At the crossroads of literature, journalism and social sciences, the investigation is all the more popular as the deciphering of signs and the relationship to truth become more complex. A look back at a heterodox mode of investigation that is all the rage.
Laurent Demanze’s latest essay, A New Age of Investigationopens with an observation: the investigation has become “a real mana-word, which structures the literary field and legitimizes authorial postures” (p. 14). Editorial collections, writer-in-residence projects, writing workshops at Sciences Po: the investigation is omnipresent and draws its strength from the intersection of plural discursive and artistic fields. At the crossroads of literature, journalism and the social sciences, the inquisitorial form seems all the more popular today as the deciphering of signs and the relationship to truth become increasingly complex.
The survey: a paradigm
Rather than proposing a typology of these investigative literatures, Laurent Demanze intends to accompany the “gestural dramaturgy” that accounts for their modes of action on the world. Six chapters account for this partition: “to be surprised”, “to explore”, “to collect”, “to restore”, “to pursue”, “to suspend”.
This list of concrete operations immediately underlines the Perecquian heritage common to the authors studied in the work and the “narrative tension” that gives investigative stories their strength of adhesion or suspension of knowledge. The succession of chapters also signals the methodological bias of this essay: it is a question of breaking with a certain hermeneutic tradition in order to follow in the footsteps of the investigators, in particular by favoring the development of a more “indisciplinary” critical discourse, the work borrowing from literary history, pragmatics, history, sociology or ethnography to understand its own object of investigation.
If this refusal of methodological compartmentalization is indeed a salient feature of our relationship to the literary text today, it seems all the more well-founded here as it is called upon by these heterogeneous practices, where knowledge and documents are offered as materials for thinking, playing, dreaming or disturbing the very idea of a locked discourse of truth.
Following the work of Carlo Ginzburg and Dominique Kalifa, Laurent Demanze returns to the popularization from the XIXe century of social surveys through the medium of hermeneutic narrative or the crime novel. It shows how the social sciences have seized upon, paradoxically, the hermeneutic potentialities of literature as “knowledge of the singular” (p. 42). If the first decades of the XXe century testify to a certain exhaustion of the inquisitorial paradigm, which finds its place in media forms while art and science continue their process of autonomy, we are today witnessing a revitalization of literary forms of reporting as well as the demand for a “disciplinary connection”.
In addition to common objects (news items, everyday uses, culture of the dominated), these investigations present methodological affinities, which multiplies the heuristic potentialities but also the ethical and political risks. Through its proximity to police practices, ethnological, sociological or historical investigation can give rise to colonial, social but also epistemological violence, all pitfalls that are not ignored by the investigative accounts of Éric Chauvier, François Bon, Jean-Paul Goux, Jane Sautière, Ivan Jablonka or Jean Hatzfeld, summoned in this essay.
Necessary reflexivity
The chapters “collect” and “restore” particularly shed light on this risk of reproducing power relations and the strategies implemented by investigators to circumvent it. Extending Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s reflections on the investigator’s modes of involvement in the constitution of knowledge, Laurent Demanze shows how, since James Agee, reporting has moved from “inquisitorial brutality to a writing of scruples” (p. 135).
To the danger of an illusory scientific neutrality, the contemporary investigator opposes the marks of a situated point of view. He also exhibits the asymmetry at work in field surveys and shows how his mere presence modifies the observed situation. Through his demand for understanding, he finally brings his body into play as the subject of an experiment. We find this idea of an empathetic investigator in the chapter devoted to restitution, understood not only as an observation report, but above all as a form of reparation in the ethical and judicial sense.
Rereading the “space of points of view”, a text that Pierre Bourdieu places at the threshold of the collection The Misery of the WorldLaurent Demanze draws from it principles that are as many “politics of form”. Transcribing, editing, testifying and narrating: in addition to the infidelities of rewriting and the necessary reflexivity of the speaker, these operations highlight the requirement of attention to the other, perceptible in the development of a polyphonic space of dissonant voices or the establishment of a sensitive address device.
A collaborative form, contemporary inquiry gives more importance to the research process than to its results. It thus gives a determining role to the reader, encouraged, in Jablonka’s books for example, to “discuss the effect of authority of knowledge” (p. 219). An open, democratic work, inquiry also asserts itself through gestures of displacement of established knowledge: diversion of data (Pireyre), collection from an alternative community (Blonde), publication of archives stolen from the institution (Artières), etc. The luminous pages devoted to these playful or marginal practices bring to the forefront the bias of heterodox writing.
Story Breakdown
As in his previous essays, Orphan Inks And Encyclopedic Fictionsin particular, Laurent Demanze shows himself attentive to another form of negativity paradoxically produced by the writings of knowledge, a negativity that contemporary research does not seek to compensate for, but on the contrary seeks to maintain: that which results from the posture of the amateur.
Dear to Laurent Demanze, this figure of the amateur defies the spirit of seriousness and the heroization that characterize the professional, scholar or reporter. Philippe Vasset, Jean Rolin, Didier Blonde, Emmanuel Carrère or even Pierre Bayard: all are wary of writings that intend to produce positive knowledge by proposing a coherent account of the world. Distinguishing the investigation from factographic or more broadly factual writings, Laurent Demanze shows that the investigator seeks less to guarantee reality than to produce dissensus. Contrary to Ricœur’s reflections on the synthetic capacity of the story, the investigation exposes and maintains the heterogeneity of documents and facts.
This fragmentation of the narrative and these gaps in knowledge are the result of an ethical necessity: maintaining gray areas and secrets means removing the subject of the investigation from the violence of social assignment. Far from betraying reality, as Luc Boltanski (whose thesis is convincingly discussed in light of Pierre Bayard’s essays on detective criticism) would like, this undermining of the plausibility of the narrative would on the contrary be a sign of greater accuracy, since it tends to express the impossible control of a “reality” whose coordinates constantly escape its observer.
Not to conclude
Of remarkable density, given the extent of the corpus studied, this essay resolutely intends to open the field of studies in contemporary French literature, as indicated by the regular solicitation of non-French-speaking authors to support the demonstration and study of works by authors identified first as anthropologists, historians or journalists in their respective fields of expertise. This is the strength of such an essay: to say the end of an autonomy of literary criticism and to extend at the same time its field of investigation.
If a successful investigation is an investigation that is called to continue, we would like to end with a question that the essay did not allow us to resolve and a suggestion for extension. The question would concern the terms “investigation” and “counter-investigation” that seem to be used interchangeably throughout the book: is there a possible distinction, less opaque investigations than others? Could we imagine a scalar paradigm of the degree of attestation of the investigation?
The suggestion for an extension would concern, for its part, the audiovisual documentary, which is alluded to in passing in a footnote (p. 130). The essay shows in a stimulating way how writers take up editing techniques familiar to documentary filmmakers: is the reverse true? Can we observe a literarization of the film documentary investigation?