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Music to be made

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There are two musics (at least so I have always thought): the music one listens to, the music one plays. These two musics are two totally different arts, each with its own history, its own sociology, its own aesthetics, its own erotic; the same composer can be minor if you listen to him, tremendous if you play him (even badly). (Barthes, 1992, p.231)

The dichotomy presented by Barthes is interesting for PaaLabRes because it places music in an activity to be done whereas it is often only presented as a product to listen to. We will try to understand how important this distinction is for the diversity of music practices.

The music to be listened to is not very difficult to define: it is what we generally call « Music ». This is the implicit definition found in the (many) aphorisms on music:

« Music drives out hate in those who are without love. » Pablo Casals

« Without music, life would be a mistake. » Friedrich Nietzsche

Music is here no more than a pure sound product with which we are confronted, which could only exist for the ear. As a product, music is adorned with extra-ordinary virtues, even with magical powers that can go as far as saving man (it works even better with « the poor fellows » generally considered as cultural sinners). Even in the attempted distinction proposed by Duke Ellington – « There are only two kinds of music: the good and the bad » – music is still conjugated in the singular, because reduced to the one function: to be listened to.

But the consequence of this is that to be listened to, the music must be well played. Music to be listened to – and I do not speak here only of classical music – has to be made by specialists, played by specialists who have learned to do it with specialists, thereby excluding, without realizing it, a common practice of music.

Even if one thinks of the multiplicity of music in as many different musics as there are styles (rock, jazz, classical, variety, experimental, etc.), these musics always have in common the fact of being well played.

Yet, in Barthes’ quote, the most important point lies in the parenthesis “(even badly)”! The difference between music to be played and music to be listened to is contained entirely in this parenthesis. Barthes defines it as « the music that you or I can play, alone or with friends, with no other audience than its’ participants (that is to say, safely removed from any risk of theatricality, any hysterical temptation) ».

For us, we prefer to use the term « music to be made » instead of « music to play », it retains the sense that Barthes attributes to it in the last sentence of his article: “What is the point of composing, if it means confining the product to the concert hall or the loneliness of radio reception? To compose, at least by propensity, is to give to be made, not to give to hear but to give to write.” “To make” seems to us less symbolically weighty than “to play” (obviously, music is always played!) and than “to write”. Although it points to the idea of a fabrication, the verb “to make” implies above all the idea of an ordinary, banal, or common act.

In order to exist, the music to be listened to, however, must be produced in extra-ordinary and spectacular conditions: the concert. The systematization and sacralization of concert practice in the nineteenth century made us conceive all music as a music to be listened to, by putting the communication relationship between a producer and a receiver at the center of the device. The room and the moment of the concert were exclusively turned towards the activity of listening. The advent of recording has further amplified – in both senses of the word – this relationship to music. The only difference between the concert and the recording lies in the temporal and spatial separation of the places of production (concert hall, recording studio, etc.) and reception (living room, car, etc.). Recording, thought of as fixing the playing and affording a possibility of infinite re-listening, has made the ear even more demanding of a product well played, even « perfect » which eliminates possible imperfections of the playing (just notice the time spent and efforts made in re-recording, editing and mixing a recording to polish the sound product). But what one gains in musical « purity » or « quality », one could well lose in the diversity of practices…

In the media, music is currently often presented as a recorded/listened to music. For example, a widely published article, ‘French people ready to sacrifice their TV rather than music’, resuming a recent survey, presents music as a product whose consumption, that is to say by listening, is essential to the proper functioning of a home. d’un foyer. However, it’s not just about « music to listen to » in this article. The last sentence quotes with astonishment, practices that can fall into our category of « music to do »:

More fun, 10% of respondents admit to being surprised by their loved ones dancing naked, 23% indulging in » air guitar « , or 30% training in front of a mirror.

But the way of presenting these practices marks them directly with the stigma of a certain inadmissibility…

If music to listen to is above all a product, whose focus on the quality to be achieved hides the social, ecological and political conditions of its production, music to be made is primarily a social activity whose end can not justify the means. Mistaking one for the other, to assume they are the same, means the musical death of the latter.

Singing in the shower, playing in your room, singing loudly over a radio, scratching a guitar by the fire with friends, playing a piece of Bach badly, playing a quartet with only three instruments, and so on, are all invisible practices because « unspeakable » – we can not call them « music » – especially where musicians who produce music to listen to are taught: the conservatory. We should therefore be able at least to specify the circumstances of the production of « music », even more so in the places where it is taught, in order to avoid any « misunderstanding »,[1] so as not to take one practice for another. It is certainly this that gives rise to the misunderstanding of what « making music » means: the use of the substantive « music » without explicitly attaching the circumstances of its production.

To illustrate explicitly the circumstances of production of the object « music », let us try to finish by clarifying what is generally implied in the expression « to learn music » in the conservatory:

Learning music,
Is to learn classical music

that is to say, learning classical music in a classical way
that is to say, learning with others to read a score written in the Western language stabilized in the nineteenth century with a music theory teacher and learning to play alone a modern musical instrument of equal temperament with a teacher of the same instrument of modern music of equal temperament to be able to then rehearse with other musicians who received the same training, but on another modern musical instrument of equal temperament with a teacher of this modern instrument of equal temperament, to form the set that corresponds to the nomenclature of the piece of Western art music composed by a genius between 1685 and 1937 in order to interpret this under the direction of a conductor as correctly as possible on the raised stage of a concert hall adapted to receive a public also adapted.

If this definition has at least the merit of being clear, perhaps allowing one to avoid some misunderstanding, it could nevertheless in the long run prevent any practice of classical music by displaying too crudely its conditions of production, today implicit but nevertheless very real, as a director of one Conservatory says: “A musician who comes here to simply play in his room, ultimately has no place here.” So we may be interested in maintaining the misunderstanding and in being not too explicit about what is expected so as not to discourage those who play in their room … and who do not particularly want out. However, and without going as far as an impossible description of the specific conditions of each practice, one could nevertheless wonder a little more about the different models of practice that exist and thus not limit oneself to using only the categories of practice provided by the institutions and their actors. By developing practices centered as much on the music « to be made » as on the musical product « to listen to », or to put it differently on music as a social activity, as much as on an artistic practice separated from everyday life, one could give the possibility of a legitimate existence to practices other than those aimed at an endless perfection induced by the practice of performance on stage, even if these other practices remain in their room.

Samuel Chagnard – 2016
Translation Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles and Nancy François

For further reading:

Barthes, R., « Musica practica », L’obvie et l’obtus, Essais critiques, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1992, p. 231-235.

Bourdieu, P. & Passeron, J.-C. (1965). Language and relationship to language in pedagigical situations, in Rapport pédagogique et communication, Bourdieu, P., Passeron, J.-C., & Saint Martin, M. de., Paris La Haye Mouton.

Bozon, M., Vie quotidienne et rapports sociaux dans une petite ville de province : la mise en scène des différences, Lyon, Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1984.

