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Transversal: Culture in the Plural

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A Transversal Escape: Culture in the Plural

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Culture in the Plural

The multiplication of the accessibility to data sources and knowledge fields is characteristic of our time, it therefore augments in an exponential manner the chances and possibilities of crossings, encounters, abductions, transformations, etc. This constrains us to complexity: to take into account this multiplication becomes absolutely necessary, starting with the three principles worked out by Edgar Morin in his “paradigm of complexity” (see Introduction à la pensée complexe, éd. ESF 1990, pp. 98-101):

  • Dialogic, that is two antagonist and contradictory, but indissociable and indispensable logics in order to understand a same reality.
  • Of recursion or of reciprocal influence, that is to say simultaneously causes and effects, product and producing.
  • Hologrammatic, presented in opposition to the “paradigm of simplification”, that is the whole is in the parts, the parts are in the whole.

The exploration of the principles of complexity developed by Edgar Morin brings us to the idea of uncomfortable comfort. The more one knows and practices a musical game field, succeeding at the end in being quietly at ease with it, notably in terms of mastering it, the more one encounters in fact some shadowy areas and its border-lines with the means to rub against them, first sources of the unexpected and of surprises: the comfort can be therefore an easy source of discomfort. And reciprocally, to be in the delicate position of discomfort can be the germ of building a new comfort. A double fruitful dynamic makes it easier to better seize of the type of interesting “comfort” to look for and to achieve.

In this way one can grasp the specificities of nomad and transversal artistic practices. They propose a concept of art that is not reduced to an analysis of the works and discussion of their value, but one that connects interactively the material and the gestures that allow the treatment of this material, the modalities of utilization of materials, the distribution of the participants’ functions and roles, the collective relationships within a group of artists, the relationships with the public, the logics of transmission, of appropriation, of mediation, education and teaching, up to the larger relationships with social and political aspects. In summary, all that constitutes the fabrication of a practice. It is also a question of connecting the practices in their diversity, comparing them, confronting them, and eventually combining them. This interactivity of the diverse elements of elaboration of the practices, and of the diversified practices builds up the conditions of a new definition of research as it explores both what guarantees the existence of the practices, and what constitutes a critical and reflexive view on practices.

In a publication announcing in a premonitory fashion the very large cultural diversity to which we have to be confronted today in the absence of a solid universal foundation (Culture in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis, London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997), Michel de Certeau made the following remarks:

Central here is the cultural act that is part and parcel of the “collage”, the invention of forms and combinations, and the procedures that allow such composite shapes to be multiplied. It is a technical act par excellence. Then, the attention is directed on practices. (p.49)

For him, the interest is no longer directed towards the “products”, but on the “methods of production”. In higher education, it is not a question anymore then of being content to exhibit the results of a research, but, “in the course of a collective praxis”, to explicit the ways to obtain them.

With the disappearance of universal principles, which seems characteristic of the situation we have to face today, the dominant theoretical models no longer allow us to think the plurality of “embedded or sedimentary systems”. We have no other choice than to proceed by trial and error facing particular situations in which our actions are inscribed (See page 101). Thus, concerning “the space of practices”, de Certeau notes that there is a persisting uneasiness: “the culture is soft” (p. 133). The actions of the users do not correspond to the intentions of those who rationally organize the world. The hard face is constituted by technocracy, which attempts to colonize the world in making the “manufacture of signifiers” profitable (p.134). All the voices of minorities are heard, projected by the media, but they tend to be instantly classified and itemized in museums or in definitively fixed written forms: they “cease then to speak and to be spoken”. He speaks of a border, which only lets through what is already dead:

This borderline circumscribes what we can say and make of the place from which we are speaking. Nothing from other cultures crosses this barrier without coming to us dead on arrival. Whatever exists is what irreducibly escapes us. The theory and practice of culture accede to honesty when we cast away the pretention of overcoming, by way of generalities the rift that separates the places where an experience or an event can be uttered. From scientific knowledge (when it is exclusive), all the way up to indigent discourses on “values” or on “humanism”, countless ways of eliminating other existences can be named. The common trait is that of the drive to establish unity, that is, a totalizing vision. Culture in the singular always imposes the law of a power. A resistance needs to be directed against the expansion of a force that unifies by colonizing, and that denies at once its own limits and those of others. At stake is a necessary relation of every cultural production with death that limits it and with the battle that defends it. Culture in the plural endlessly calls for a need to struggle. (p.139)(See also the station « La Culture au pluriel » of the present edition)

