English translation of the French transcript, made with AI and not yet proofread — click a paragraph to jump to it. Show the French original
Popular music and pop music 1:30 The first theme of the first year of the Université Populaire de Saint-Dizier is "P as in People." And we get the impression that indeed, since it's a cardinal notion in Rousseau, we get the impression that the people are everywhere and nowhere, and that there is a lot of talk of opposition, so, are we still within the dialectic of populist and popular, for example.
2:03 Dominique, where is the people? At least the question of populist. I'll answer your questions, but by taking things up again, starting with the musical field. It's a deliberate approach, I think we're getting to the heart of what could be proposed as an answer to your question. We've heard everyone talk about pop music.
2:36 And I say somewhere that pop music has come to seal the systematic takeover of popular musics. Let me explain. And conversely, the word "people," for me, doesn't correspond at all to "popular." I'm not trying to put the Anglo-Saxon language on trial for the benefit of French expression. It just so happens that Anglo-Saxons have been the dominant power in terms of wealth for a few generations, that's all. I could have said the opposite for the 17th, 18th century, it was French that dominated, embodied as the language of the domination of social and political elites over the rest of Europe.
3:09 So where am I getting at? I mean, I'm answering your question in detail and concretely: what did a popular music mean in the past? In what way was the popular music of southwestern France necessarily different from the popular music of the Ardennes, or of Corsica, or of a tribe, a community of Amazonian Indians? Because "popular," in that case, for me the correct meaning, for musics, means a music that can only blossom on that particular ground, that particular soil.
3:44 That ground, let's not naturalize it too narrowly, it means of course nature, the geographical setting, but also the history that has occurred there. So, each music expresses the destinal singularity, if I may say so, of the here and now that I consider as a people. Pop music is the opposite. It comes from above through diffusion, through radio, then television, etc. I hear what's going to become a hit while shaving in the morning, then I hear it again on the radio going to the office, etc. We know how the promotion of something is done, and in the end everyone's whistling it. I mean, it didn't come as an emanation, on the contrary, it came to sound the death knell, because, to answer your question, something is happening in musical consumption today that has never happened before in the history of music.
4:23 When I say today, that's for about the last two generations now. Namely that in Berlin, in Tokyo, in Abidjan, in Paris, in Rio, you hear the same songs between 10pm and 2am. I'm not making this up, the same hits. At the time it was Michael Jackson, before that the Platters, and later on, well, after that I lose track of the references, either myself outdated, or on the contrary found more advanced compared to those who stayed stuck on the Platters. But there it is. There really is a music that came to flatten the rich diversity, the abundance of popular musics.
5:00 Either "popular" means what is the expression of a specific people in a here and a now, a geographical here and a historical now. So it's not enough to open your eyes and look at this people and do empirical surveys. You have to take into account everything I don't see, which is the history that preceded it. The result is nothing without its becoming, as Hegel would say. And... Or else it's pop music, or "people," the celebrity culture, for example, it's the same thing. They're the same heroes of celebrity culture.
5:30 I'll take at random Michael Jackson and Barack Obama, they're both very "celebrity." I mean, Barack Obama is more of a celebrity than Eisenhower was, who was very famous but wasn't a celebrity. Whereas it was Eisenhower who denounced the military-industrial complex in the United States. He was a military man, by the way. Far more progressive than Obama, even though he was from the Republican Party. So, once again, watch out for these words. Peoples, nations, today, are hyper booby-trapped.
6:00 And... I think the dialectical solution, I found it in countries... In Ivory Coast, there are 93 languages. In a very small country, well, small... In terms of population, compared to... I mean, what is it? There are 12 million inhabitants at most. In Niger, how many are there? There are 11 million in a territory two and a half times the size of France. There are 8 official languages. I'm not even talking about local dialects. From French to Arabic, because there are also Arabs in addition to the Tuareg, the Hausa, the Zarma, the Fula, etc. Well.
Rousseau: the people is that which recognizes itself in the contract 6:30 When are we an ethnic group? Or when are we not an ethnic group, but a people? A people, a nation. I mean, these notions that aren't thought through as such. So, let's be clear, all this... well, let's be clear. To bring some clarity to it, Rousseau's advance in The Social Contract is immense and even decisive. I call "people" whoever recognizes themselves in the contract. That is, who is first an actor in the contract, who doesn't just undergo it.
7:00 Who is a founding member of it. Who is, I come back to the earlier question about the same and the other, who is at once governing and governed. Active and passive when obeying the law they've prescribed for themselves, etc. So here I'm establishing a bond between citizens, that of the general will, which is neither one of color nor one of biology. So I don't reduce the people to ethnicism. I recognize ethnicity, but not ethnicism. For instance, I was asked about Africa earlier. I owe it to Africa to have understood that the words designating ethnic groups, for example Hausa, in Niger, one of the largest in all of Black Africa, nearly 50 million speakers, that's enormous for the region.
