On August 19, a headline caught my attention in the opinion section of New York Times : “I refuse the graceful slide into cultural irrelevance”. I refuse to slide gracefully into cultural irrelevance. It was like a compendium of notions that all preoccupy me more and more: what it means to be relevant in an age where we assume that everyone can be, how we evolve as people who think and write, the grace expected of those who age and the fact that we can cling at all costs to a certain idea of relevance. Big file.
The starting position of the journalist, Jessica Bennett, is clear: she will not sink into irrelevance, a place that she does not directly define in her text, but which we can sense is distressingly arid, sad. desert where wander aimlessly those who, like her, have already been relevant, former tenors of the zeitgeist condemned to watch the youngest, the new cool people live and exist. A word lingered in my childhood to describe these poor fallen souls: a has been. It was the worst insult, the most terrible designation. Of all the ragged beggars begging for attention at the city gates, none was more pitiful than the one who had once been king.
There was a way to avoid the most total ignominy by accepting the decline with grace, precisely. Come on, it’s good, life gives and life takes back, I was hot and no longer am, I retire to my lands, draped in memories and silence. Some were known to have followed this path, while others desperately clung to the shreds of their relevance and a few stayed the course, continuing to produce and think with renewed clarity and strength.
But my childhood took place worlds ago, at a time when trends evolved slowly enough that anyone with a little awareness could easily follow them and, above all, take the lead. time to understand them before commenting on them.
We could have believed, naively, that faced with the insane acceleration of the trend cycle, everyone would more or less agree to slider gracefully in L’irrelevance, entire nations of bird watchers and tomato growers, happy to observe the world from afar, in the evening, while rocking on the porch. But that meant taking into account our irrepressible need to see ourselves exist, in no way satisfied by technologies, quite the contrary. From the top of our now connected steps, our “I”s resonate more than ever in the public square. Did we think we would one day read so many articles written in the first person, and in an emergency at that?
Gone are the days of long-considered thoughts and carefully considered words. Can we still allow ourselves to turn our tongue seven times in our mouth before speaking? It’s a long time, seven revolutions of language, the time it takes for a trend to be seen elsewhere, the few seconds necessary for an idea to be recovered and better reworked by others.
The healthy distance once imposed by the nature of things and the slowness of our communications is now a risk: blink and you will be overwhelmed.
The idea we have of relevance, or at least that which the text of the New York Times which caught my attention, requires total adequacy with its time. Now, if we take for granted that the era is passing at breakneck speed, and that we are in a surface economy, how can we dig, how can we stop to look around when we are carried by such a powerful current? No one wants to speak through their hat, but no one wants to miss the boat, a complex gymnastics from which the thought does not always escape unscathed.
We can, however, cling to another version of relevance, one that blossoms in the patient observation of things and the distance that we more or less manage to take in relation to our so noisy “I”. This is where I would like to make my nest, in a habitable silence where we have time to make connections, develop ideas, make mistakes and start again. All doubts would be welcome and welcomed, they would never be chased away, they would have their place at the table every evening, between certainties and intuitions. I don’t know if it’s a place where it’s possible to slip in gracefully, but I have the impression that it would be cool there, and that a good wind would blow there.