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Transversal: Hybrid (English version)

concepts

A Transversal Escape: Hybrid

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Hybrid :

Transversal peregrinations can lead us to the hybrid character of many artistic approaches: a hybrid object cannot be definitively classified in a particular domain. For a long time artists worked already on forms situated at the borders between different artistic domains: sound and/or graphic poetry, musical theatre, musical graphic scores, sound sculptures, etc. In creating hybrid artistic objects, they tried to differentiate themselves from the dominant notion of the autonomy of art and of the strict separation between dance, music, theatre and visual arts. This idea of composite object includes any artistic act that mixes and intertwines at least two usually separated domains of thought. It is not a matter of a simple superimposition of specialties combined in some performance, as for example with the opera, but effectively of an act or an object that can be interpreted by the public as being part of either domain or both domains at the same time. An example of this is the idea of typoésie developed by Jérôme Peignot, which combines the visual characteristics of typography with the poetry contained in the grouping of letters, mixing indissolubly background and form. This practice, very common to avant-garde movements of the 20th Century, can be perceived at the same time as poetry (text), visual arts (signs distributed in space) and music (rhythm of the scattered signs and onomatopoeias).

Concerning the definition of hybrid, several Internet pages and dictionaries give us the following information: which comes from a natural or artificial crossbreeding between two different entities (synonym: mixed, metis, crossed), and in a metaphorical sense, which does not belong to any particular genre, which is strangely composed of diverse, disparate and surprising elements (heteroclite, composite, illegitimate).

It is possible to qualify artistic practice in general as a “multiform hybrid of tinkering about in context”. Terms like “plural” or “multiple” could also be proposed, but these adjectives are already largely used to qualify artistic “professional jobs”, which are often removed from the practices and ways of making things of all those who, sometimes without speaking about it, make music, make dance, make graphisms, etc., while cheerfully tinkering about (Claude Levi-Strauss) or poaching (Michel de Certeau). Artistic practices can be broken into six different types of activity, to be “distinguished in order to be better linked” (this felicitous expression, which points out the goal of an analysis that breaks practice up into its component parts, is inspired by the writings of Edgar Morin and Edouard Glissant): creation, performance, mediation/education, research, administration, technical aspects/making instruments. There are no boundaries in between them, they spread in continuity in intercrossing edges, they are shifty and very often superimposed. Our hypothesis is that each artistic practice is hybridized by all the different types of interactions. And all these at all times claim a jubilatory manner of going about things!

Contributions of the PaaLabRes Collective – 2015
Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

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Transversal: Créolisation (English version)

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A Transversal Escape: « Créolisation »

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« Créolisation » (According to Edouard Glissant):

Edouard Glissant defines the key notion of « créolisation » as the confrontation of disparate elements belonging to several distinct cultures, which can result in the creation of completely unforeseeable new things that stretch far beyond a cultural juxtaposition or even a negotiated synthesis of the diverse elements at hand.

Edouard Glissant clarifies his thought in the following manner:

The world becomes creolized, that is to say that the world cultures, today brought into contact one with another in a thundering and absolutely conscious manner, are changing in exchanging, through irremediable collisions, merciless wars, but also with forward movements of consciousness and hope, which allow us to say – without being utopist, or rather, in accepting to be so – that human groups today abandon, with difficulty, what they obstinately held to for a long time, namely that the identity of a human being is only valid and recognizable if it is exclusive of the identity of all the other possible beings.”
(Introduction à une poétique du divers, Paris: Gallimard, 1996, p. 15), our translation.

