[by François Rastier]
Against culture[1]. — Deepening the project of humanism, the authors of the Enlightenment conceived culture in a cumulative manner, in time as in space. We thus owe them the notion of world literature and the very project of the sciences of culture, as well as their historical and comparative methodology. Thus general linguistics, comparative literature, anthropology, etc., were formed far from any abstract universalism, since a culture can only be characterized and understood in the corpus of other cultures, and cultures evolve through constant contacts and exchanges. This is consistent, in the field of knowledge, with the cosmopolitanism that asserts itself on the political level.
We then began to become aware of the relative autonomy of the semiotic world, since works, artistic and scientific, testify to a freedom taken with regard to the supposed determinations of race, sex, nation, religion, era; this abandonment with regard to all appropriation, this freedom allows creators to innovate. The artistic shipwreck of totalitarian countries will demonstrate this Conversely by a grandiloquent and repetitive kitsch, whose failure derives from the restriction of the corpus as well as from the stigmatization of the authors for racial and/or political reasons.
Naturally, the nationalisms of the 19th centurye century have encouraged the questioning of the concept of culture thus extended and we remember the Kulturpessimismus of the Bismarckian era. In their fight against the Enlightenment, Nazi thinkers later denounced the very notion of culture as a means of Jewish domination. Heidegger thus affirmed: "To appropriate 'culture' as an instrument of power, to take advantage of it and to present oneself as superior, is fundamentally Jewish behavior[2] " Derrida transposed this by denouncing the "essential coloniality" of culture.[3] ; he thus reversed, while taking it up again, the colonialist thesis that the West brought culture to the colonized peoples. From then on, a consistent postcolonial thought must "deconstruct" - or even eradicate - culture in the name of the anti-racist fight.
This is the effect, if not the explicit program, of the cancel culture : born on North American campuses, this movement that claims to be deconstructive has spread to the entire cultural sphere, including the media. This "culture" (probably a habitus, in the sense that we speak of "IBM culture") is paradoxically reduced to a neo-puritan conformism that leads to the censorship of entire sections of culture. The rare productions that it gives rise to have been noted so far for their edifying poverty.
Modalities of action. — Now the very concept of culture is being challenged by three other factors.
1/ Postmodernism both concretized and accredited the idea that the beginning of this millennium had marked a definitive break. Millenials would naturally carry an unprecedented novelty that obsolete any cultural tradition, sent back to an idle and compromised antiquity. This discreet millenarianism legitimizes a generalized "deconstruction" and allows some to claim a Nemo before me which prescribes an ignorance that has become militant.
2/ The Internet, at least in what the big firms have made of it, especially those of social networks, privileges immediacy, thoughtless sales, basic emotions, and excludes the taking of distance by minimalist formats and the constitution of groups locked in their filter bubbles by reinforcement algorithms. Social networks have thus become the major place of radicalization of the cancel culture, which hardly existed before them.
3/ Religious fundamentalisms, in their theological-political version, exclude secular culture and the recent rise of Islamism is accompanied by destruction and prohibitions: books of course (Bok Haram means "Books are impure"), music (except military songs), plastic arts (see the Buddhas of Bamiyan), dramatic shows, etc. This extends to entire sections of religious culture: Daesh and Al-Qaida have destroyed thousands of Sufi mausoleums.
In our countries, canonically, a censorship campaign includes these steps: definition of an offended community, choice of a theme of indignation and a target person, dissemination of the incrimination on social networks, insults and threats on the target, pressure and intimidation on institutions, justification a posteriori of the campaign. The consequences range from intimidation to decisions to resign, even suicide – as recently that of Mike Adams, a professor at the University of North Carolina. Death threats are becoming commonplace and sometimes prepare the assassination of the designated target.
The campaign is conducted in the same way, regardless of the identity group at stake. For example, Islamists obtained the cancellation of a conference by Mohamed Sifaoui at Paris I, as did post-feminists in Bordeaux for Sylviane Agacinski. Putting intersectionality into practice, political groups under the union label federate various associations, phantom or not, which collectively take up the accusations: homophobia, Islamophobia, racism, links with the extreme right – never anti-Semitism.
