Once a month, from the pens of writers from Quebec, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current affairs the works of ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec, in collaboration with The duty.
It has almost never happened to me to be fully in agreement with any government decision (what do you want, it’s an indelible defect), but in all honesty, I must admit that the ban on cell phones in class enacted by Minister Bernard Drainville has my almost complete support. Even if everyone clearly sees the media hype created around this law, since many establishments already had internal regulations in force, I think that it nevertheless clarifies a situation which requires serious redress.
I have been teaching long enough (25 years) to be able to see the sad transformation of the social climate that now reigns not only in classes, but also during breaks between class periods. These moments of collective breathing were once noisy as possible, chaotic, carried away and full of unexpected events, but humanly rich, instructive, like a sort of extension of the course and often more important than the course itself, like the margin of a text which would bring the text back into play; they are now silent, morose, boring, heavy as a funeral, asphyxiating. They crush thought in an anemic and sterile present.
As soon as the break is declared, I see the people to whom I was speaking eye to eye just a moment ago, suddenly adopting a completely different attitude: their noses in their cell phones, their heads tilted like absinthe drinkers. of the past, drugged by a machine designed to swallow their attention whole, they vaguely bob their hats, drunk and zombified by a witchcraft against which no antidote has any effect.
What has been happening in classrooms and in minds since the arrival of cell phones is a large-scale catastrophe, which has crushed individual and collective attention in the twisting economy of attention. This time once floating and free for the emergence of the unexpected or for the contemplation of the slow tracking shot daydreaming now belongs to digital poachers, who have imprisoned our capacity for concentration and meditation in their algorithms.
Change of mentality
Almost half a century ago, in 1978 precisely, well before all these machinations invaded our minds, the essayist Pierre Vadeboncoeur observed, in a prophetic way, in his major book The two kingdoms, that “the modern era has seen a radical shift in attention.” The new “mirages,” he says, “have fixed a more captive attention on visible things” (p. 38).
The arrival of cellular and digital technologies, which relaunches the great game of capitalism in a now dominant attention economy, is thus only a consequence of the massive advance of materialism in the century and therefore in reality proceeds of a profound and powerful change in mentality. For Vadeboncoeur, it now separates time into two unequal parts, which largely captivates consciousnesses outside of themselves and leaves only a very small glimmer of presence to oneself.
Vadeboncoeur does not arrive point blank at this breaking point which suddenly makes him our capital contemporary, but on the contrary he arrives there almost in spite of himself, after a slow maturation of a malaise which increases with the obligation to increasingly imperative to live with the frenzied pace of the century. In the great journey supporting the Quiet Revolution that is all of Vadeboncoeur’s work, from its birth to its erasure, The two kingdoms (1978) is located halfway between the prophetic texts of the light years of the Quiet Revolution (The risk line1963) and the more overtly spiritual and dark meditations of the last major collections of essays (Essays on Belief and Unbelief2005; The keystone2008).
At the heart of this chiaroscuro of thought, between two waves of incessant novelties, in an undertow of both intimate and collective shortness of breath, Vadeboncoeur, on the eve of the first referendum, feels within himself the need for a meditative break , of an internal examination of the path traveled, of a stopping of consciousness on itself and makes the decision to “withdraw from the domain of action” (p. 42).
He therefore diverted his attention from social, political and trade union action, which had called him to speak out at the end of the Duplessist period in favor of major changes in society and to get involved in the founding of the CSN. After all this agitation, the moment seemed come to him to let express in himself and in his texts a concern for the soul which seemed anachronistic to him in this period of all the upheavals that was the Quiet Revolution.
Vadeboncoeur therefore arranges for himself a sort of invisible and secret rest housed at the heart of the general movement of things and reverses his own ideas put forward twenty years earlier, at the time of The risk linewhich was intended as a response to the call of Overall refusal by Paul-Émile Borduas (1948) to advance towards a world to come promising a fullness of being. Vadeboncoeur notes, a few decades later, that the once desired progress has indeed occurred, but while forgetting along the way the promise of being which was the heart of this global movement.