Glissant uses the image of the “circularity” of the spiral, in order to oppose it to the “arrowed projection” of colonization (Introduction à une poétique du divers, p. 14). For him, a memorial trace, like the one reconstituted by the American black slaves and “valid for all”, is opposed to the so-called universal « thought proceeding by systems” or « systems of thought » (p. 17). He says: “The trace supposes and carries not the thought of being but the wandering of the existing” (p. 69). According to him, « créolisation » can be achieved only if the cultural elements at hand are rigorously “equivalent in value”, so that a given cultural group would not impose on another its methods, practices and concepts. He chooses the term “créolisation” in preference to “métissage” (interbreeding), because, he writes, “’créolisation’ is unpredictable while it is possible to calculate the effects of interbreeding” (page 19). He sees « créolisation » as a dynamic process, which cannot be decreed in advance, and should emerge from walking on a pathway, from a transversal going through.

Contributions of the PaaLabRes Collective – 2015
Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

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Ecology of practices

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What do we mean by “ecology of practices”? The term ecology affirms that living beings have some relations to their environment, in configurations of interdependence. Life and above all the survival of living beings depend on other beings, whether live or inert, in particular situations. Ecology has become an important preoccupation because of the threats to the survival of the whole planet today, precisely in relation to human actions. The ecological questions more and more pertain to important cultural domains and to the relationships between human beings; in going beyond a purely scientific preoccupation, they intrude on the political sphere.

In the arts, ecological concerns centered recently on awareness of natural phenomena, the disappearance of certain species, or on heightened attention to our urban environment in the perspective of a moralization of excessive uses and of a desire to create reasoned practices respecting the spaces of others and the environment in general. In the cultural domain, ecology is considered as the influence that the environment exerts on behaviors and mentalities of individuals immerged in it.

For the PaaLabRes collective, the utilization of the term of “ecology” has another meaning in its relation to practices. The term “practice” refers to concrete situations involving actions inscribed in some duration. Practice most often implies relationships between human beings in a collective, and also interactions of these same beings with objects, all this happening within a well-defined material, cultural and institutional environment. It is this particular agency of all the interactive unstable elements in duration that constitutes a “practice”. In artistic domains, the practices are defined at the same time by:

  1. Some hierarchic relationships between qualified persons. The idea of hierarchy implies that there are more or less qualified people and that the qualifications might vary according to defined roles, certain roles having the reputation of being more prestigious than others. Hierarchies can be more or less affirmed and more or less controlled by democratic rules.
  2. Relationships between persons and objects resulting in particular actions. The objects influence the actions of people as much as people exert their craft on the objects. Some technical gestures are developed according to how tools of production behave.
  3. Usages that are more or less fixed by rules. The rules come from established traditions, or can be invented for determined contexts. They are more or less explicit, and when they are implicit, there is often the impression that they do not exist. In order to create the absence of rules, one has to invent mechanisms, which in order to be efficient have to be organized like sheet music.
  4. Relationships with the external world, notably with the public through particular media. But also the relationships with other neighboring practices, in order to be different from them, to be influenced by them, or in order to disqualify them.

Practices can then be thought of as beings, as living entities in themselves, which interact in various ways with other practices. The interaction between practices is precisely what is interesting for the PaaLabRes collective as a fundamental concept to be developed.

The concept of “ecology of practices” has been developed by the philosopher of sciences Isabelle Stengers, in the Tome 1 of Cosmopolitics.1 In an interview published in the magazine Recherche2, Stengers, talking about ecology in terms of relations between individuals and between populations, describes them as offering three possible options, which vary according to circumstances: a) the individuals can be preys; b) they can be predators; c) they can be considered as resources. One of the favorite examples for Stengers, inspired by the practices introduced by Tobie Nathan, gravitates around traditional pre-modern or non-modern psychotherapy practices. Most of the time these practices have some difficulty to coexist with scientific approaches that disqualify all the others in the name of rationality, and that tolerate them only reluctantly as part of a museum-based survival of cultures. However, the keys to success of therapies can often be found in the belief systems and cultural environment of the concerned individuals:

In ecological terms, the way in which a human practice chooses to present itself to the outside world, and notably when it proposes to enter in relationship with the general public, is part of its identity. At present, the identity of physics is at the same time made up of all the beings that it has created, the neutrino among others, and of its incapacity to present itself to the general public. For me, to try to create new links of interest around physics and other practices means making a proposition, not of radical change but of a mutation of identity. (…) The physicist would no longer be this being who, suddenly, intervenes in the name of rationality disqualifying all the others. (…) In my speculation, this physicist could become an ally if we would decide, for example, to take seriously the traditional psychotherapeutic practices that bring into play djinns and ancestors. He would know that in saying that, one does not pretend that the djinn is of the same nature as the neutrino: he would know that one is going to be interested in the risk of these practices, in what they are able to achieve. In this world in which the practices are present through their risks and their requirements, the physicist can coexist with the traditional therapist.3.

