutes then half an hour, is placed in the middle of the structure, on the left the division into shares, on the right the sharing of the sachet and the milk. The structure thus appears as a mode of embedding, reducing, mastering temporality.

This temporality is even objectively intermediate, both 5 min and 2 h. Rapid preparation is opposed both to slow preparation, the separate purchase of the flan's simple ingredients - eggs, sugar, flour or cornflour, vanilla pod - and to the ready-made object, the immediate purchase of potted flans in the refrigerated section. This division of the three temporalities (fast preparation, slow preparation, no preparation) itself determines a wider organization of space, the general distribution of departments in the supermarket.

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The structural approach is the approach of the consumer society: in the supermarket, it distributes shelves; in the shelves, it declines product varieties. An efficient approach, with massive returns: the aim is to rationally satisfy demand as quickly as possible². But this demand is not stimulated: the structural organization of the market presupposes demand, a desire that is already there. It does not question the origin of this desire, nor the means of triggering it.

Milk strategy: the deconstructionist model

This is the question that gives rise to the second strategy, the one that advertises and boasts the 80% milk, while the aim is to sell the 20% powder. Boasting about the milk means relying on what will complement the powder to make up the dessert. But there's no longer any question of powder: the words "sachet" and "portion" have disappeared. "4 sachets = 16 portions" becomes "4 flans of 5 portions each"; "One portion (127 g) contains 110 kcal, 5% of the recommended daily allowance for an adult" becomes "Per [ramekin hieroglyph] kcal 85, 4% of the RDA". The structure is now illegible, while the whole emphasis of the message is on a play of container and content, aimed precisely at abolishing the differences posed by the structure: the flan is its mold, the bottle is the flan; the real is the imaginary, the ingredient is the product.

Milk short-circuits the manufacturing process: slightly tilted, the milk bottle floating above the flan has only to pour out its contents for the flan to emerge. The bottle is the flan, both its origin and its achievement. It's no longer a question of knowing how the powder was made, or what ingredients went into it. In a way, the powder has been erased by the advertising message, and is now merely a supplement to the milk, which is the focus of the communication: milk is the noble element, and the dessert will ultimately be made essentially of milk. Milk not only directs the powder towards its fulfillment in the dessert; it also brings the product back to an origin that is not the industrial origin of its manufacture, but the imaginary origin of the desire for this product: milk authorizes me to desire the powder, it moralizes my desire, it assigns to it the virtue of a healthy and authentic product. The most shameless chemistry is thus reversed into natural desire: milk thus reconciles the origin and fulfillment of desire, it designates the completed blank (80% milk) and what morally motivates its consumption (drinking milk).

Supplement definition

This second approach, which displays the milk and obscures the powder, plays on the auxiliary function of this powder in the manufacturing process: the powder is just a supplement; it comes in addition to the milk, it's added, sprinkled over the hot milk; and it supplements what I don't have the time, the energy to really integrate into my milk: the eggs, the sugar, the flour, the pod.

"Supplement" here is taken in the double sense of the word³: as addition and as substitution, as what comes in addition to milk and as what supplements, what replaces other ingredients. The logic of the supplement is based on a reversal: a priori, the supplement is little, it's even invisible; in the end, the supplement changes everything; it's the supplement that gives the product its body, its identity. Here, the powder is initially masked by the promotion of the milk; yet it is the powder that ultimately gives the milk the fluted shape, the consistency, the flavor of the flan.

Selling milk instead of powder implies a critical distancing from consumer society. The strategy takes into account the implicit presuppositions of this society, which can only function on the condition that the consumer's desire is constantly solicited by a return to the origin of desire, i.e. to the original negation of the industrial system that has been built up between desire and its satisfaction, between the imaginary origin of pleasure and the material reality of its consumption.

Milk instead of powder implies a critical distancing from the consumer society.

The strategy of the supplement intends neither to lie about the product (there will indeed be 80% milk in the flan), nor to question the economic system in which the product is embedded (it is indeed still a question of selling, grosso modo, the same powder). On the contrary, pointing out the contradiction between the product and the system (an industry that manufactures nature), she takes advantage of it to increase efficiency. But this efficiency develops at the very limit of the system: by recognizing that it's not the powder, but essentially the milk, that conditions and satisfies demand, we run the risk of breaking out of the system at any moment: what if, quite simply, we drank a bowl of milk?