Chagnard, S., (2012) Modèle de pratique et pratique du modèle en conservatoire – Un musicien, c’est fait pour jouer. Master’s research essay under the direction of G. Combaz – Institut des Sciences et des Pratiques de l’Education et de la Formation – Université Lumière Lyon 2.

Lahire, B., « Logiques pratiques : le “faire” et le “dire sur le faire” », in L’esprit sociologique, Textes à l’appui, Paris, Éditions La Découverte, 2005, p.141-160.

Levine, L. W. (2010). Culture d’en haut, culture d’en bas : l’émergence des hiérarchies culturelles aux États-Unis. Paris: Éditions la Découverte.

 

[1]. ”The gravity of the linguistic misunderstanding in the pedagogical report stems from the fact that it has to do with the code. (…..) Learning means acquiring knowledge and inextricably, acquiring a knowledge of the code by which this knowledge is likely to be acquired. In other words, the code can only be learned here through the less and less clumsy décryption of the messages. No doubt this is the logic of all real learning either in the case of diffuse socialization or acculturation, but is not pedagogical communication entrusted precisely to technicians of learning whose specific function is to work continually and methodically at minimizing misunderstanding about the code? » [Bourdieu & Passeron, 1965, p. 15]

 

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Praxis (English version)

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Today political discourse articulates between the opposing concepts of poiêsis, which refers to the production of an object or a work, and praxis, which entails an action with no other purpose than itself.
According to H. Arendt, modernism is dominated by the created work or object, particularly through an infinite manufacturing of items and tools, where the concealed processes of elaboration are considered a means to an end, the final product taking precedence:

The implements and tools of homo faber, from which the most fundamental experience of instrumentality arises, determine all work and fabrication. Here it is indeed true that the end justifies the means; it does more, it produces and organizes them. (…) During the work process, everything is judged in terms of suitability and usefulness for the desired end, and for nothing else.1

Meanwhile, all practices today have, in one way or another, to confront forms of storage of information provided by electronic technologies, which come to subtly change everything: recordings, disks, electronic memory… the fixity of electronic storage of information has the tendency to create a general reification of both works written on scores and ritualized actions fixed in the collective memory of the participants. A recording definitively fixes a particular moment, but in this very process of solidification of real life, less now than ever before may it pretend to represent the authentic tradition: at a certain moment certain individuals have done this, it is just one example among others of a type of practice. Moreover, the digitalization of memory allows very easily to pirate them and to modify them for one’s own benefit. Recordings fix real events, but they are precarious in their virtuality. In order to escape commoditization, there is no other choice than to use some cunning in making sure that each event would not be the simple exact repetition of a preceding version.

However these technologies also seriously undermine the claim to the exclusivity of traditions and, hence, their aura. They favor the differentiation of practices in all fields, and therefore return to the forefront the processing and collective nature of the praxis.

For Hannah Arendt, the term praxis is replaced by “action” most often related to “speech”. For her, the condition of the action depends upon a cooperative of at once equal and different human beings. In this sense, action and speech characterize political action in its highest form: acting together whilst recognizing our differences:

Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act.2

H. Arendt compares the Greek and Roman systems of political interaction. In ancient Greece the laws have the function to allow the subsequent actions of the citizens, “not Athens, but the Athenians, were the polis. »3.

Modern society, more influenced by Rome than by Athens, has completely degraded action. And Arendt notes:

It was precisely these occupations – healing, flute-playing, play-acting – which furnished ancient thinking with examples for the highest and greatest activities of man.4

Rehabilitation of the praxis in the era of electronic globality returns the flutist to his place as actor of his own practice,5 , at play with the irresolute relations with others, the ephemeral character of actions, and unpredictable outcomes.6

Jean-Charles François – 2015

Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago, London : The University of Chicago Press, 1958, p. 153. Even though few references are made by the author to the terms poiêsis and praxis, her exposition, supporting three essential elements of the human condition, namely of work, created works and action, provides important keys to the understanding of what is at play in today’s world.

2. Hannah Arendt, op. cit., chapter V, « Action », p. 188.

3. Ibid., p.195.

4. Ibid., p.207.

5. See Marc’O, Théâtralité et Musique, Paris : Association S.T.A.R., 1994: “We have stated that, in a broad sense, the word actor relates more to a produced activity than to a social status (an identity). Ideally, the actor, author of his actions, is an author who verifies and acts. Through his actions, whether it be on the scene of work, social, family or otherwise – he tries to understand what he is lacking. Only action can bring him to understand this lack. And it is that upon which life is founded which he is lacking. All that he needs is to have aims in life and so fix goals. In this way he has a destiny, he contributes to cultural development. He makes history.” (page 86)

6. See Jean-Charles François, “Le Bèlè Martiniquais face aux héritiers de l’art autonome”, Les Périphériques vous parlent, N°36 Web, Paris, 2012. The practice of dance, poetry and traditional Bèlè music in Martinique is a living example of the idea of Praxis as it is defined in this text.

 

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Discipline (English version)

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The notion of discipline seems at first sight foreign to concepts used by PaaLabRes. In our collective, the emphasis is on the concepts of nomad and transversal. In what way is discipline pertinent to our approach?

In the founding text of PaalabRes, the term “discipline” is employed in the two most commonly used definitions, the first one as domain or field of knowledge and practice, separated from other domains, the second one as personal mastery or obedience:

  1. “Our society is characterized in all domains by the instability, the precarity and the erasure of the limits between disciplines.” “Technologies are at the centers of transverse approaches linking disciplines that were until now far apart.” “This does not exclude, in fact, the presence of external observers and the collaboration with non artistic disciplines (notably social sciences and humanities).”
  2. “This book is ‘a questioning on the operations of users, supposedly destined to passivity and discipline’ ”. [quote from Michel de Certeau L’invention du quotidien, I. Arts de faire, Paris, Union Générale d’Éditions, Coll. 10/18, 1980]

These two uses of “discipline” are most often distinct from one another in common language (an “artistic discipline” versus an “iron discipline”), even when this double use appears in the same domain: a teacher should impose discipline in her/his class – rules of conduct and of obedience – in order to teach his/her discipline – ensemble of knowledge of a specific subject matter. If the use of the one thus does not call spontaneously for the use of the other, we can nevertheless think that the two meanings in this last case are perhaps not very far apart.

