BB: In the light of what you're saying, do you think that Adorno could give an explanation of the title of his book?

JFL: No, I don't think he could. I think that his title…how can I put it? I think his title is bad but that his book is very good. And that's precisely because it isn't at all a theory and has nothing to do with aesthetics. This is the line of thought into which I'd like to situate this work, and I'd want it to be a kind of prolongation of what's indicated in Adorno's work. But, you know, whenever I reread Adorno, I always see that his approach is negative, and almost always cynical, which is the measure of the breadth of his despair. It's the measure of the strength of the attachment still to be felt for modern aesthetics, the measure of the strength of the attachment still to be felt for modern aesthetics, the measure of a refusal to go into mourning for the final death of it. With Adorno we're within the sphere of melancholy. You can't forget the context in which that book was written. The most admirable parts of German art were being burned in public, and the most intelligent parts of literature and the arts were being persecuted. We no longer live under that kind of despotism, but today we can see we live under a kind of democratic despotism of the media, which is of course, something very different. And so, even though there's nothing that has been forgotten, we have to attempt to work our way into the philosophy of contemporary art by completely disengage in ourselves from romantic aesthetics. And so this reflection on art begins for me with Discourse-Figures as a way of starting to palliate-or rather to supplant - the political thinking of the present day.

Basically, the most essential question of all for me, is the question of all, for me, is the question we've just been talking about: "What do we do if we no longer have the prospect of emancipation? What sort of line of resistance can we have?" When Zola took part in public affairs, he knew exactly what he was talking about, he was aware of his "prospects of emancipation". The same thing was true for Voltaire, and for Fourier, who was also a political thinker, and it was still true for Sartre, even though Sartre was wrong. We intellectuals are no longer capable of any kind of real intervention. And so what is our line of resistance if it's no longer a question of a prospect of emancipation? I think that it's something that's very closely connected to artistic activity, or philosophico-artistic activity. It's something that has to be thoroughly explored by asking ourselves what's happening at the level of time, space, and the social community in contemporary art. That's what I've been trying to explore by means of these various small texts that I write on art, and sometimes of music, when I feel sufficiently audacious. I'd like to write a commentary on Paris Texas and say that it's an Alice in the Big City, which is not poor art anymore.

BB: Let's go back to your exhibition "Les Immatériaux" and to the concept behind it.

JFL: We arbitrarily and quite purposely created a kind of filter, since there were so many things to exhibit that our very first worry was about how to go about dealing with it all. There was never any pretense of doing some sort of universal exhibition. Universal exhibitions are no longer possible, and that's more than just a question of budgeting. And so what were our criteria of selection? They were on three different levels. First of all, we wanted to exhibit things that inspire a feeling of incertitude: incertitude about the finalities of these developments and incertitude about the identity of the human individual in his condition of such improbably immateriality. That's a criterion of selection that's concerned with the philosophical stakes of the exhibition. Then we obviously had to give attention to the arrangement of the show in terms of time and space. And here we appealed to two principles: no fancy mouldings and no pedestals. We didn't want still another re-evocation of a gallery or a salon, by which I mean an arrangement of rooms in a Royal Palace as designed by the king. We wanted to avoid this way of squarely defining things and we had to discover a more fluid and immaterial system for the organisation of space.

So, instead of walls, we'll have a system of webbings that will be stretched from floor to ceiling, and the ways in which they're lighted will permit us to vary the distances that the eye can cover and to modulate the indications that ought to be followed, but without being prescriptive, since many of the sites we'll be building will be in the form of intersections that allow one then to go off in any number of directions. These webbings will be grey, and they'll change in quality according to the ways in which they're lighted, and that will also determine whether or not they are more or less opaque. Here again you can see that I'm still within the tradition of the modern. Something else that we've decided to realise for the exhibition is a system of portable radio guides. Each of the visitors will have a kind of Walkman, and even though they won't have to tune into different stations, they'll move from one broadcast to another as they walk through the exhibition space. The broadcasts will cover several sites at once. This is a way of permitting me to create a soundtrack of commentaries that won't even really be commentaries at all, and the textual element included in the visit to the show will be a considerably more forceful presence than it usually is; there will also be music and other sound effects. I'm particularly concerned with turning the exhibition itself into a work of art, and I imagine that that may cause some discomfort for Daniel Buren.

BB: How do you mean?

JFL: You'll remember that he once had a complaint to make about one of the Documenta exhibitions, and he remarked, "What they're exhibiting isn't the works of art, but the exhibition itself." There's a way in which that's what we'll be doing here, even though I'm not at all concerned with asking myself if I have the right to declare myself an artist. I simply feel that there are things that can be done at the level of the physical articulation of the exhibition, and we've decided to try to do them. Something else, for example, is that any art objects that may find a place next to the other elements of the exhibition will have to be compatible. We also intend to exclude works that are expressionist, neo-expressionist, or "transavantgardist". We intend to be quite "strict" in our attempt to detect the existence of a postmodern sensibility, which isn't at all the sort of thing to which the term is generally applied in the field of the arts.