In the arts, in particular in musical art, because it is so much linked to identity problems, the disqualification of the practices of others is the rule rather than the exception. The genres or styles are more often preys or predators, rarely resources. The disqualification can be manifest in four different ways and often simultaneously: firstly it can be made on the basis of competences or of technical artistic expertize, either for example that someone would not be able to read musical scores, or that someone could not improvise during a social gathering; secondly the disqualification can be measured according to a presupposed authenticity, either for example by blaming a practice for not respecting a tradition, or on the contrary by accusing a tradition of being the source of a lethal stagnation; thirdly, disqualification is induced in relation to a public success, either in accusing the artistic form of being commercial to the point of not belonging any more to a legitimate art, or in blaming it for being too far removed from public understanding to the point of being completely marginalized; and fourthly disqualification can manifest itself in relation to official learning institutions, either when a given practice would be excluded from them, or on the contrary when this same practice strongly asserts its existence by staying outside any institutions, considered in this case as the source of too confortable existences.

The issue of attempting to get rid of the infernal logics behind the disqualification of the practices of others, in order to replace it by a pacified ecology of practices, is far from simple. The solutions lie not in putting an end to conflicts or in forcing cultures into an idealized “melting pot”, but in seeking rather to organize the confrontation of practices on the principle of mutual recognition and equal rights. The main difficulty of this political program lies in that it is not sufficient to let cultures coexist in a given space, even if it seems pacific at first: the multiples enclaves in a shared institution (or a common territory) remaining in mutual ignorance of their respective raison d’être and simply limiting their relationships to their juxtaposition, or even to their superimposition, do not create the conditions of a viable democratic contract likely to pacify fundamentalist antagonisms. The effective confrontation of practices in mechanisms that have to be invented, which oblige them to interact while respecting their own existence, without compromise, becomes a necessity in order to face (at least partially) the difficulties in which our societies tend to sink. Only the existence of public institutions dedicated to this effect could arguably avoid the permanent danger of more or less violent civil wars.

The ecology of practices takes the form of the continuous emergence of new practices stemming from the already existing ones and continuous disappearance of other practices. This phenomenon seems to have been strongly reinforced since the advent of electronic media’s instantaneous communication. The onset of these numerous practices implies in each case, as noted by Isabelle Stengers, the “production of values, (…) the proposal of new modes of evaluation, of new meanings ».4In the perspectives of the ecology of practices, the issue is not to think anymore that these values, evaluations and meanings should replace the old ones in the name of a truth that one would have finally discovered, but that they “are about the production of new relations that are added to a situation already produced by a multiplicity of relations ».5 The extraordinary multiplicity of practices that emerge and disappear, through the very varied content of the meanings they express, results in a calling into question of normalization processes that led to universally recognized truths imposed on all. To ideas, the source of imposed “undeniable facts”, is opposed the resistance of practices that confront the instability of realities, and their values relative to contexts.

Consequently, the idea of ecology of practices is not only about the contents of the works or of artistic approaches in relation to sound ecology: that is on the one hand the issues relative to sound pollution in our societies, and on the other hand the enhancement of diversified sound environments. The ecology of practices involves a complex ensemble that gravitates around notions of interaction between human beings, and between human and non-human beings, in particular with inert objects and technologies. In this context artistic practices are confronted, like any other practices, with difficult dilemmas having to do for example with issues such as data hacking, respect of author’s rights, advertising power of the media, cultural industries economy and the funding of alternative practices, free or paid access to information, facilitated access to learning (notably about specialized techniques) and to critical thought, access to employment, in short anything that contributes to influence the environment, its unstable and uncertain future, and the beings living in it.