African ethnicities as economic functions 7:38 The Hausa, the Zarma, there are tensions, and the Fula, especially between Hausa and Fula, for example, but among themselves, it's not framed in terms of ethnicity. When you ask them, it's in terms of economic function. They're not Marxists in their heads. But the Hausa are often excellent butchers, it's a very widespread profession, whereas the Fula are herders. How could there not be a structural, conflictual relationship between suppliers and customers? As kids, we all saw Westerns from the great era, the golden age of Hollywood, with a cowboy and his cattle and herds, in conflict with the "pea-eaters," the dirt farmers, who've given up herding livestock and migration to grow vegetables, which the cattle will eat, and so they put up barbed wire.
8:25 These are structural conflicts. Yet in that case, white Americans aren't pitted against white Americans. So in black Africa, what we believe to be ethnic groups, with origins and biologies, well, fantasies, delusions really, in fact it's often the same people. I'm thinking of the bloodiest conflict ever seen in Africa, poor Rwanda. It's the most appalling massacre, along with the Khmer Rouge, probably, in the whole postwar period, we can agree on that. We see there that it's one of the rare countries precisely where the linguistic difference I want to talk about doesn't even exist.
8:56 They have the same language, the Hutus, the Tutsis. It was Belgian missionaries originally, and then others who took over, who spent their time pitting them against each other, saying, since colonialists always have to rely on one ethnic group to fight another, as the French did in every country. Favor the Tuareg, they're noble, a bit like us, they don't have flat noses, in short. They're proud and free peoples, as if Black people were servile and vile. So there's an unconscious racism. Third-worldism, which likes to think of itself as leftist, often, these supposedly ethnic differences map onto socio-historical functions as soon as you look closely.
9:38 I owe this to Africa, though. You don't say, go find an electrician, you say, go to the Beninese guy, in a street in Abidjan, because it's the Beninese who handle all the small electrical jobs, repairs, radios, batteries, etc. As they say, I need cigarettes, go call the Diallo. Diallo is the name. Diallo, among the Fula, is like Smith among the English. It's a name that emblematizes belonging to the Fula ethnic group. Go to the Diallo's, because it's the Fula who set up the little stands on the ground selling Bics and cigarettes. So what we believe to be ethnic differences, differences of peoples, to answer your question, are actually differences of internal functions within the same society.
Cantonization, Procrustes, and the criminality of abstraction 10:13 That revealed a lot of things to me. Once again, Africa allows us to see magnified the things in which we drown here, often for partisan reasons. So, what does "the people of France" mean? Today we often hear that, "the people of France." It's a notion I quite like, it's true, a people of France. But still, I mean, kings too used to say they had the love of their people. I mean, all that is somewhat confused notions. Between unanimism, on one side, and differentiation, hyper-regionalist cantonization, a Corsican speaking to you.
10:51 Very briefly, a small illustration. I was once talking with a Corsican in front of his villa, which was brand new, and he was planting poplars because they grow rather quickly, to make himself a hedge fairly fast around it. And an autonomist shows up, shaved head, fatigues, and tells him, don't plant that, it's not a tree from around here. I said, I also don't want olive trees uprooted, because it was the Greeks who brought olive trees to us. So we should uproot those too. That's what I call cantonization, you see, and if Corsica becomes independent tomorrow, you'll always find someone from Bonifacio to say that the real Corsican language is Bonifacio's, that it has nothing to do with Bastia's, and so on, it goes on infinitely, like everything of the order of the imaginary.
11:24 That's what causes millions of deaths. It's when we absolutely insist that the real must correspond to the imaginary. There's a myth that expresses this very well, among the Greeks, the myth of Procrustes, who put passersby on a bed or a table, we've never quite known which, and they had to fit exactly - you see the formalism - the size of the table. If it stuck out by a millimeter, he cut it off, and if it was too small, he stretched them. It's monstrous, until Theseus put an end to these infamies. That denounces well what Hegel denounces even in the Terror, though he was an admirer of the Revolution, he conceived of the Terror as the reign of formalism, because virtue had to be in the abstract sense.
11:59 And so heads are cut off like cabbages, Hegel said, they slice cabbages. The terrible criminality of abstraction, in a way, when it holds power, when it leaves the real world to become... I would even say that there is, in the Philosophy of Right, a striking passage where Hegel almost announces the genocide of the Khmer Rouge, when he says that the almost Hindu attitude of contemplation, he says, that when it forsakes contemplation to turn toward action, becomes the fury and destruction of all existing order.
12:33 And I, a kid from Indochina, used to hear the French of Indochina say that the Vietnamese don't like us, they're nationalists, touchy, the Prussians of Asia, they're not good, they're not nice, they're mean. Whereas the Cambodians are gentle, they're Buddhists - a million dead. We must be wary of such things. So, watch out with the notion of the people and all that. But today, in modernity, since the French Revolution, the people are all those who recognize themselves in the general will.
13:08 No matter their origins, their colors, there's no room for hesitation.