The campaigns target the content of teachers' courses, those in secondary schools like Samuel Paty and many others, and those in higher education, like this lawyer from the University of Aix-Marseille who was threatened with death; guest lectures by people who are stigmatized or simply suspected; finally cultural activities, such as performances of Suppliants from Aeschylus at the Sorbonne or from the play adapted by Charb at the University of Lille.
Censorship relies on laissez-faire or direct support from the authorities, always attentive to social networks and concerned about their peace — but perhaps also on the administrative apparatus' predilection for social control.
The simplest form of control is the issuance of standards deemed inclusive. For example, a professor at Lundt University was refused admission to his course on fascism in the 19th century.e century because the bibliography did not include at least 40% female authors – quite simply because women have rarely addressed this theme.
Other standards weigh on research at the international level. In several countries, any scientific project must meet an inclusiveness heading and comply with the gender mainstreaming even in digital meteorology or cosmology, under penalty of being rejected as insufficiently “gender-aware”[4]Prestigious journals are bending their scientific evaluation criteria according to “gender” or racial criteria; for example, the journal Nature has recently been asking authors to indicate whether they are black.
The same goes for recruitment: in the USA, as in many other countries, you have to fill out a diversity statement and commit to working towards it. Job profiles are published using the generic feminine – and sometimes, as in the Netherlands, explicitly exclude male candidates. Nowhere is racial or sexual determinism on thought the slightest questioned.
Finally, the categories imposed by identity activists and administrative apparatuses serve a presentist and purifying reading of the past, in order to exclude entire sections of culture from study corpuses. For example, it was enough for a tweet from Shea Martin, a young anti-racist activist, to affirm that the Odyssey is "trashy" for this work to be proudly removed from a study program in Massachusetts. The movement #disruptexts on Twitter has specialized in this kind of calls for censorship.
The British Library created an initial list of 300 authors whose work was linked to slavery or colonialism, including contemporary poet laureate Ted Hughes, on the grounds that an ancestor born in 1592, Nicholas Ferrar, had links to the London Virginia Company. Ferrar was critical of slavery, and was not an ancestor of Hughes, so the British Library eventually apologised to Hughes' family.[5], but it nonetheless continues its proscription lists, certain that the work of an author today may be tainted by the putative crimes of distant ancestors.
In France, competition programs have been the subject of protests stigmatizing authors such as Ronsard or Chénier. A petition was launched against the "rape culture" in the sonnet XX of the Loves by Ronsard, where the narrator imagines Cassandra having become Danaë. Now this legendary princess, locked in a bronze tower by a very patriarchal father, consented to a gratifying and contactless union. Another petition attacked André Chénier's "Oaristys". In this pale imitation of Theocritus, a shepherdess skillfully negotiates her future matrimonial contract, before prenuptial frolics crowned by a heterosexual joy that the petitioners could not see. Chénier was decapitated, but his work preserved; for how long? Of course Sade, Céline and Drieu are not indignant at all; but by attacking Ronsard and Chénier, examples are made: no one is safe from virtuous censure.
The hermeneutics of deconstruction had, following Heidegger, theorized and justified the violence done to texts. In the postmodern imagination, it is no longer simply a matter of sticking presentist categories on ancient texts, but of simply rendering their corpus obsolete. For example, in a study of corpus semantics, I had studied the contexts of the word woman in 350 XNUMXth century novelse. The results testified to what today seems an overwhelming machismo; but a first evaluator opposed the publication, on the grounds that my corpus, obviously, did not contain recent feminist texts. A corpus must indeed drive out all the others. It is therefore the whole culture prior to the cancel culture who finds himself excluded.
The future is not bright, however, since censorship also takes place upstream. Publishing houses employ readers whose mission is to exclude anything that may seem shocking to identity pressure groups. In addition, many creators anticipate the future and self-censor. Thus the cancel culture is it preparing to realize the supreme wish of the cultural industry: to replace culture with culture, calibrated for communities which are as many customer segments.