The origin of the word discipline can be found in effect in discipulus, which means “pupil” in Latin, thus relating discipline to the idea of learning. The history of the word reveals also a kinship between the two definitions and the proximity of a link to the body:

“The ancient meaning of “massacre, carnage, havoc, calamity”, proper to old French, is to be understood as an extension of the idea of “punishment”, an accepted sense during the 12th Century (ca. 1170), especially applied to a cleric’s corporal mortification (1174) and giving way, by metonymy, to the concrete meaning of “instrument used for flogging” (before 1549) in religious circles. However, as soon as mid-12th century, the word is also employed with the modern definitions of “rule of life, of conduct” (ca. 1120) and “education, teaching”. By metonymy, a discipline refers to a subject matter being taught, a branch of knowledge.” [“Discipline” Le Robert – Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, Alain Rey (dir.) p. 1095]

Discipline as working on the body, was described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish. He showed the development during the 18th century of discipline in different institutions through an ensemble of meticulous techniques, methods and practices, which aims, through the corporal inscription, at the fabrication of docile bodies combining usefulness and obedience. Discipline as working on the body through specific practices, evidently constitutes the explicit techniques and goals of an institution like the army, but the “body techniques”, as Marcel Mauss calls them, are equally operational in any teaching practice, including those which are the most “theoretical”. A discipline, by its teaching, constitutes an ensemble of regulated knowledge, techniques and practices, which are inscribed indiscriminately in body and mind. One could say then that discipline is, in the same movement, matter and manner. There is no “matter” (knowledge, understanding, etc.) without “manner” (rules, procedures, etc.).

A discipline, considered as “branch of knowledge”, is only, as indicated by the wording, part of a tree which would represent world knowledge. Following this definition, it is an element of a global knowledge, with a possible doubt as to its effective existence in itself, and which would certainly be only situated historically, culturally, etc., a discipline is thus necessarily partial and excluding. It delimits a perimeter of validity of a culture, that is some ways of thinking and of acting, outside which what it defines no longer applies and is no longer valid. A discipline is obliged to turn inward on itself in order to exist in relation with other disciplines and carries in this way an exclusive logic. However it is because a discipline elaborates its own instruments of contemplating and measuring the world, fragmented but specific instruments, that it can often produce unique knowledge capable of enlightening the world in new ways. Nevertheless, knowledge cannot be unlinked from power, there is a great temptation to preserve in the teaching of a discipline only an ensemble of techniques with no relationships to the knowledge intended to be conveyed, and therefore to the power that this knowledge secures. Michel Foucault showed that the functional role to which a body is subjected, was inversely proportional to the political role it was able to play.

Finally, defined in this way, discipline is thus what at the same time allows and impedes a practice.

For us, reflection on the notion of discipline does not aim to suppress discipline or to multiply the inter-, multi- and trans-disciplinary rationales, nor to harden it in repositioning it on exclusive “fundamentals”. What is at stake is rather to try not to dissociate, within one discipline, the entwined rationales often presented in the form of disjointed elements, as for example “theoretical” and “practical” levels. This supposes that one should imagine a “whole” dimension of discipline, which contains its epistemological, historical, cultural, social (etc.) conditions of construction. However, this position goes against the economic model of division of labor elaborated in the 19th century, that Western art music represents through the hyper-specialization of diverging points of view on music: that of the composer, musicologist, audience, performer, teacher, etc., not to mention the instrumental “enforced discipline” [disciplinarisation] of these last two.

Between a call for a mandatory mixing of disciplines, softening their specific concepts in which everything would be in everything, and the extreme fragmentation of one discipline causing it to explode in as many tightly closed specialties as there are practitioners/researchers, we advocate the importation of foreign elements that shake up and introduce other considerations, allowing a provisional reconfiguration of space and of disciplinary practices.

Samuel Chagnard — 2016

Translation Samuel Chagnard, Jean-Charles and Nancy François

For further studies:

Astolfi, J.-P. (2010). La saveur des savoirs disciplines et plaisir d’apprendre. Issy-les-Moulineaux : ESF.

Chervel, A. (1998). « L’histoire des disciplines scolaires », in La culture scolaire une approche historique. Paris : Belin.

Forquin, J. C., (2005) « Disciplines scolaires », in Dictionnaire encyclopédique de l’éducation et de la formation (sous la direction de Philippe Champy et Christiane Étévé), 3e édition, Paris, Retz, p. 275-279.

Foucault, M. (1993). Surveiller et punir : naissance de la prison. Paris : Gallimard.

Lahire, B. (2012) « Des effets délétères de la division scientifique du travail sur l’évolution de la sociologie », SociologieS [On line], Débats, La situation actuelle de la sociologie, on line, January 27, 2012, consultation on February 10, 2016.

URL : http://sociologies.revues.org.bibliotheque-nomade2.univ-lyon2.fr/3799

Mauss, M. (1934) Les techniques du corps, http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/mauss_marcel/socio_et_anthropo/6_Techniques_corps/Techniques_corps.html, consultation on February 11, 2016.

 

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Experimental (English version)

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The term “experimental” remains difficult to define in artistic contexts, and concerning PaaLabRes’ particular issues, it poses a certain number of problems. A first definition seemingly suitable to artistic practices goes towards the idea of trying out things in link with experience. Any sound production practice implies a degree of trial and error, of experimentation in order to achieve a desired outcome. One carries out a series of trials in order to arrive at a solution that is satisfying to the practitioner’s ear or to the external listeners’ ones. Through reference to experience, one implies that the trials are carried out in the framework of an interaction between a human being and some concrete material. This first determination of the meaning of the word is situated far from the definition of experimental in the sense of scientific research, which, according to the Petit Robert dictionary, can be described in the following manner: “Empirical experience which consists in observing, classifying, making hypotheses and verifying through appropriate experiences”.

However, for some years practicing musicians (instrumentalists, singers,…) have been present in the university, and this implied the necessity to contemplate the question of research in a manner appropriate to their situation. If the very act of interpretation can be considered as constituting, under certain conditions, an original creation in itself, it is then possible to propose the notion of experimental as being the best way to provide a framework for a research process: it would not only be a question of playing, but of defining a project similar to the empiric experience described above.

The definition of experimental is made more complicated by the fact that this term has been used to describe particular aesthetic movements inscribed in a singular historical context. On the one hand, John Cage and his circle have been very often described as typical of what we call “experimental music ».1 The well-known definition by Cage of the term experimental conditions its utilization on not considering it as the description of an act that can be after the fact judged successful or failed, but rather on considering it as an act the result of which one cannot know in advance.2 He emphasizes here an elaboration process in which the will of the composer creator should be absent, in which the agency and the nature of the sounds are not determined from the beginning, and which does not predict the way listeners might experience them. The term experimental has also been used to describe 20th Century composers – most of them Americans, inspired by pragmatism (Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Edgar Varèse, Harry Partch, Robert Erickson, etc.) – who refused to found their music on conceptual theories, and who turned their attention to the materiality of sound production. It is also on this idea of more direct production of sound matter, that electroacoustic music has been qualified as “experimental music”: electronic and concrete music studios had taken on the aspect of scientific laboratories. The label “experimental music” is applied today to an infinite number of practices, especially when they are difficult to categorize in a specific traditional genre.

