En Francais dans le texte*
In addition to the fact that I come from “a family of peasant in the foothills of the Pyreenes”, I seem to share with Bourdieu’s a certain discomfort with academia and intellectual elites. My experiences both in school and during my brief encounters with somewhat elitist circles in New York City and Buenos Aires have really puzzled me: what is it with intellectuals and French speaking? I find this relationship disturbing, and (pardon my French) disgusting as, to me, it furthers a cultural path dependence inherited from a not so glorious colonial past.
Bourdieu discusses in Distinction cultural consumption and a ranking phenomenon that occurs within a micro-level society. In an increasingly global context, I think it is important to understand that the same ranking takes place on macro-level, where cultures are ranked according to an exploiting scale that spreads and naturalizes a post-colonialist ideology. Interestingly, in this text, he touches upon codes and decoding. I always find that translated texts from French authors (i.e. de Certeau, Foucault, Barthes, and even Bourdieu) present an annoying display of “French” which I do not find in texts from other nationalities. As a matter of fact, intellectuals from other first language chose to use French to express some of their ideas. Featherstone argues that “Satisfaction depends upon possession or consumption of the socially-sanctioned and legitimate (and therefore scarce or restricted) cultural goods”. I think this is particularly true when it come to highly legitimized cultural consumption: try reading a Russian novel without speaking French, you will probably have to skim through some of the book because most editors refuse to translate French from the original text.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with intellectuals – or anyone else for that matter - speaking French, learning French, writing in French. What I think is wrong is that by doing so they contribute to the construction of a discourse where nationalities are ranked on an absolutely subjective hierarchical ladder, and where being French for an academic is so much better than being from any other nationality, that the mastery of the language of many thinkers will make an argument so much stronger. Why? Because in my opinion, this rationale gives grounds to, and naturalizes another one, more viscous, more discriminatory and more excluding that we can see everyday in the media.
After the tragedy in Denver this summer, the international media thoroughly covered the tragic shooting. The American victims were glorified and grieved over by the entire international community through special reports and editions on television. In contrast, the 3,000 non-combatant civilians killed in Afghanistan by American drones were barely mentioned in the press, only described as a “necessary collateral damage”. The intensity of the media’s reaction to the event in Denver compared to the lack of concern for the deaths in Afghanistan shows the role of media in the allocation of appropriate or inappropriate grief over the loss victims by creating mediatic visibility or invisibility, coverage or silence, of an event because of a discourse that ranks nationalities.Bychoosing silence or exposure, the media is orchestrating the our attention to such a degree that we are not able to recognize what has been lost and we are inhibited to witness what is going on in the world. We become alienated to a point where we forget that we are a part of the world we evolve in, we tend forget that nationality has not concrete meaning, it is merely a social construction, and we become less likely to challenge the social order.
To me, it often close to revolting to see that subversive men and women cave in and subscribe to such an exploiting ideology, but perhaps it is only my interpretation of events that tease my own sensibilities.
*In French in the original texte, which is a too common footnote in Russian novel.