Hence the investigation of Two kingdoms on the malaise that torments the essayist, reluctantly caught in the turmoil of a materialist century above all and doomed to impermanence, immediacy and viral modes of thought which follow one another the other by exhausting oneself in the heart of the void — all this decades before the invention of individualist pages on social networks.
The forgetting of Being
We hear in the pages of this collection of essays (especially in the first, crucial essay, Absolute dignity), the Western philosophical theme of the forgetting of Being, this great vein of thought, which runs from Plato to Heidegger and even beyond. But it is expressed in Vadeboncoeur in a more humble tone and constantly brought back to the meditative narration of a simple experience of life and thought testifying to an intimate rout and a waywardness of the time which does not escape however, instead of the common place of O tempora, o mores inherited from Cicero, read by Vadeboncoeur at college, and which poses the essayist as judge of the drift of his contemporaries and of a time that he describes as “bric-a-brac” or “a carnival of ugliness and of extreme stupidity” (p. 43).
His colleagues at the magazine Freedom have, for the most part (with the notable exception of Yvon Rivard, who will be his heir), seen in this book only a sort of conservative reaction to the modernization of Quebec, in particular to its increasing secularization. And it is precisely here that we must grasp the full complexity of Vadeboncoeur’s thoughts, this man clearly committed to the left, a sovereignist and a trade unionist, but also turned towards the spirituality of his college years between the wars.
The simultaneous combination of the laws of these two seemingly incompatible kingdoms has confused more than one reader. However, we must understand that we find ourselves here at the very heart of the author’s thoughts, as well as at the very heart of the genre of the literary essay, which, since Montaigne in his famous turret (“épékhô, I suspend my judgment”, was inscribed at the entrance to his library), this gesture of withdrawal of thought from any form of political or social action to examine more attentively, in great calm, the value and meaning of human life, sometimes attributing to it one value, sometimes another, even if it means contradicting each other in the same sentence, but always maintaining the same freedom of thought.
Obeying this solitary inclination bordering on the monastic, Vadeboncoeur quite naturally finds in his writing what Marielle Macé calls the cabin of thought (Our cabins), to contrast it with the large manors of more classic treaties. Almost without realizing this striking similarity of spirit, Vadeboncoeur readily imagines himself in the genre of the essay he practices as in a “hut” that he would have built “in secret, far from prying eyes” (p . 46), or like “Descartes in his stove”, he says with a hushed humor characteristic of his prose, full of nuances and teeming with cultural allusions which reveal a deep knowledge and long exposure to Western canonical texts.
The turn of her phrase also recalls Montaigne in several respects, especially in the palimpsest of the different attempts at expression which pushed the founder of the genre to often take up the same idea dozens of times until she agreed to let herself be lie on the page becoming completely transparent. We see this pugnacity at work in Vadeboncoeur when, for example, he seeks to circumscribe a subtle phenomenon that escapes him until he finally manages, after several pages, to pin it down like an entomologist a particularly rare butterfly. and fleeting.
The whole paradox of Vadeboncoeur is brought to light here by his desire to turn towards an ancient and forgotten world, which allows him at the same time to advance in modern thought in the form of the freest and most eloquent essay. more free from any agreed form. Vadeboncoeur thus inaugurates the Quebec line of essayists who only enter Modernity backwards, advancing according to the reverse impulse of the crayfish, shelled in its movement of retreat which nevertheless allows it to advance more quickly, to even get ahead the century and its base concerns: “Late, we are early!” » he said with that crooked smile that you have to know how to read to understand the full spirit of derision.
Thus, by not following so much the century’s craze for technological gadgets which zombify classrooms and consciences, we were, basically, ahead of their ban, just as the thought of the essay according to Vadeboncoeur frees from dependence on the present.