This multiplicity of meanings, in certain cases very vague, results often in misunderstandings, and the role of “experimental” in the collection of concepts within the PaaLabRes collective remains particularly uncertain and unstable. We will limit its use to the perspective of a definition of what could constitute research in artistic domains. In this context, the Orpheus Institute in Ghent (Belgium) has recently published a book (Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen (Belgium): Leuwen University Press, 2013). This publication is centered on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger3, director of the Max Planck Institute for the history of sciences, which is based notably on experimental systems, with some perspectives on eventual applications to artistic domains. For this author, experimental systems are articulated around four categories:

  1. There should be an intimate, interactive relation between scientific objects and their conditions of technical production, in an inseparable manner. This relation is at the same time local, individual, social, institutional, technical, instrumental and above all epistemic. He emphasizes the hybrid character of experimental systems and because of this, their impure nature.
  2. Experimental systems have to be able to produce surprises constituting new forms of knowledge. They have to be conceived in ways producing differential results that are not predictable. They have a certain autonomy, a life of their own.
  3. They should be able to produce epistemic traces (what the author describes under the term of “graphematicity”), which show and incarnate their signifying products and which can be represented in writing.
  4. Experimental systems should be able to enter networks that include other experimental groups, by means of conjunctures and bifurcations, forming thus experimental cultures.4.

Rheinberger speaks of “experimental spirit”. For him on the one hand, at the core of this concept lies the interaction between the experimental investigator and the material, which implies that, in order to create new situations, the investigator is immersed in the material. Here, as with Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the material exists in itself and the interaction implies a relation that goes in two-ways. On the other hand, this experimental spirit proceeds from a particular attention to the fact that science is a practice rather than a theoretical system, he therefore advocates assuming inductive rather than deductive attitudes.5 It is here question of getting rid of the idea that a theory of knowledge is centered on an ego, a subject trying to apply a network of theories on an object. The experimental situations have to correspond to two requirements: a) a precision in elaborating a context; and b) a sufficient complexity in order to leave the door open for surprises.6

For Rheinberger, an “experimental system” can only be understood as a play of interactions between machines, ingredients, techniques, rudimentary concepts, vague objects, protocols, research notes, social and institutional conditions. The experiments are not just methodological vehicles to test (to be confirmed or rejected) some already theoretically established or hypothetically postulated knowledge, as philosophy of sciences usually claims. Knowledge is generated by experiments – of which no one had any idea beforehand.7

At the core of scientific processes of experimentation, according to Rheinberger, epistemic things and technical objects exist in dialectical interrelations. The epistemic things are defined as entities “ ‘whose unknown characteristics are the target of an experimental inquiry’, paradoxically, embodying what one does not yet know. »8 The technical objects are defined as sedimentations of old epistemic things, they are scientific objects that incarnate instituted knowledge in a determined field of research, at a given time; they can be instruments, apparatus, mechanisms that delimitate and confine the evaluation of epistemic things. The epistemic things are necessarily under determinate, the technical objects on the contrary are determined in characteristic manner. Rheinberger states:

In Towards a History of Epistemic Things I wanted to convey the idea that the experimental process plays out a dialectic between epistemic things and technical objects, and that there exists a functional relationship between them rather than a substantial one. Epistemic things that have reached a certain point of clarification can be transformed into technical objects – and vice versa: technical objects can become epistemically problematic again. The technologies with which one works are normally used as black boxes; they can, however, be reopened and become things of epistemic interest.9

Michael Schwab, in his introduction to the book, interprets the idea of experimental cultures as fit to bear on research in artistic domains, providing that one would have a more supple approach than the ones used in science:

During my conversation with Rheinberger (chapter 15 of the book), it became clear that a particular type of work ethic, experience, and sensibility is required in experimental systems that can also be found in artistic practice: dedication to a limited sets of materials, attention to detail, continuous iterations, and the inclusion of contingent events and traces in the artistic process, allowing the material substrata to come to the fore as a site where traces are assembled.10.

Schwab raises three issues that are at the heart of PaalabRes’ questioning relative to research in artistic domains:

  1. All artistic practices, to the extent that they confront materials to ways of treating them, can pretend to be experimental systems. In what way can one distinguish artistic research from any artistic practice production?
  2. The question of newness, of originality, of future, of progress, inscribed in the requirements specification of scientific research, as well as in the artistic modernity called “experimental music”, became in a subtle manner in the course of the 20th Century an idea that belongs probably to the past.
  3. There is a general crisis of representation, which leads us to wonder if the academic forms of research publication are appropriate for the artistic domains, and if other alternative forms of representation more suitable to practices can be used.

Moreover, one can ponder with Henk Bordgorff:

What is the epistemological status of art in artistic research? Are artworks or art practices capable of creating, articulating, and embodying knnowledge and understanding? And, if so, what kinds of artworks and practices do this (what is the ontological status of art here?) and how they do it (the methodological status)?11.

The notion of experimental remains a necessary term when contemplating the specificities of research in artistic domains, but its manipulation remains very problematic because of the multiplicity of references it generates, notably by the fact that it is often claimed as the exclusive territory of modernity in the European high art tradition.

In conclusion, we will refer to Paolo de Assis, a composer and researcher at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent, who proposes a pathway for thinking about artistic research on a basis somewhat different from the ones proposed by musical analysis, music theory and musicology turned as they are towards the interpretation of works from the past:

However, there might be a different mode of problematising things, a mode that, rather than aiming to retrieve what thingsare, searches for new ways of productively exposing them. That is to say, a mode that, instead of critically looking into the past, creatively projects things into the future. Such is the final proposal of this chapter: to reverse the perspective from « looking into the past » to creatively designing the future of past musical works. In my view this is precisely what artistic research could be about – a creative mode that brings together the past and the future of things in ways that non-artistic modes cannot do. In doing this, artistic research must be able to include archaeology, problematisation, and experimentation in its inner fabric. The making of artistic expérimentation through Rheingerger’s experimental systems becomes a creative form of problematisation, whereby through differential repetition new assemblages of things are materially handcrafted and constructed.12

In PaaLabRes perspectives, it would be necessary to widen the notion of works or things of the past to the practices themselves as they are present in tradition and as they adapt continuously to new contexts.

Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. See Michael Nyman, Experimental Music : Cage and Beyond, New York : Schirmer Books, 1974, second edition, Cambridge and New York : Cambridge Univesrity Press, 1999.

2. John Cage, Silence, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: M.I.T. Press, 1966, p. 13.

3. « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger taught molecular biology and history of sciences at the Universities of Salzburg, Innsbrück, Zürich, Berlin, and Standford, and he is the director of the MaxPlanck-Institut in Berlin since 1997. Influenced by Jacques Derrida’s thought, he co-translated Grammatology, he argue for a historical epistemology, principally centered on experimental systems » (www.diaphane.fr)

4. See Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, « Experimental Systems : Entry Encyclopedia for the History of the Life Sciences » The Visual Laboratory : Essays and Ressources on the Experimentalization of Life, Max Planck Institut for the History of Science, Berlin. http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/essays/data/enc19?p=1
A chart is presented in Paulo de Assis « Epistemic Complexity and Experimental Systems », Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, Michael Schwab (ed.), Orpheus Institute, Leuwen, Belgique : Leuwen University Press, 2013, p. 158.

5. See « Hans-Jörg Rheinberger in conversation with Michael Schwab », Experimental Systems,…, op. cit., p. 198.

6. Ibid., p. 200.

7. See Henk Borgdorff, « Artistic Practices and Epistemic Things », in Experimental Systems, Future Knowledge in Artistic Research, op. cit., p.114.

