I read That of Olivier Roy new book The crisis of culture: identity politics and the empire of norms. It’s the best book on culture in years, and if you like Martin Gurri and Bruno Macaes, you should try this one too. This book actually excited me on a theoretical level.
At the beginning of the book you will read the key question:
Are we living in a new culture or, conversely, is this broadening of normativity the sign of a profound crisis in the very notion of culture?
This may be the last solution. To some extent, the Internet drives the process, breaking things up and allowing, even sometimes demanding, greater literality. But it is also a cultural trend that predates the primacy of life on the Internet. Shared implicit understandings are constantly being erased, and this is a key variable driving many global trends.
Roy applies these ideas to current issues of immigration and assimilation (which are now more difficult), to how to understand algorithmic social media, to the self-sufficiency of Japanese culture (a precursor to broader trends), to the prevalence of memes (deculturation personified), by the elevation of folklore by UNESCO and others, autistics doing better in the contemporary world, arguments over reparations (more of a complaint than a real politicized struggle), the EU (extreme deculturation) and our current obsession with food (and also food writing) as a form of compensation for a deculturated world.
Here is an interesting passage among many others:
Therefore, it is not that English is becoming dominant, along with its cultural foundations, but that its use is becoming decultured. This is why the linguistic phenomenon certainly does not reflect an Americanization of world culture. The aim is to avoid any misunderstanding and any need to refer to implicit understandings which are not necessarily shared. Jokes are prohibited and emotions must be expressed explicitly using an emoji with a predefined meaning. Emotion is certainly permitted, but it must be immediately understood by its recipients, wherever they come from, it is therefore “sourced” from a list which, while remaining open, is prepared in advance .
The conclusion of the work serves first of all: “The trilogy of declaration, coding and normativity now seems to structure all debates and strategies on all sides…”
French thinkers remain underestimated in the Anglosphere. It is also remarkable how little Olivier Roy is publicized in the “online world”, all the more reason to read this one and absorb the alpha.
You may remember that Roy wrote earlier The failure of political Islam, which I also found very interesting. He is therefore one of the greatest intellectuals of today, and he is still going strong at 74 years old. I’m still not sure how many of his proposals I agree with, but I have a feeling he’s making real progress on the issues at hand.
