The French Theorist Meme

In the introduction to Free Culture, Lawrence Lessig makes this caveat about the scope and style of his project:

My method is not the usual method of an academic. I don’t want to plunge you into a complex argument, buttressed with references to obscure French theorists— however natural that is for the weird sort we academics have become. [p. 13]

This is almost boilerplate language these days if an academic wants to write for a general audience. It says several different things to different types of readers. To academic colleagues, it says, “I know I am stepping outside the tent for his.” To everyone else, it says, “I’m plain folks like you, not an elitist.”

I’ve used the meme myself, many times, to negotiate an awkward stance that is smitten with theory but yearns to connect and communicate with people who never suffered through a graduate seminar. I said this in my first attempt to write about the blind flaneur:

The word pedestrian, with its connotations of banality and routine, does not begin to express the satisfactions I experience in this kind of walking. The French have better words for it. The verb is flanare, which loosely means to stroll or to wander timelessly. One who walks this way is a flaneur. In Paris, such walking evolved into an art form. Poet Charles Baudelaire and critic Walter Benjamin were two of its great artists. In their imaginations, an aimless stroll through the streets of Paris became social transformation, the construction of new and subjective realities out of the pedestrian debris of cultural excess and alienation. Whew! Fortunately, you do not have to be a postmodern theorist to follow the flaneur’s art. It can be as simple as strolling down Rue Mouffetard with a baguette under your arm.

This meme isn’t anything new, postmodern, or modern. It goes back to the time of Diderot and Locke, maybe Descartes and Hobbes. It carries with it the Anglophilic cultural prejudice that contrasts fanciful French theory with practical English action.