In former times much was made of a system of ideas, known as culture, whose inculcation was expressed in the form of ritual or profane practices. Culture ruled custom. An unstated consensus viewed it as the perfect measure of a civilization that prided itself on its religious and moral prejudices, its pacific and warlike proclivities, its knowledge, art, science, public buildings, libraries and museums.
Every schoolchild was supposed to acquire culture as a way of marking him or herself off from the ignorant rabble, meaning manual workers, whose subjugation the intellectuals were charged with ensuring, either by justifying their abject submission or by leading them by the hand toward “bright tomorrows.”
By acknowledging that colonized peoples once deemed primitive did in fact possess a culture, the progressivism of the industrial age granted them a form of existence which, as though by divine grace, transcended their status as mere beasts of burden. In the pantheon of its universal imperialism, bourgeois ideology in a way assigned Dogon or Inuit culture a proletarian character, thus bestowing a dignity on the exploited class that it simultaneously withheld by reducing it to the lowest level of survival.
Culture became a weapon. It won its spurs by virtue of its response to the assault upon it by the horde of German intellectuals exalting brute force, or similarly that of academic Maoists glorifying the exhaustion produced by manual labor and obliging students to subject themselves to it en masse.
Everything argues for the continued defense of culture, especially considering that in the market where slaves with doctorates pursue their deplorable careers, Shakespeare and Dante are as nothing alongside the communications techniques that make it possible to sell—and to sell oneself.
All the same, sooner or later we shall have to face culture’s ambiguity, even its false pretenses, because it is ultimately nothing but a scheme for commandeering knowledge.
Culture is surely the fruit of the alienation at the root of humanity’s separation from itself, of that transformation of the life force into labor force which gives rise to the division between intellectual and manual work, gives mastery over the body to the head, and places terrestrial matter under the yoke of the mind.
Being a system of thought separated from life—or, in other words, an ideology—culture is willy-nilly a tool of domination: it should therefore hardly surprise us that it carries within itself the seeds of the kind of populism that scorns it.
Culture is a confined space, a conceptual prison that must be opened. How can we be freed from its alienating power without freeing what it has trapped in its drive to domination?
Learning to live demands a vital passion: curiosity, the desire to learn, the thirst for knowledge. This vitality is gloriously evident in the child’s wonderment, just as long as it is not captured and sterilized by a taste for power inculcated by a pedagogy of predation.
The desire for knowledge inhabits the child and anyone who has preserved their childhood within them. My wish is that everyone should become wise out of desire, not to satisfy a need to dominate. What greater satisfaction could there be than that felt by anyone who knows that a generous dispersal of their knowledge reaps a rich harvest.