The two differences

The supplement blurs the structural interplay of differences, but does not abolish it: rather, it is part of a communication and consumption strategy that distances itself from the model in which it nevertheless remains embedded: we know that powder is not milk, that it is the product of a recipe, that it is situated in a given place in the taxonomy of supermarket shelves ; but we play at forgetting this for the duration of a flan desire, we assume in concert a fiction we're not fooled by, we superimpose this fiction, the world it opens up, onto the structure it must make us forget⁴.

Then the reference system built up by the various products spread across the supermarket space, and then, at a lower level, by the ingredients that make up each product, takes a back seat. The process that becomes the product's process of reference and identification is no longer the industrial process of manufacture, with its objective temporality, but an imaginary process of erasing this production: it's a question of returning to milk, of surfing on the original desire for milk, of abolishing all the mediations that separate milk from flan.

The flan enables milk to be fixed as a form, a consistency, a trace. Between the pure white liquid and the shapes and colors of the flan, a new difference is established, no longer a taxonomic differentiation between a variety of ingredients, products, shelves, but a difference that hides itself, that plays at abolishing itself in front of us, that lures us, deludes us, makes us take the product for the origin, the flan for the milk, what comes after for what was there before. The difference between milk and custard does not define a structure, but on the contrary blurs it; even more paradoxically, it does not establish a process (adding milk to make custard), but on the contrary reverses it: custard represents milk; it is the sign, the original trace from which the consumer's desire reconstructs, imaginary elaborates milk, which becomes the by-product of his custard dream.

Such is the flan of theory: reduced to its elementary constituents, its ingredients, it proceeds from structural modeling; inscribed in the process that runs from desire to consumption, it highlights the play of the supplement (powder/milk), the problem of the origin of desire and the dimension of the constitutive process of the object (the trace, the differentiance). The approach is then no longer structural, but deconstructive.

II. Theory and scandal

We have no doubt that the flan metaphor is not without ulterior motives: the point here is obviously not simply to compare two presentations of packets of instant formula, nor even to seriously deduce two opposing hermeneutical models. What motivates the metaphor is that literary theory, and within that theory structuralism in particular, with its deconstructionist corollary, have, since their emergence in the mid-60s, been struck with suspicion⁵ : the structuralist apparatus, the jargon of deconstruction, Lacanian verbal games, produce a discourse that sometimes seems to wallow in illegibility: it could all be just flan. Theory presents itself as flan, it's all flan, we say with this vulgarity in the most polished academic circles, as if there were something adulterated, chemical, in a product that would only be a substitute for thought, in the same way that agro-food chemistry offers mass consumption a substitute for cuisine.

Now this consumption, which has been developing since the 1970s in the United States and from there almost everywhere in the world, is virtually forbidden in France, as if the country of cuisine and literary theory were practicing a kind of anti-cultural exception here.

Books and founding events

In 1953, Roland Barthes published an essay, Le Degré zéro de l'écriture, whose starting point was an interrogation of contemporary literary writing, which he claimed was characterized by the disappearance of the depth and singularity of style. Beyond the hypothesis of a white, stripped-down writing, of a degree zero of writing, which Barthes identifies notably in A. Camus and M. Blanchot, the essay implements a revolutionary approach to the literary thing, what might be called a French-style structural method.

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For Barthes, it's a question of breaking out of the traditional opposition between form and content, style and work, to identify, in the literary field, a structural level, where language and style constitute fixed objects, and a functional level, where writing, in a moving way, establishes the text's link with reality, articulates aesthetic form to the symbolic, ideoliogical content of the work, and thereby inscribes literature in History.

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As we can see, contrary to certain received ideas, this structuralism is not a formalism: it does not reduce literary analysis to a game, to a technical skill that would be indifferent to the stories that works tell, to the social, historical, political context in which they were written, and they are received. On the contrary, Roland Barthes' shift from object (language, style) to function (writing) aims precisely at this essential articulation with content, which must be understood dynamically, in the movement of history: this is the project set out in the final pages of Degré zéro de l'écriture; to write a history of writing.

Le Degré zéro de l'écriture triggers a whole movement. Barthes takes part in the creation of the journal Communications⁶ and collaborates with Philippe Sollers on Tel Quel. In 1962, he joined Michel Foucault on the editorial board of Critique⁷.

But Roland Barthes' first major syntheses don't come until 1965: Éléments de sémiologie in 1965, Critique et vérité in 1966 (Barthes' response to Raymond Picard, who attacked the "new critique"), Système de la mode in 1967. There would be a second Roland Barthes in the 1970s, much more marked by the effects of non-textual meaning, the semiology of the image, the undecidable, or structurally non-modelizable dimension of signifiance, of obtuse meaning: critical attention focused on everything that could not be reduced to a linguistic, differential organization of meaning.

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Parallel to this, Jacques Derrida, who had known Pierre Bourdieu and Louis Marin in khâgne at Louis-le-Grand, taught at the Sorbonne from 1960 to 1964. He befriended Philippe Sollers and worked on Husserl's phenomenology. In 1963, he gave a lecture at the Collège philosophique on Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie, in the presence of the latter⁸. In 1966, he took part in the John Hopkins University colloquium organized by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato, entitled The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, in honor of the celebrated Belgian-born scholar Paul de Man. This colloquium will have a decisive importance in the history of deconstructionism and the constitution of a french theory in the United States⁹. Derrida reunites with Barthes and meets Lacan. Jakobson, Genette and Deleuze, who were unable to attend, sent in their texts. The colloquium attracts hundreds of listeners.

Michel Foucault publishes Les Mots et les choses in 1966. In 1967, Derrida's first three books came out: De la grammatologie(Minuit), L'Écriture et la différence(Minuit), La Voix et le phénomène(PUF). Roland Barthes publishes Système de la mode the same year; the article "L'effet de réel" will appear in Communications in 1968. In 1968, Deleuze published Différence et répétition. Lacan, whose seminar at the Ecole normale supérieure attracts a growing crowd, is at the height of his fame: his seminars, almost all published today, materialize a monumental thought and work. A corpus thus seems to be emerging, which in retrospect gives the impression of a science in progress.

Or, while the epistemological revolution is undeniable, we must be wary of reconstructing, after the fact, the massive coherence of a unified program. It was in the turmoil that preceded and accompanied May '68 that all this was thought out and elaborated: verbal and interpretive delirium and theoretical nonsense were allowed to flourish on a par with the most stale sense and the most serious modeling. Better still: without this delirium, no modelling is possible.

After the excesses of structuralist sectarianism, then the return of conservatives to the university and the anti-theoretical reaction, perhaps even more totalitarian, that this return has engendered, perhaps it's time to consider all this with more moderation and, above all, levity. What if delirium were consubstantial with theory, or at any rate with that theoretical moment, a moment that the history of thought could not, will not be able to do without; if a certain flan of theory was necessary to the theory of flan?

To make this entanglement clear, it's easiest to take an example.

Platon before Socrates

During the summer of 1977, Jacques Derrida stayed in Oxford. His hosts take him to the Bodleian library's cartery, where he discovers¹⁰ a postcard reproducing the frontispiece illumination of the Prenostica Socratis basilei¹¹ by Matthieu Paris, an English Benedictine monk of the first half of the thirteenth century, best known for his work as a historian (continuation of the Chronica majora, Historia Anglorum) :

"Socrates, the one who writes - seated, bent, docile scribe or copyist, Plato's secretary, what. He's in front of Plato, no Plato is behind him, smaller (why smaller?) but standing. With his outstretched finger he seems to be indicating, pointing, showing the way or giving an order - or dictating, authoritative, magisterial, imperious." (J. Derrida, La Carte postale, Flammarion, 1980, p. 14.)

It's safe to assume that the illuminator was no connoisseur of Greek philosophy: Socrates is no more than a figurehead for this book of spells borrowed from Arab folk necromancy. The idea was to showcase Socrates, and at the same time Mathieu Paris knows that Socrates is linked to Plato. But here, he inverts the place and function of the two characters¹².

We know in fact, and our entire philosophical tradition insists heavily on it, that Socrates on the contrary preceded Plato, who was only his disciple. Socrates wrote nothing¹³, Socrates at the lectern, according to this tradition, is nonsense, since it was precisely Plato who, breaking with Socrates' own method, a purely oral practice of philosophy based on dialogue and ironic questioning, put the Master's supposedly impromptu, spontaneous, circumstantial and, as it were, thoughtless dialogues down in writing.