Jean-Charles François – 2015
Translation Kerrie Szuch and Nancy François

1. Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, Bononno, R (trans.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (2010).

2. Isabelle Stengers : « Inventer une écologie des pratiques » www.larecherche.fr/savoirs/autre/isabelle-stengers-inventer-ecologie-pratiques-01-04-1997-69210

3. Ibid., p. 59.

4. Cosmopolitics I, op. cit., p. 32.

5.

 

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Orality

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Sensory Body and Learned Models

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In musical discourse, orality is often summarized in two assertions: to “learn by rote” and “without score”. Yet orality, and the term seems an over-simplification, refers in fact to a sensorial involvement in sonic practice. This mobilizes conjointly the ear listening, the eye sighting, the voice singing, the body dancing, the feet stomping, the hands playing, the word arising, in the service of a project built on experiences, trial and error and individual and collective constructions.

This sensoricity, a globalizing term taken up by Alain Savouret, plays a part in the ineffable side that any human action has, because it cannot be modeled (or escapes any definitive all-embracing modelization). It is constantly redefined by the permanent absorption of new experiences in the audible, vocal, tactile, gustative, visual, body motion domains… of the being in action – in reaction to the environment. Moreover, it integrates elements of traditions relative to the socio-cultural milieu of each and everyone.

Every human being has this ineffable part, which can be observed in his/her most diverse actions. It constantly interacts with the model-based part relative to the undertaken action, more or less mastered by the actor (manual techniques, theoretical knowledge, historical culture, …) and it leads to unique productions because carried by her/his global being.

Henceforth, the question is not about developing or refusing orality as defined in this way (it is there!) but rather about evaluating as closely as possible the existing models, symbolized by the relationship to the written in practice. This dosage, unconscious in nature, (the unconscious domain), can be questioned, be brought to light by the confrontation with others. Collective open practices can thus be the place where these individual equilibriums are elucidated. Greater mobility of boundaries, more porosity, can be found there. Interpersonal tinkering about becomes possible, each person bringing his/her stock of objects with a view to creating some assemblages that can become, or not, definitive realizations.

Orality questions our relation to writing and to the model to reproduce. There is orality in all societies; it is the degree of the presence and usage of writing, which introduces differences between, on the one hand, reproduction of the model, analytical discourses, and on the other hand variability of the objects in the time of their production, analogical discourses.

This point of view on orality allows one to consider musical practice from the sensorial perspective of the human body as a variable to the learned models.

Michel Lebreton – avril 2014
Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

 

Cultural Operations

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Episode 1 : operation, cultural operation


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This is not an embezzlement of definition.

Cultural operations are already, to begin with, an operation…

The choice of a feminist Latin etymology

Operation comes from the Latin word “operatio” (adding to it an “n” of love), meaning to work and a work.
A first origin can be found in “opus, operis”, a work and to work, but also as in work of art, a finished product. Or we could have the opos-opus of sap and juice, of sweat or sesterce, which one can get from working… PaaLabRes relies on a second origin, taken from the antique feminization (in the tactical feminist-action) of the first opus, operis: “opera”, to work and a work, but also activity; that is of a production in progress. In the framework of certain customs, an idea of providing service, with application and attention, with taking care and trouble, is associated with this word.

The verb operor (to work and making something, but also to practice, to exercise, to produce, to achieve) adds the meaning of to have some effect. It appears that the operative roots of the construction of all these words are:

  • ops, for power, strength, means, force including the idea of help, support and assistance.
  • op, radical that indicates the eye or the sight (as in optical matters for example), and by extension, analysis (as in biopsy, analysis of a living tissue), and also the prefix indicating “opposite” and “against” (to oppose, to be in opposition).

The “op” of hip hop, and the hype and the hop, of the oopsy daisy!
And the hit and the pot, of the horsy’s hops and of the seal’s seashore
Let’s stop our ding dongs
A   p o s t a l   s t a m p
No hip and no hope, no more dis-hope or sur-hope?
Suripo and syrup’s la la my don dingbat
[song in the process of being recorded]

 

Some previous (not yet cultural?) uses of operations ?)

