[by Dania Tchalik]
A video claiming to "deconstruct" the "reactionary" discourse of my intervention - and by extension all the contributions to the "colloquium of shame" (sic) held on January 7 and 8 at the Sorbonne – has been circulating on YouTube and social networks since yesterday.
I will not return to the accusations of musical Zemmourism (is there a choreographic or pictorial Zemmourism?) and sexism against a critique, conducted in the name of gender equality, of the neo-feminist, separatist and identity-based reading of the history of music. I will not insist on the vulgarity of the tone and presentation, the manipulation techniques specific to the genre of the video of debunking which appeals to emotion and dispenses with going to the source, or the countless misinterpretations due to ideological blindness and the inability – always more striking when it is predictable – to perceive the second degree. No, I am not criticizing left-wing thought in itself but what it has too often become: a posture connected, moral and hypocritical justifying all regressions. No, wokeism is probably less of an imminent danger for Western Civilization (capital letters are required) than a tool for bringing consciences into conformity and a career accelerator, and its register of expression is more comical than tragic – at least, as long as it is not in power.
In short, I cannot thank the author enough, social justice warrior larger than life, to have confirmed – albeit unwittingly – the whole of my reasoning. The rare passages touching on the fundamental questions nevertheless offer me the opportunity to recall some principles of a free artistic education.
1. There can be no other "counterpart" to the financing of conservatories than the quality of the teaching provided. None diagram national orientation, any equality charter, no school project… in short, no political injunction external to the logic of the respective disciplines can influence the content of teaching and justify a breach of the neutrality of the civil servant in the exercise of his functions. This is why it is preferable that the supervision of these establishments and their staff be national, which would ensure their sustainability (one thinks of the current dismantling of the music schools of Blaye and Wissembourg) and that artists play a major role in it: it is up to the administration to place itself at the service of art and not the other way around.
2. The committed artist, if possible of his own accord rather than under social and institutional pressure, is the one who relies on his art to justify his commitment, rather than the one who relies on his commitment to justify his art.
3. The democratization of music consists of facilitating material access to artistic education without modulating its nature according to ethnic or social criteria, and ensuring social justice and gender equality, hic and nuncIt does not consist of a stereotypical denunciation of "bourgeois culture" by which no one is fooled any more, nor of a victimization of categories of the population without their knowledge, and even less of a vain rewriting of history aimed at making up for discriminations that occurred in the past.
4. A school that emancipates the individual must have a conservative dimension (Arendt) and be sheltered from the noise of the society that surrounds it: it is at this price that it manages to anticipate the doxas of its time, the contributions of the past fertilizing the promises of the future. On the contrary, a school in a hurry to adapt to the "movements of society" and idolizing the present shows itself as the factory of conformism and as such, it is falsely progressive and authentically conservative.
5. We will deduce from this on the political level that wokeism, namely the relativization, or even the systematic questioning of common-sense social and cultural frameworks and criteria of judgment in the name of minority rights, does not emancipate the individual but on the contrary, imprisons him in a statistical straitjacket disconnected from reality. It then constitutes the counterpart of governance by numbers applied to the economy, formerly in the framework of real communism (in the USSR, positive discrimination was also practiced), and now in the technoliberal framework. The same is true for pedagogism, which bans the richness of disciplinary content in favor of a mass management of flux and stocks through standardized procedures and covert management of behavior. A consistent criticism of these excesses is in no way specific to the extreme right but constitutes the common thread of republican thought, concerned with preserving a common framework and a guarantee of effective consideration of the interests of all, in particular the weakest.