8. See Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 159. He quotes Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube, Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2004, p.238.

9. Ibid.

10. Michael Schwab, « Introduction », Experimental Systems…, op. cit., p. 7.

11 Henk Borgdorff, op. cit., p. 113.

12. Paulo de Assis, op. cit., p. 162.

 

 

 For an itinerary-song towards…


 

Transversal (English version)

concepts, practices report, , , , , , ,

For an
itinerary-song
towards…

 
 
The station « Transversal » is composed, on the one hand, of a collective text written by the members of PAALabRes in the form of an “exquisite corpse” game, each contribution being visually presented in different manners, and, on the other hand, by three transversal escapes: a) a text on the notion of hybrid and on related artistic forms; b) a text with references to the “créolisation” of the world according to Edouard Glissant; and c) a text with references to the idea of plural culture, according to, among others, Michel de Certeau.

 

Contents:

« Transversal »: Paalabres Collective
Hybrid
« Créolisation »
Culture in the Plural
 
Return to the French text

 

Transversal – Paalabres Collective

This is a spineless concept difficult to grasp.
If one replaces “v” par “p”, one would get something that would transpierce, that would have a phallocentric impact. But a transversal line only traverses and one has difficulties to stop it in its trajectory, and to reflect upon it.

To pierce the clouds, to traverse them. To transgress.

If one replaces “v” by “f”, one would get transfer (of stocks?), transition to the inflexibility of fer-ruginous matter. But the idea of transport (travel, love-making?) imbedded in “trans” is to go in “verses” towards indeterminacy, in a peregrination of diverse perverse fevers. One would be carried away by the trans-fair.

In ball games, “transversal” means a long passing shot across the width of the field that would reverse the game. Then, one has to be clever, skillful in sending and receiving the ball. This implies not only the receiver of this pass, but also all the participants. One never sufficiently considers the things and the people that make the actions possible. We should not forget that all penalty shots at 3 points in the net are welcome, and please not on the post!

And if one starts by taking out the “n”… The noises, the images, the odors, the tastes, the contacts and the senses traverse, in reverse also, and then diverge, and do the inverse too, whether going into a trance or not.

— You said trans, transverse and salsa, vestal, transversal?

Beware, above all to not replace the “v” by a “grrrr” of aggressive transgression.

— My transversal, but what’s the matter with my transversal?

The “it” of intestinal transit should be avoided, of sonata transition, of transitory elements in sound envelopes in the acoustical domain.

Is transversal anything that cuts across perpendicularly the longitudinal axis of an elongated form. And this is very important! For example, in modern differential topology, the study of which, it should be remembered, was started by René Thom on ideas by Poincaré (Henri, the cousin of Raymond) and which is based on the notion of transverse sub-varieties. Good night.

Certain persons go as far as saying that the dislocations of the earth’s crust are transversal faults, according to cnrtl!

To go directly to something.

In musical practices “in acts”, do not believe that financial transactions are part of them.

See the synonyms of “transversal”, there is no antonym?

The notion of instability refers to something unsteady, fragile, wavering between two ideas. Should we rather understand it as “never having the expected form”; “going towards”, etc?
The idea of transversal consists in having all the terms like fragility, stammering, attempts, round trips, displacements, migrations, transfers, etc., converge in a logic of an absolutely inexorable evolution, proper to the life of practices.

To what is it opposed?
It is opposed to, say: root, race, origin, purity, original sin, DNA …

Dog – Reality is not below the animal, even if political. It is not around, it is not to be seized, it is not a framework, not a finality. Reality is something you traverse. Writing, living in general, it is always something to be traversed.

Vestal trance, vesperal tramp, Enter the versed ballad

According to who says it, it is a real travelling across, or the use of an institutional language that does not change anything.

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads; I like this idea of a music that is there, that one grasps at a given moment, it opens out, and then it closes, and in fact the music continues, it continues to leave some traces.”

Situated across something

Everything would be fairly clear if within each large category of practice we were in presence of a unity of comportments and of aesthetics. Now, the diversity of modes of functioning is not organized in borders defining genres, but is expressed within each genre in itself. For example, in the jazz world, some people want to work only with written scores, and others, on the contrary, like to insist on the conditions of an oral transmission. In the contemporary music world, almost no relationships exist between those who write scores, those who improvise, and those who have chosen to express themselves with electroacoustic means. In traditional world music one can find those who are aiming to recreate the authenticity of a disappearing social practice, and those who want to adapt their practice to the conditions of our own social life. In amplified music, there are only few common points in the ways of doing things between techno, hip-hop, rock, and those who are influenced by other types of music. One could say that every day, in all domains, a new genre emerges.

Transversal is always a transfer salve,
it obliges to anoint ones own practices with improper elements.
You can’t traverse, go across, without getting wet.
The traverse stains.
Traverse mucks up (traverse yuk!).

It does not always happen as expected, sometimes it slips… through the net,
it falls in the trap set…, sometimes it travels not straight.

The traversion, it is the aversion of the traverse: it has to go straight

some think that they are not transversable, the damn fools!

A music of the present time can be envisioned, as time unfolding in the making that in a way would oblige us to break with the habits of classifying in trends, aesthetics, genres, cultural influences, so as really refusing any identification to already known consensual frameworks that tend to place the artists before a paradox: one should invent in continuity, search for ideas, without exceeding the limits, create a new thread, some newness but without escaping the context organized by designations, as if these designations were there for ever, whereas they themselves appeared at a given moment, in order to get rid of other paradigms, to qualify something that the old classifications were not able to grasp.

“When a group is formed, one knows that it is composed by individualities. Each person is able to develop her/his projects alone. The equilibrium is found in co-construction, in which whoever pretends to be the leader [chef] is nothing more than a liar [menteur]: each person is at his/her place and the detail is discussed more and more. These are musical discussions in the course of elaborating propositions, each one speaks and may intervene. The decisions are always based on common choices.

In transverse, of transvermeil, through transverb, to the transvair.

Decompartmentalize

“One arrives somewhere, one comes out again, then it continues, one does not know where it leads, I like this idea of some cooking that is grasped at a given moment, it opens and it closes, and in fact, the cooking continues, it still leaves some traces.”

In the conception of transversal, it would be as inappropriate to say that such or such creation mixes influences from diverse origins, as to say it comes from somewhere or from nowhere; it is best not to search for a provenance nor for an affiliation, it is even necessary to renounce contemplating a multicultural origin, or an expression of world music. The origin of a music of transversality is here, there and everywhere: its origin is a project, and the origin of the project a desire for a project shared with musicians who bring to it their personality, their energy and their imagination.

