Macron vs Wokeness: 1970s French Intellectualism Comes Home to Roost

A speech by Emmanuel Macron from last October became news in America this month when it was reported by the New York Times that he had complained about the influence of American social-scientific theories in French universities. He meant the neo-racialist left-wing theories that want to prosecute ‘whiteness’ in the name of social justice, and that are indirectly giving succour to radical Islam in France. He was also thinking about the drive to ‘decolonize’ university curricula by thinning out canonical white authors who are important to French national identity, a movement that has been underway for decades now but that received a new lease on life in the era of Black Lives Matter. He says that this movement is Anglo-American and contrary to the tradition of French scholarship.

This is interesting because until recently it was common for conservatives to blame French intellectuals for the problems besetting American academia. In 1968 German activist Rudy Dutschke famously called for leftists to stage a long march through the institutions of power instead of just fighting losing battles against police in the streets of Paris, Berlin and Berkeley. Perhaps not directly in answer to this call, but certainly in its spirit, during the 1970s young American academics in the humanities and social sciences romanced French intellectuals like Derrida, Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Irigaray, Deleuze and others. The latter group’s poststructuralist theories were indebted to older French intellectuals like Sartre and De Beauvoir, as well as to Francophone structuralists like Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss, while the overlapping field of postcolonial studies owed much to the writings of Frantz Fanon, a French citizen from Martinique. Both groups were obsessed with language as the medium of human subjectivity; and language, as Saussure had taught them, is structured by differences.

The foundational text of poststructuralism is Derrida’s ‘Of Grammatology’ (1967), translated for American readers by the postcolonial studies scholar Gayatri Spivak in 1976. It argues that Western identity was founded on the mistaken idea that writing is an artificial supplement to speech. It tends to become detached from its author and therefore subject to misinterpretation. In this ‘misguided’ view, speech is a true reflection of the speaker’s intention. People can mean what they say and if you don’t understand you can ask them to clarify it. Despite the fact that writing was valorized over speech in the Enlightenment culture in which Derrida was educated, the ancient Platonic belief in the possibility of finding the true meaning of utterances by consulting their speaker had survived within it and needed to be deconstructed.

Derrida’s skeptical close-readings of Plato, Rousseau, Levi Strauss, Saussure and others tried to show that you can never get back to an original meaning. The author is not just always already alienated from his words; he is constituted by them as much as they are by him, and he contains contradictions. The first language must have arisen all at once, because words, written or spoken, only make sense in the context of other words from which they differ, and to which we helplessly resort when trying to explain them. Though we’re forced to use words like ‘reality’ or ‘truth’ or ‘intention’ to give the impression that we’re talking about something stable and meaningful, to the deconstructionist words like these must always be placed ‘under erasure’. In Derrida’s wake, the importance of constantly undermining your own and other people’s meaning-making became an ethos for many university intellectuals and - often in a dumbed-down, impressionistic form - for the students they sent out into the world as ‘critical thinkers’.

You can see its legacy in the current practice of pluralizing everything: modernities, postcolonialities, orientalisms, masculinities. To use the singular is to reify the irreducibly complex nature of what you purport to describe, and it violently essentialises people who don’t fit neatly within your categories. This ethos feeds into the tendency on the left to split into ever smaller identity groups, and has contributed to the recent proliferation of new genders among the teenage demographic that used to go in primarily for eating disorders. The word ‘iatrogenic’ was coined to describe a disease contracted through medical treatment, and we may soon need a similar word to describe psychopathologies contracted through the education system.

The movement against essentialism exported from France in the seventies has come home to roost, having turned into its opposite: an essentialising rage against whiteness. As Derrida told us, binary oppositions are unstable, whether in deconstructionist readings or due to historical contingencies. The ancient binary that favored speech over writing, was upended when he argued that the main features of writing are more fundamental to how language works than speech as it was understood by Plato and Rousseau. Since then, other binaries like occidental/oriental, white/black, male/female, knowledge/power have been subverted ad nauseam in the name of social justice, by academics trying to survive in a publish or perish economy. They submitted to this economic regime because universities are nice places to work, and pretending to be an activist by writing articles about literature’s complicity with imperialism is in the short term a lot easier than risking your livelihood by refusing to play the game. By the same token, identity politics are much less threatening to the neoliberals running universities than class politics were.

But the law of diminishing returns has meant that while members of the 1970s generation who imported poststructuralism from France have safe jobs and retirement funds, the economic regime to which they capitulated has led to an inflationary devaluing of the academic essay and the graduate degree. This in turn drives the tendency for claims about the oppressive structures of signification we live within to become more hysterical. Whiteness is the most pernicious of the chimaeras today’s scholars do battle with - in journals nobody reads. They also teach students, and through their efforts, whiteness is being demonized in the culture at large in a way that has sometimes resulted in violence against individual white people because of what they represent. Unlike the terms I listed above, whiteness and white masculinity are nearly always spoken of in the singular, yet they behave like a hydra that grows three heads for every one that you cut off. If you’re a white male, trying to argue that you don’t speak for whiteness only proves that you do. As was once argued about subaltern identities, you can never mean what you say or say what you mean. This is social justice that looks a lot like poetic justice, also known as revenge.

Countries like France inherited a host of problems of their own making when their colonial subjects moved to the metropolitan center of the empire as citizens. French intellectual exports are now coming back to haunt them too, and are helping third-generation postcolonial immigrants to style themselves as victims of imperialism and white supremacy in classrooms. This abets the process of Islamic radicalisation and contributes to the growth of hermetic subcultures within France that are antagonistic to its republican values. Not that the French can really be accused of cultural imperialist intentions towards America. It was upwardly mobile American leftists seeking to acquire dissident chic in the academic marketplace who recruited French thinkers to their cause. So perhaps Macron is right to call the woke ideology that is now helping to radicalize French citizens ‘American’, even if he’s wrong that it’s completely alien to the tradition of French scholarship.

His measures against radicalisation in schools and universities are being criticised in some quarters for militating from the right against intellectual diversity, but teachers have huge influence over people in their formative years, and it’s reasonable to expect some scholarly detachment of them. Intellectual diversity is important in a university, and it can only function if the line between scholarship and activism is clearly drawn, which hasn’t been the case in the inbred leftist milieu that the humanities and social sciences have become. There’s no real value in having the united colors of Benetton in your classroom if they all agree with each other about the problem of white supremacy, or if the differences among them are hair-splitting scholastic differences that are not representative of the wider society. When diversity turns into its opposite, then it’s time to try something new, and there’s merit in the claim that Macron is doing exactly what Trump should have done in America by making schools and universities responsible for training in the values of citizenship as a basis for pluralism.

John Tangney is a writer, photographer and podcaster from Ireland. He has a PhD in Renaissance Literature from Duke University and spent a number of years working as an academic in Singapore and Russia. His articles can be found in New English Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Time Traveller, Religion and the Arts, Litteraria Pragensia and Literary Imagination, among others. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube.