A PHYLOSOPHY
CONTENTS
1 / THE FORM Archipelagic Thinking
2 / THE METHOD Serendipity
3 / THE BACKGROUND Poetics of relationship
4 / THE HORIZON Outrage & Delights
1 / the FORM
Archipelagic
Thinking
It is not enough to say: Long live the multiple.
The multiple, we must do it.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal,
necessary in its entirety, fragile or possible in its unit, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
A process
The archipelago is the very shape of the contemporary world as we perceive it today. Both galaxies and planets, ecosystems, living beings, cultures and cities are constellations of stable elements in constant relationships.
WHAT SHAPES FOR WHICH CONTEMPORARY WORLD?
The "Mondialité" d’Edouard Glissant
Excerpt from Mondialite or Les Archipels by Edouard Glissant
by Hans Ulrich Obrist (Editor), Asad Raza (Editor)
“What we call globalization, which is standardization according to the lowest common denominator, the reign of multinationals, standardization, the wild ultraliberalism of global markets (a company conveniently transfers its factories to a distant country, patients cannot buy cheaper medicines in a neighboring country), and so on, everyone can see; it is the parade of everyone's hackneyed platitudes, repeated endlessly, but it is also, all of this, the negative side of a prodigious reality that I call globality. It projects, this globality, into the unprecedented adventure that we have all been given to experience today, and in a world which, for the first time, and so vividly, and in such an immediate, violent way, is understood as both multiple and singular, and inextricable. It is necessary for each of us to change our ways of understanding, living and acting in such a world. »
Hans Ulrich Obrist
As Glissant told me, “it was in these islands that the idea of creolization, of mixing cultures, was brilliantly realized.
Because the continents refuse mixing, while archipelagic thinking allows us to say that neither the identity of each person nor the collective identity are fixed and established once and for all."
(...)
I can change through exchange with others, without losing or diluting my sense of self. And this is what archipelagic thinking teaches us. I loved this idea. My sense of self becomes more complex and more urgent. And this idea of Glissant, of the archipelago, we have often discussed the idea that the archive of interviews should be a kind of archipelago.
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, Fragile or possible in its unity, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
In other words
Drawing the lace that connects the different elements of the world is a stimulating, perilous and temporary exercise. This is the very object of all fundamental research.
Some have the privilege of shaping their own islands, of creating new ones.
They forget the single axes, prefer evolving, multipolar forms, the aim full of benchmarks of the progressive enrichment of reality.
Reports
To create is not to distort or invent characters or things. It’s creating new relationships between characters and things that exist and as they exist, it’s retouching reality with reality.
Robert Bresson quoted by Laplantine
Living nature
Copying the objects that make up a still life is nothing. What is important is to express the sensation that they inspire in you, the emotion that the whole arouses, the relationships between the objects represented, the specific character of each of them, modified by its relationships with the others, all intertwined like a rope or a snake.
Henri Matisse
Lumps
Its heterogeneity is that of mille-feuille, the most difficult pastry to begin, resisting the fork by its very heterogeneity.
Michel Thévoz
Essay
Archipelago thinking is a thought of testing, of intuitive temptation, which could be opposed to continental thoughts, which are above all system-based.
Édouard Glissant
Cloth
The archipelago is diffracted, fractal, necessary in its totality, fragile or possible in its unity, passing and remaining, it is a state of the world.
Édouard Glissant
Even yourself
I am made of parts that can fit into many mechanisms;
and elements that make up an infinite number of combinations.
Paul Valéry
Archipelago
A MODERN IDEA
“The term “archipelago” can be broken down into the roots “arc” (the Greek meaning “original”, “main”) and “pelago” (a Latin derivation of an earlier Greek term meaning an open sea, a pond, a gulf, even an abyss, the feeling of being on the high seas).
Archipelago is not an ancient Greek word, but a modern Italian word made from these Greek borrowings.
The elements of the word are Greek, but there is no trace of arkhipelagos in ancient or medieval Greek (the modern word in Greek is borrowed from Italian).
Archipelago thinking is a thought of testing, of intuitive temptation, which could be opposed to continental thoughts, which are above all system-based.
Édouard Glissant
2 / THE METHOD
SERENDIPITY
Serendipity is looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer’s daughter there.
Pek Van Andel
The irony is that the royal method for experiencing discoveries is an anti-method, one that we cannot master. Serendipity, or the art of bouncing off happy coincidences, cannot be controlled any more than chance itself can be predicted.
The chance encounter is like a hole in the social net, which frees us, offers us a passage.
Lewis Hyde
WHAT TO FIND NEXT TO WHAT YOU’RE LOOKING FOR
Serendipity, or the art of using fortunate coincidences, cannot be controlled any more than chance.
On the other hand, an attitude which allows chance to bear fruit, one which
1) agrees to expose himself,
2) notice the unusual.
In other words
Availability
There is no shortage of opportunities. We are the ones who miss them.
Tibor Fischer
Active
There is an intermediate degree between “the act” and “the occasion”, that where we provoke, where we attract the opportunity.
Franz Kafka
Mill
Welcoming errors does not contradict chance but corroborates it. Jorge Luis Borges
Necessary
Even the fortuitous elements were made necessary by the action they exerted after the fact on the whole. Franz Kafka
Prepared
In the field of observation, chance only favors prepared minds. Louis Pasteur
Cascade
If I don't understand Einstein, it doesn't matter. That will make me understand something else. Pablo Picasso
Unexpected
I like to have the actors rehearse with scenes that are not in the script or that will not be in the film because we are trying to establish their characters and for me a good interpretation is knowing how to react. Jim Jarmusch
3 / THE BACKGROUND
POETICS OF RELATIONSHIP
I am made of parts that can fit into many mechanisms; and elements that make up an infinite number of combinations.
Paul Valéry
An aesthetic
The writer Harry Mulisch noted our little conservative inclination common to all: “When visiting someone, we always sit in the place we occupied the first time.” Many more details than we believe follow this inclination, this memory. We go where we've already been, we do what we've already done, we see who we know. Knowing this inexorable numbness is already stopping it a little.
A sense of memory
Each place located in certain works opens up a terrain of thought. We think of the method of loci (places in Latin), Memory Palace or mental palaces. This art of remembrance has been practiced since Antiquity. It makes it possible to structure long lists of contemporary elements on the basis of memories of places with which they are associated. A vast mental landscape then emerges, deploying a philo-diversity of infinite richness...
Relations
Against essentialism
Essentializing something or someone consists of reducing (an individual for example) to only one of its dimensions, which results from a reduction of reality. To essentialize is to apply a unique, deliberately biased label. It also consists, most of the time, of REIFYING reality, that is to say transforming and reducing an individual, a work, etc. to the state of an object.
Example: The Foreigners, the women, the men, the whites, blacks, artists, nobles, commoners, Jews, the Van Goghs, the abstract people, ... Impoverishment is systematic.
Everything is relational
The important thing is not the things, it is the relationships between things.
Denis Podalydès quoting Pierre Bourdieu.
Unlike the essentialization of the world, considering the relational aspect of what constitutes us shows very simply that everything has real meaning only as a function of a relationship with something else, of a relationship, of an always particular and changing context. The work here proceeds from this relational evidence.
I therefore call beautiful everything which contains in itself enough to awaken in my understanding the idea of relationships.
Denis Diderot
A TANGO WITH NUANCES
The needs and dangers of life generally ensure forced mobility, but if the environment is comfortable, natural inertia (that which maintains a body in its state in the absence of an external cause) risks insidiously fossilizing us.
There is no more useful attitude than to get moving again, to follow an external soundtrack that invites you to shake up everything that is not stone.
It's about putting the mind in motion, choosing everything except a home, pushing the head to the antipodes, going where the arrow is going, drawing the target afterwards, and being surprised at having aimed so well.
In other words
Tilt
Many realize late that an arrow's destiny is to fly
and not to care.
Roberto Juarroz
Elastic
The philosophy of the relationship would not only be an art of wandering but literally a wandering philosophy, whose poles and points of exchange would constantly move.
Édouard Glissant
Dancer
I am a man of movement for whom immobility is a constraint.
Waslaw Nijinsky
Shade
I don't evolve: I travel.
Fernando Pessoa
Locomotion
Think ! Rather act on my machine of being (and thinking) to find myself in a position to be able to think new, to have possibilities of truly new thoughts.
Henri Michaux
From the front
Fear is a passive state, and the goal is to be active and take control, to be alive in the here and now.
The movement is from passive to active, because if the past is not denied in the present, we do not live.
Louise Bourgeois
Weird
Wandering thought is a special faculty.
Samuel Beckett
Perpetual motion
All art is a search towards the same goal; if we ever reached it, it would be over; there would be no more art, everything would be frozen, immobile, absent.
However, in nature, everything is mobile, everything is possible.
Alberto Giacometti
Meridian
Here are the interior landscapes of a man long gone to the pole of himself.
André Breton
Kayak
Let us not waste time analyzing our thoughts, on the contrary try to row further, to keep the pen (like an oar) perpetually in the current, in order to make an exact transcription of the passage.
Henry David Thoreau
On Pushkin
Not a day goes by without this force, this itinerant inspiration, creating some instantaneous performance here or there.
Vladimir Nabokov
4 / THE HORIZON
OUTRAGE & DELIGHTS
All works of world literature I divide into two groups: those which are permitted and those which are written without permission. The first is vomit, the others, a little air that we steal. Osip Mandelstam
We are regularly touched by the aesthetic here and there, that of the forest or of people who strive to do their best in art as elsewhere. However, there are moments when this pleasure becomes what it is: a soft wallpaper without brilliance or in common with the part of disturbance that the intimate truth allows to transmute into deep emotion.
This complex, uncertain part then suddenly agrees with the understanding when it wavers. We are caught between unformulable questions. This is where the encounter with facets hitherto out of reach of existence becomes desirable because possible.
HOW OUTRAGE IS THE CONDITION OF DELIGHTS
The outrage meted out to preconceived ideas, to ordinary clichés, to the banal decorative comfort of the doxa of common sense and reason is patent.
Something trembles and tries to survive behind the conformist glaze which overwhelms collective sensitivity.
No work will ever offend what reality imposes on us through the heartbreaking spectacle of the brutalities that we inflict on reality.
The concept of outrage can be considered as an antidote to everything that simplifies, obliterates, enslaves and cannot recognize the free and emancipatory character of the creation of the true, that is to say multiple, self.
It is about refusing to stick to agreed limits and ensuring that art remains a power of questioning, of opening possibilities.
The movement at play, sometimes disconcerting in terms of manners or morality, is always accompanied by an appeal to the intelligence of the viewer, to his humor.
Contempt, if it exists, is never harm. It is very simply constructive, revealing us to ourselves. This is all its value, which is priceless.