Never have the arts and culture been so essential, because the pandemic and the war, because the absence of temperance, because the gradual disappearance of ambiguity, humor and gray areas. Because the arts do that for us, at a lower cost: take a step back, accept other certainties, rub shoulders with other destinies.
The culture in the 2022 presidential campaign resembles the last Cesar ceremony: smooth, anesthetic and absent. One could rejoice at having escaped the self-centered delusions of the most spoiled actors, directors and technicians in the world, who benefit from advantages and a status almost engraved in stone, but one could have hoped for subversion, a step aside, another light on the world. Because that’s what we demand from the arts and culture: to show reality in a different way, to shift the general doxa to offer something to think about.
Thus the candidates for the presidential election do not scramble to support the independence of creators and draw a vision of the culture of tomorrow – whereas streaming platforms are slowly killing cinemas, and it is likely that going to the cinema will soon be a luxury. I would have liked to hear even a reflection on the new ways of consuming culture, on this general sale of creation.
An impossible debate
The only question that seems to agitate the candidates is that of the audiovisual license fee, which some (Emmanuel Macron, Eric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen) want to abolish. Whether for more independence – Macron’s version – or to “liberate” public broadcasting from leftists – Zemmour version – or “liberate” purchasing power – Le Pen version. One could certainly wonder about the lack of diversity of ideas on public radio stations, France Inter in the lead. One might wonder how it is possible that a large majority of the journalists of this station feel the need to go on strike to protest against the arrival of “reactive” columnists in the morning, as if they felt in danger in front of just a contrary idea.
One might also be surprised at the more than disturbing complacency of public broadcasting towards the candidate of the radical left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who, a few weeks ago, doomed Ukraine to extinction and regularly weaves laurels to the worst autocrats, from Putin to Maduro, passing through the military juntas fond of coups d’etat on the African continent.
But the debate is impossible, blocked by adolescent provocations, reduced to the personalities of the candidates, who are very happy not to go further, incapable as they are of proposing anything other than blacklisting, denunciations, fantasies.
Who defends the idea of thinking against oneself?
We could have expected a precise intervention from the candidates on the “wokism”, the cancel culture, the tyrannical inclusive writing that plagues universities. I know well that the cancel culture does not exist for those who practice it, that wokism is a reactionary-conservative-baby-eating delirium, but one would have to be blind not to see that culture is shrinking to the bone, that to question the morality of authors of the past, and even those of the present, is tantamount to obliterating much of the culture.
Thus the incomparable Sandrine Rousseau having just discovered that Proudhon is a misogynist, are we going to witness autos-da-fés of the work of the only revolutionary of the 19th century from the working class? I dare not imagine the day when the troublemaker of the Greens will open a book of the “divine marquis”… Does she know that Virginia Woolf was deeply anti-Semitic? And Charles Dickens a terrifying heartless husband and father? What to do withOliver Twist so ? When we witness the cultural death of JK Rowling, erased in the name of the anti-scientific madness that rejects biological reality, we could have expected a clear position taken by our candidates for the presidential election.
And what about the ever increasing absence of culture in education? From the abandonment of classic works so as not to offend the sensibilities of the baby seals that have become schoolchildren, college students, high school students? Who defends the beautiful idea that you have to think against yourself to grow, that disturbing, radical, ambiguous works should be at the heart of knowledge, to allow emancipation? Where has the promotion of general culture gone? Where are our humanities that allowed the advent of the free citizen?