If one utilizes it to keep the compartmentalization and the silos on the pretext of the qualifying value of some sprinkling of actions…

 

Contributions of the PaaLabRes collective— 2015

 

Three transversal escapes

Hybrid
« Créolisation »
Culture in the Plural
 

 For an itinerary-song, towards…


 

Nomadism, Nomadic

concepts, improvisation, , , , , ,

Return to the French text

 

Drawing : Alain Savouret

 

For an
Itinerary-song
towards…

 
Nomadic :  » What is not established, has no fixed dwelling « 1. This term when applied to the arts, can have, in the framework of PaaLabRes, several meanings :

  • Artistic practices, which are inscribed in constantly reinvented processes, rather than the presence of stable, definitive and immutable objects or works (even though they might be constantly reinterpreted).
  • Artistic practices, which are conceived in continuity within and outside institutions, between formal and informal learning, or which use the institutional settings for their own ends.
  • Artistic practices, which refuse stylistic labels and promote the active coexistence of aesthetical positions, their effective meeting, or their blending together.
  • Artistic practices which are situated in mediating spaces in between disciplines or domains of thought: any hybrid forms that are impossible to definitively classify in a single category of action; anything that aggregates theory and practice in the same act.

The idea of nomadism determines the overall form of this present “media set-up” in which this text is included, drawing from the experience of Australian Aboriginal people (see the English Editorial).

Deleuze and Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus, in a chapter entitled “Treatise on Nomadology: the War Machine”, described the presence of a “minor” or “nomadic” science, which strongly distinguishes itself from scientific practices in the “royal” sense of the term2 :

The characteristics of such an eccentric science would be as follows: 1) First of all, it uses a hydraulic model, rather than being a theory of solids treating fluids as a special case; (…). 2) The model in question is one of becoming and heterogeneity, as opposed to the stable, the eternal, the identical, the constant. (…). 3) One no longer goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar flow, but from curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals and vortices on an inclined plane; (…). 4) Finally, the model is problematic, rather than theorematic.3

In the first proposition in this quote, Deleuze and Guattari draw on a contrast between “striated” space and “smooth” space, concepts borrowed from Boulez’s writings on music. If one takes up the proposed hydraulic image, a river consists in a partly random constant flow, from which the detail is difficult to perceive. A complex sound wave (the sound of the river for example) is of the same nature, a constant flow of sinuosity impossible to analyze without establishing some points of reference. In order to understand the river, one has to striate the space by noticeable spots distinct from each other: a rock, a bridge, an islet, etc. In order to understand sound, some discontinuity has to be established: the musical notes do not interrupt the flow of the complex sound wave, but they allow the identification by the ears of stable melodic lines, easy to recognize through repetitions, while the sound of a stream flow at a given point will only appear as a special effect, as a particular case. This is indeed one of the problematical foundations of stabilized musical parameters (precise pitch, precise durations, distinct from each other), which on the one hand are constitutive of Western musical notation, and on the other hand also entail some instable parameters, such as timbre in particular, which is inscribed in some continuity (dynamic envelopes, constantly evolving sound spectra, subtle inflections, micro-variations, etc.) and which would touch on what cannot be precisely written. This phenomenon can be interpreted, in our collective’s perspectives, as a differentiation between music centered on stable elements, with successions of identifiable notes, and music centered on timbre, on sound in itself, being understood that neither the one nor the other can dispense with the presence of a mixture of stable and instable elements: notes without timbres are too synthetic, the timbres without asperities soon become fastidious. “Nomadic” musicians would be drawn towards instable sound productions.

In the quote’s second proposition, the notion of heterogeneity in processes “in progress”, implies, in the present nomadic context, leaving indeterminate a great part of the sound production, rather than definitely fixing the detail of the contours. Rather than analyzing separately each parameter in order to control them, the approach that leaves the sonorities to unfold in all their complexity presupposes considering sound in its heterogeneous totality involving the interactivity of the parameters and not their separation. The question of heterogeneity can be expanded to social interactions, in relations to different groups or practices: social mix in a given practice, confrontation between practices, genres and styles, confrontation between artistic domains, hybrid forms, creolized cultures, cross-cultural expressions, plural declinations of culture. Nomadic would be the ones who would not seek to defend a single identity disqualifying all the others, the ones who are ready to assume several roles, taking the risk of not artificially grafting a particular role on to another, taking the risk to fully assume the imposed conditions given by each situation, without at the same time being attached to a rigid definition of each role taken separately.

Concerning the third proposition of the two authors’ quote, it relates to the concepts developed by Michel de Certeau on the differentiation between strategy and tactic. In strategy, usually imposed from above by some power, the lines are clearly defined by objectives to be attained, the space is rationalized in functional perspectives, the laws define what it is allowed, and above all what is not allowed. Tactics are answers to situations that arise, often resulting from strategy, immediately reacting to them in order to reap some benefits. Strategy traces future lines of conduct, enlightened by historical facts from the past, tactics are embedded in the meanders of reality in a continual present. The nomad thus would be the one who in a pragmatic manner allows the world to follow its course, in reacting to circumstances, with the danger of never being able to master it, nor perhaps to change it.

Finally, the fourth point of the definition, the idea of “nomadic” consists in being confronted with the complexity of things and situations, and, as their evolution occurs, in elaborating a series of questions capable of defining a comportment of action. It is not a matter of establishing some laws, or inescapable truths, some “theorems”, which will induce acceptable comportments, but of determining a balanced pathway on the crest between catastrophic precipices, in between wayward excesses on each side of the track charting its course, a pathway which problematizes complex reality. The nomad would be the one who does not simplify reality in categorical precepts easily understood, but who confronts the variable complexity of the globalized world.

The idea of nomadism is, according to Daniel Charles, linked to the notion developed during the 20th Century of “un-working” [désœuvrement], not in the sense of not knowing what to do with one’s time, or of being outside the official field of work, but in the sense of being removed from the concept of work (of art) identified by a finished object.4. Daniel Charles refers principally to John Cage, whose scores often imply processes that determine sounds or events independently of the composer and localized in the particular realization of a creative performer. The score is not any more a unique work, but can result in an infinity of potential works. In connection to this notion, Daniel Charles refers to Pierre Lévy’s work on computer applications to artistic domains, in which “the use of digital tools leads to the concept of templates for possible works ».5 The artist does not produce a work but designs a software – Pierre Lévy speaks of open source software, template or hypertext – which will generate automatically an infinite number of versions that are particular “instances” of the same structuration.

For us, the notion of nomadism, influenced by the new technologies and by world economy, has to be considered in a much wider manner. The idea of “un-working” has to be taken literally and includes the importance in today’s society of wandering and precariousness and unemployment. This also includes the cultural domain in the broad sense, in a society of leisure, in artistic forms that are often disparaged, in anonymous activities outside the public scene and the sphere of publicity.

A possible interpretation of the term “nomadic” has to do with its antonymous relationship with the term “sedentary”, as developed by Isabelle Stengers in a chapter of the seventh volume of Cosmopolitics, “Nomadic and Sedentary ». She describes this distinction between these two terms as eminently dangerous, as they lend themselves to many “misunderstandings”. Nomadic people (those who come from elsewhere in order to disturb the life routines) are rejected by the sedentary ones, but in our society, the sedentary people are those who “reject the challenges of modernity”, hanging on to their quiet little world, the nomads being those who are ready to risk changing society.6 Nomadism soon becomes an obligatory pathway towards progress and to avant-garde artistic forms attempting to make a complete break with the past. The nomadic norm could very well be considered from that perspective as sedentary. The two terms can be completely turned around in relation to particular contexts. Consequently, for Stengers, they have to be “kept in tension”.

But the sense that we want to emphasize concerning nomadism lies at the same time outside the field of institutional sedentary settlements and outside the wandering of experimental modernists without necessarily excluding them. The space of nomadism is a localized place in which the nomads move on an everyday life basis, with not much importance given to the place they might move to, as do the artisans who care about their own everyday practices without claiming to open new territories. The nomads can suddenly invade other territories perpetrating predatory raiding, but they then return to their delimited roaming at home. The smooth space is punctuated by significant objects, by striations, it is bounded by some limits. To come back to Mille Plateaux:

The nomad has a territory, he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). (…) Although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine (…). A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.7

Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation by the author and Nancy François

1. Translated from the dictionary Le nouveau Petit Robert, Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert, 1967/2002, p. 1736

2. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 (pp. 351-423). It should be noted that the concept of “nomad” is for these authors associated with the idea of the “war machine”. It is an external space to the state apparatus with its two head figures, the king-magician and the priest-jurist. This war machine can be recuperated by the states in order to effectively carry on wars, the nomad space is a war machine which does not necessarily use effective war.

3. Ibid., p. 446-447 of the French edition.

4. Daniel Charles, Musiques nomades, écrits réunis et présentés par Christian Hauer, Paris: Editions Kimé, 1998, chapters 15 and 16, pp. 211-231.

5. Pierre Lévy, La machine univers, Paris: Ed. de la Découverte, 1987, p.61.

6. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics II, Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010), “The Curse of Tolerance”, chapter on “Nomadic and Sedentary”.

7. Deleuze and Guattari, op. cit., p.471 of the French edition.

 For an itinerary-song towards…

 

English reference : George Lewis « Afterwords… »

abstract

George Lewis, « Afterwords to « Improvised Music after 1950 »: The Changing Same », was published in The Other Side of Nowhere, Jazz Improvisation, and Communities in Dialogue, eds. Daniel Fischlin and Ajay Heble, Middeltown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004, p. 163-172.

The original essay, “Improvised Music after 1950”, was published in Black Music Research Journal in 1996 by the Center for Black Music Research – Columbia College, Chicago.

Return to the French text.

Transversal : culture au pluriel

compte-rendu de pratiques, concepts

Une échappée transversale : culture au pluriel

Traverser vers Hybride, vers Créolisation, retourner à TRANSVERSAL

Culture au pluriel :

Notre époque se caractérise par une multiplication des sources de données et champs de savoirs accessibles, donc augmente de façon exponentielle les chances et possibilités de croisements, rencontres, détournement, transformations, etc. Ce qui nous contraint àla complexité : sa prise en compte devient absolument nécessaire, en commençant par les trois principes travaillés par Edgar Morin dans son « paradigme de complexité » (voir Introduction à la pensée complexe, éd. ESF 1990, pp. 98-101). :

  • dialogique, c’est-à-dire deux logiques antagoniques et contradictoires mais indissociables et indispensables pour comprendre une même réalité
  • de récursion ou d’influence réciproque, c’est-à-dire à la fois et dans le même temps causes et effets, produit et producteur
  • hologrammatique, présenté contre le « paradigme de simplification », c’est-à-dire le tout est dans les parties, les parties sont dans le tout.

L’exploration des principes de complexité développés par Edgar Morin nous amène à l’idée de confort inconfortable. Plus on connaît et pratique un terrain de jeu musical en finissant par s’y sentir tranquillement à son aise, en terme de maîtrise notamment, plus on connaît, en fait, ses zones d’ombre et ses frontières-lisières avec les moyens d’aller s’y frotter, premières sources d’imprévus et de surprises : le confort peut donc être source facile d’inconfort. Et réciproquement, être en position délicate d’inconfort peut être l’amorce de la construction d’un nouveau confort. Une double dynamique fructueuse permet de mieux saisir le type de « confort » intéressant à chercher et à construire.

C’est ainsi qu’on peut saisir les spécificités des pratiques artistiques nomades et transversales. Elles proposent une conception de l’art qui ne se réduit pas à l’analyse des œuvres et à la discussion sur leur valeur, mais qui met en relation interactive le matériau, les gestes qui permettent le traitement de ce matériau, les modalités d’utilisation des matériaux, la distribution des fonctions et des rôles des participants, les rapports collectifs au sein des groupes d’artistes, les relations au public, les logiques de transmission, d’appropriation, de médiation, d’éducation et d’enseignement, jusqu’au rapport plus large au social et au politique. En somme tout ce qui constitue la fabrication d’une pratique. Il s’agit aussi de mettre en relation les pratiques dans leurs diversités, de les comparer, de les confronter et éventuellement de les combiner. Cette interactivité des divers éléments d’élaboration des pratiques et des pratiques diversifiées noue les conditions d’une nouvelle définition de la recherche tant dans ses aspects de ce qui permet aux pratiques d’exister, que de ce qui constitue un regard critique et réflexif sur les pratiques.

Dans un ouvrage annonçant de façon prémonitoire la très grande diversité culturelle à laquelle nous avons à faire face aujourd’hui en l’absence d’une fondation universelle solide, (La culture au pluriel, Paris : Christian Bourgeois, 1980), Michel de Certeau notait la chose suivante :

« Ce qui devient central, c’est l’acte culturel propre au « collage », l’invention de formes et de combinaisons, et les procédés qui rendent capable de multiplier les compositions. Acte technique par excellence. L’attention se porte donc vers les pratiques. » (p.108).

Pour lui, l’intérêt se porte non plus sur les « produits », mais sur les « méthodes de production ». Il ne s’agit donc plus, dans l’enseignement supérieur, de se contenter d’exposer les résultats d’une recherche, mais, « à travers une praxis collective », d’expliciter les manières de les obtenir.

Avec la disparition des principes universels qui caractérise la situation dans laquelle nous nous trouvons aujourd’hui, les modèles théoriques dominants ne permettent plus de « penser le pluriel de systèmes imbriqués et sédimentés ». Nous n’avons aucun autre choix de procéder par tâtonnements face à des situations particulières dans lesquelles s’inscrivent des actions (voir p. 187). C’est ainsi que, concernant « l’espace des pratiques », il note qu’il y a un malaise persistant : « la culture, c’est le mou » (p. 233). Les actions des usagers ne correspondent pas du tout aux intentions ceux qui rationnellement planifient le monde. La face dure est constituée par la technocratie qui tente de coloniser le monde en rentabilisant la « fabrication des signifiants » (p. 234). La société de consommation transforme le peuple en public. Toutes les voix minoritaires du monde sont entendues projetées par les médias, mais elles tendent à être instantanément classifiées et répertoriées dans des musées ou dans des écritures figées : elles « cessent alors de parler et d’être parlées ». Il parle d’une frontière qui ne fait passer que ce qui est déjà mort :

« Cette frontière circonscrit ce que nous pouvons dire et faire du lieu où nous parlons. Rien des autres ne traverse cette limite sans nous arriver mort. La pratique et la théorie de la culture accèdent à l’honnêteté quand nous renonçons à la prétention de surmonter par des généralités la coupure qui sépare entre eux les lieux où s’énonce une expérience. Du savoir scientifique, lorsqu’il est exclusif, jusqu’aux discours indigents sur les « valeurs » ou sur l’humanisme, il y a mille manières d’éliminer d’autres existences. Elles ont pour caractéristique commune la volonté d’instaurer l’unité, c’est-à-dire un totalitarisme. La culture au singulier impose toujours la loi d’un pouvoir. A l’expansion d’une force qui unifie en colonisant, et qui dénie à la fois sa limite et les autres, doit s’opposer une résistance. Il y a un rapport nécessaire de chaque production culturelle à la mort qui la limite et à la lutte qui la défend. La culture au pluriel appelle sans cesse un combat. » (p. 241)

Contributions du collectif PaaLabRes — 2015

Traverser vers Hybride, vers Créolisation, retourner à TRANSVERSAL

 

 Pour un itinéraire-chant vers…


 

Transversal : créolisation

compte-rendu de pratiques, concepts

Une échappée transversale : créolisation

Traverser vers Hybride, vers Culture au pluriel, retourner à TRANSVERSAL

 

Créolisation (selon Edouard Glissant) :

Edouard Glissant définit sa notion-clé de « créolisation » comme la confrontation d’éléments disparates appartenant à plusieurs cultures distinctes, ce qui est susceptible de créer des choses nouvelles complètement imprévisibles qui vont bien au-delà d’une juxtaposition culturelle ou même d’une synthèse négociée des divers éléments en présence.

Edouard Glissant précise sa pensée de la manière suivante :

« Le monde se créolise, c’est-à-dire que les cultures du monde mises en contact de manière foudroyante et absolument consciente aujourd’hui les unes avec les autres se changent en s’échangeant à travers des heurts irrémédiables, des guerres sans pitié, mais aussi des avancées de conscience et d’espoir qui permettent de dire – sans qu’on soit utopiste, ou plutôt , en acceptant de l’être – que les humanités aujourd’hui abandonnent difficilement quelque chose à quoi elles s’obstinaient depuis longtemps, à savoir que l’identité d’un être n’est valable et reconnaissable que si elle est exclusive de l’identité de tous les autres êtres possibles. »
(Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris :Gallimard, 1996, p. 15)

Glissant utilise l’image de la « circularité », de la spirale, pour l’opposer à la « projection en flèche » de la colonisation (Introduction à la poétique du divers, p. 14). Pour lui, une trace mémorielle, comme celle reconstituée par les esclaves noirs des Amériques et « valable pour tous » s’oppose à la « pensée de systèmes » et « des systèmes de pensées » prétendument universels (p. 17). Il dit : « La trace suppose et porte non pas la pensée de l’être mais la divagation de l’existant » (p. 69). La créolisation selon lui ne peut se faire que si les éléments culturels en présence sont rigoureusement « équivalents en valeur », de façon à ce qu’un groupe culturel donné n’impose pas ses méthodes, pratiques et conceptions sur un autre. Il choisit le terme créolisation de préférence à métissage car, dit-il, « la créolisation est imprévisible alors qu’on pourrait calculer les effets du métissage » (p. 19). Il voit la créolisation comme un processus dynamique qui ne peut pas se décréter par avance, elle doit émerger d’un parcours, d’une traversée.

Contributions du collectif PaaLabRes — 2015

Traverser vers Hybride, vers Culture au pluriel, retourner à TRANSVERSAL

 

 Pour un itinéraire-chant vers…


 

Transversal : hybride

compte-rendu de pratiques, concepts

Une échappée transversale : hybride

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Hybride :

Les pérégrinations transversales peuvent nous mener au caractère hybride de beaucoup de démarches artistiques : un objet hybride ne peut être définitivement catégorisé dans un domaine défini. Depuis longtemps déjà, des artistes ont travaillé sur des formes se situant aux frontières des domaines artistiques : poésie sonore et/ou graphique, théâtre musical, partitions musicales graphiques, sculptures sonores, etc. En créant des objets artistiques hybrides, ils ont tenté de se démarquer de la notion dominante d’autonomie de l’art et de la séparation stricte entre danse, musique, théâtre et arts plastiques. Cette idée d’objet composite inclut tout acte artistique qui mêle de manière entrelacée au moins deux domaines de pensée habituellement séparés Il ne s’agit pas d’une simple superposition de spécialités se combinant dans un spectacle, comme dans l’opéra par exemple, mais bien d’un acte ou d’un objet dont la perception par le public peut être interprétée comme faisant partie d’un domaine ou d’un autre ou des deux à la fois. Pour prendre un exemple, l’idée de typoésie développée par Jérôme Peignot qui combine le caractère visuel de la typographie avec la poésie contenue dans le groupement des lettres, mêlant de manière indissociable le fond et la forme. Cette pratique, très présente dans les mouvements d’avant-garde au vingtième siècle, peut être perçue à la fois comme poésie (texte), arts plastiques (signes distribués dans l’espace) et musique (rythmique des signes éclatés et onomatopées).

Concernant la définition d’hybride, au détour de quelques pages d’internet et de dictionnaires, on peut lire : qui provient d’un croisement naturel ou artificiel de deux variétés différentes (synonyme : mélangé, métis, croisé), et au figuré, qui n’appartient à aucun genre particulier; qui est bizarrement composé d’éléments divers, disparates et surprenants (hétéroclite, composite, bâtard).

Il est possible de qualifier la pratique artistique en général comme un « hybride multiforme de bricolage en contexte ». Des termes comme « pluriel » ou « multiple » pourraient aussi être proposés, mais ces adjectifs sont déjà largement utilisés pour qualifier les « métiers » artistiques, souvent sans se rapprocher des pratiques et manières de faire de tous ceux qui, parfois sans le dire, musiquent, dansent, graphiquent, etc., en bricolant (Claude Levi-Strauss) et en braconnant (Michel de Certeau) allègrement. On peut détailler les pratiques artistiques en six noyaux d’activités différentes, à « distinguer pour mieux relier » (Cette heureuse expression précise le but d’une analyse qui décompose, elle s’inspire des écrits d’Edgar Morin et d’Edouard Glissant) : création, performance, médiation-formation, recherche, administration, technique-lutherie. Il n’existe pas de frontière entre elles, elles s’étendent en continu dans des lisières d’entrecroisement, elles sont mouvantes et se superposent très souvent. Et notre hypothèse est que chaque pratique artistique s’hybride parmi toutes les variétés d’interactions. Et tout cela, couramment en revendiquant une façon jubilatoire de procéder !

Contributions du collectif PaaLabRes — 2015

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