An operation, “action done by some power, some force, which produces a physical or moral effect” [Cnrtl, A], is mysterious and magical. In the first traces of written texts we have, RELigion was not far: with the Holy Operation, old lips pear eat also in its operations.

As “action carried out according to some method, through the combination of an ensemble of means” [« action faite selon un méthode, par la combinaison d’un ensemble de moyens », Larousse French dictionary, opérer 1-opération 2], another religion grabs this term: l’ECONomics and BUSiness carry out speculative, financial, and monetary operations.
Les MATHématics themselves contributed by specifying an operation as “a process of a determinate nature that, starting with known elements, engenders a new one” [« processus de nature déterminée qui, à partir d’éléments connus, permet d’en engendrer un nouveau », Robert French dictionary, 3]. It is interesting to pay a short visit to “logic”: “examples of logical operations: identity, negation, conjunction, either exclusive or inclusive, non-disjunction, inclusion, non-conjunction” [« Les opérations logiques sont : l’identité, la négation, la conjonction, ou exclusif, ou inclusif, la non disjonction, l’inclusion, la non conjonction », Cnrtl B2b, Guilh. 1969].

And the MILITary (it is strange that, in dictionaries, “milit.” means military and not militant)… Look! They have not shown the tip of their nose under gasmasks. They annexed operation as an “ensemble of strategic movements or of tactical manœuvres of a deployed army, executed in order to attain a given objective” [Cntrl, C1]

Movement, manœuvre… strategy, tactic… all this evokes something… no, not in this context, actually mostly against this military / police context… the “lightning-raid operation” by Alpha Bondy of the Brigadier Sabari: the police violence (already more than 30 years ago!). And also another book with a revolutionary content… even an introduction? Ah yes: The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau (translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984)… which has “the purpose (…) to make explicit the systems of operational combination [les combinatoires d’opérations] which also compose a ‘culture’ and to bring to light the models of action characteristic of users whose status as the dominated element in society (a status that does not mean that they are either passive or docile) is concealed by the euphemistic term “consumers.” Everyday life invents itself by poaching in countless ways on the property of others.” (p. xi-xii) And here you are: “operation” in its plural form, is not very far from the word “culture”. We will come back to it.

Another big domain of the use of the term is MEDicine. An operation is here a surgical procedure performed on “some part of the living body for the purpose of modifying it, of cutting it, of taking it out” [Robert dictionary, 4], “for therapeutic, preventive, aesthetic or experimental purposes.” [Cnrtl D]. A certain number, even indeed a considerable number, are undoubtedly necessary after a military operation…

The takatak and tikitik of the machine guns
tactic of gunners,
that’s a lot of deaths, that’s a lot of deaths!
The clataclak and clatterlet of shears,
catheters and curettes,
repair bodies, repair bodies!
[song in the process of being recorded (bis)]

It is worth noting that the relative frequency of the term (in the corpus of the Trésor de la Langue Française) more than doubles between the first part and the second part of the 2Oth Century: from 5103 to 11520 occurrences (applied to a 100 thousand words [Cntrl, Fréq. Rel. litter.]). Is it thanks to the progresses in medicine? Is it the fault of the multiplication of military deployments? Actually, it’s both, thank you captain (in an operetta)? Or else is it due to the fast pace of financialisation? It is certainly not the appearance of the phrase “cultural operation” in the conclusion of Culture in the Plural by Michel de Certeau [(trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis, London: The University of Minnesota Press, 1997) p.133-147] that was the cause of an “operation” runaway…

A cultural operation?

At first, it is necessary to clarify the words culture and cultural. We could multiply the definitions that do not limit the so-called cultural field to the arts and artists. They are numerous, and it is fundamental to constantly recall them in order to fight against the confiscation of the process of conceptualizations by recognized artists. Michel de Certeau writes in Culture in the Plural:

“Surely if it is true that any human activity can be cultural, it is not necessarily the case or is not yet inevitably recognized as such. If culture is really going to exist, it is not enough to be the author of social practices; these social practices need to have meaning for those who effectuate them.” [p. 67]

And in this framework, what can be an operation?