So it's Plato who should be at the writing table, inspired by thought, by Socrates' demon, which with its finger points the way, suggests what to write. Writing comes after speech, which it fixes and thus claims to supplant. Plato supplements Socrates, who would be no more than a name to us if his disciple hadn't put his practice and thought down in writing: Plato's dialogues are the supplement to Socratic speech, as flan supplants milk, as powder supplants flan.

In Mathieu Paris's Benedictine monastic world, where one devotes one's life to copying the manuscripts that compile the culture thus fragilely, precariously preserved from the ravages of time, the magisterium, the earthly precedence returns to the written word. Of the two philosophers, the greatest is the one who writes. But writing is only inspired by the Word, just as the evangelists, for whom this is a secular transposition, only wrote inspired by the Holy Spirit, via an angel, or the Virgin. The philosophical couple (Plato inspiring Socrates) is therefore not just an inverted couple; it's also a transposed couple (The Spirit inspiring the evangelist).

The necessary delirium of interpretation

But the strangeness of the image is not reduced to this interversion-transposition of the couple Socrates and Plato form. On the other hand, Derrida highlights an extraordinary obscenity of representation:

"The card immediately seemed to me, how shall I put it, obscene. [...] Later, others will attempt a scientific and competent reading. It must already exist, asleep in the archive, reserved for the rare survivors, the last guardians of our memory. For now, I tell you that I see Plato¹⁴ hard up Socrates' back and the ubris¹⁵ insane erection of his cock, an endless, disproportionate erection, passing like a single idea through Paris¹⁶'s head and the copyist's chair before sliding gently, still warm, under Socrates' right leg, in harmony or symphony of movement with the cluster of phalluses, spikes, feathers, fingers, nails and scrapers, the very writing boards addressing each other in the same direction. " (Pp. 22-23.)

Of course, we can propose a competent reading, a scientific interpretation of the image, based on the content of the Prenostica, possibly by confronting the illumination with what we know of the readings, the cultural universe of Mathieu Paris. But it's not this scholarly reading of the image, its textual reduction, that interests Derrida here; nor is it, he suspects, what justified the choice of this image as a postcard, then the choice of this card as the outcome of the walk his Oxford hosts organized for him.

The reversal of the respective positions of Socrates and Plato that we would expect today, undoes for the modern eye this exegetical, syntactical reading of the illumination, frees the image from the textual framework that constrains it, autonomizes it as a scandalous, obscene scene. Plato trying to climb onto the back of the chair, practically kissing Socrates on the back, Socrates straddling his writing desk, which he raises between his legs, and finally this bizarre oblong object¹⁷ protruding from the chair (a lever to adjust the angle of the writing desk?), all this makes a tableau as an inenarrable scene, as a delirious joke that titillates the imagination and invites delirious interpretation.

The problem of writing

So this is an effect for the eye that Derrida assumes to be unserious, unscientific, an obscenity that from the point of view of medievalist scholarship is pretty much gratuitous¹⁸. And yet the scene has an extraordinary theoretical resonance for him, for it places the Derridean deconstruction of writing at the threshold of our modern rational culture: the Platonic writing of the dialogues is not simply the transcription of Socrates' living speech; it is Plato who makes Socrates the origin of philosophy, who manipulates and stages his figure in his dialogues. And in this manipulation, there's something obscene, something sexual, even if no Platonic dialogue features Socrates with Plato. The humble Plato, who never develops his philosophy in his own name, but always through the protagonists of his dialogues, first and foremost Socrates, thus sets up a device with exorbitant pretensions, in which the function of desire, and above all sexual desire as the basis of philosophical sublimation, plays an essential role. It is thus amusing to see this desire at work in the illumination, whether the illuminator intended it or rather whether his pen unconsciously solicited it: the image thus figures an erection, and thus affirms the Freudian co-presence of sexuality and thought; it identifies the inaugural act of the birth of philosophy with a phallic hole and proliferation.

Here then is an odd couple, inverted, inverted, held together by the function of the phallus, and by the obscenity of that function. The Socrates scribe at the beginning of philosophical writing lays out, at the threshold of writing, the picture of an image that attracts the eye with its obscene belfry. Through this something in the image that, as it bells, makes a return to the phallus, Derrida discreetly articulates the grammatological deconstruction of writing to Lacanian reflection on the scopic drive, which proceeds, as we shall see, from a similar apprehension of the image.

Notes