For Michel de Certeau, “the cultural expression is foremost an operation”. Concerning this idea, he indicates three instances: “(1) To do something with something; (2) to do something with someone; (3) to change everyday reality and modify one’s life style to the point of risking existence itself.” [Ibid. p. 143] For him the operation is the meeting point of a particular trajectory that goes across a place, a “practice of a space that is already constructed”. Here, the spaces are “determined and differentiated places” organized by the economic system, social hierarchies, the manners of expressing oneself, the traditions, etc. [p. 145] The trajectory modifies through particular actions the conditions of the instituted places:

“Thus, cultural operations are movements. They inscribe creations in coherences that are both legal and contractual. They stipple and trace them with trajectories that are not indeterminate but that are unsuspected, that deform, erode and slowly change the equilibrium of social constellations.” [p. 145-146]

A zebra [“They stipple and trace them” is used here as a translation for “Elles les zèbrent”, and the verb “zèbrer” comes from the animal “zèbre”] is “the wild donkey” [“l’âne sauvage”, Larousse French Dictionary] “with a very fast gallop” [“au gallop très rapide”, Robert French Dictionary], it is an “ordinary individual” [“individu quelconque”, Cnrtl], a “strange individual” [“individu bizarre”, Robert]… Striped like a zebra, a walker makes the cars listen to reason… To streak like a zebra is to scratch and jam the system, is to striate and “to mark with sinuous lines” [Larousse], with the signature “Zorro”…

For all the zebras who zig and zag
social constellations, star-type societies
For all the other Zadigs and other Zidanes
who dance with no ceremonial and fly in the nets
with zazou’s zedoary of zipped zany
And some hot pepper! Some erosions, movements, alterations,
And some hot pepper! Some collusions, changes, transformations.
[song in the process of being recorded (ter)]

In addition to all this, let’s keep in mind a few ideas from the early definitions above: production as process rather than as finished product, attention and application, strength with help and support, facing up to something, engendering something new, intervention (to come in between, to emerge during something, to stand in-between, to interrupt, to mingle with, etc., a term that the military and medicine use also a lot!); likewise the notion of actions done together, or series of actions.

In the next episode, we will continue to work with the elements developed by Michel de Certeau. His book, The Practice of Everyday Life (op.cit.) begins with: “This essay is part of a continuing investigation of the operations, the ways in which users – commonly assumed to be passive and guided by established rules – operate.” (p. xi). This is the first phrase: the plural is there and the expressions linked to “operation” are very present in this general introduction….

An affair to be followed!

Nicolas Sidoroff – February 2016
Translation Jean-Charles and Nancy François

List of the dictionaries used…

Listed in the order of edition.

  • [Larousse] : Dictionnaire de la langue française, Lexis. (1992). Jean Dubois. Paris : ed. Larousse. (original edition, 1979).
  • [Robert] : Le nouveau Petit Robert (dictionnaire alphabétique et analogique de la langue française). Text by Paul Robert, revised et amplified under the direction of Josette Rey-Debove and Alain Rey. (2008). Paris : Dictionnaires Le Robert (new ed. millesime, first edition of Petit Robert, 1967, of nouveau Petite Robert in 1993).
  • [Cnrtl] : Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. [consulted on line: cnrtl.fr/definition/op%ération , February 11, 2016]

For the etymology:

  • Dictionnaire Latin-Français. Félix Gaffiot. (1934). Paris : Hachette [consulted on line: lexilogos.com/latin/gaffiot.php, February 11, 2016]
  • Les racines latines du vocabulaire français. Jacques Cellard. (2007). Bruxelles : De Boeck, ed. Duculot 4e édition.
  • Dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français. Jean Dubois, Henri Mitterand, Albert Dauzat. (2011). Paris : Larousse, ‘Les grands dictionnaires’.
  • Dictionnaire d’étymologie du français. Jacqueline Picoche, with the collaboration of Jean-Claude Rolland. (2015). Paris : Le Robert, coll. ‘Les usuels’. (new ed., first ed., 1992)

 

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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.

 

 

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