TESTIFY TO MAKE MEMORY OF THE REALITY – REFLECTIONS ON THE WORK OF JOCHEN GERZ
Gilles GUIGUES is a philosopher, a doctor in letters and arts of the University of Provence, Aix-Marseille I and former member of LAKES (Letters Arts Communication Sciences of the language) of the same University. He manages researches and teaches the philosophy of the action in various superior centers of studies preparing for diplomas of the sector of the social and cultural engineering. He published in particular « Rainer Maria Rilke, l’existence en figures » (L’harmattan Ed., 2012) and « Receuillement de Socrate » » (L’Harmattan Ed., 2014). In this contribution, he makes us a brilliant plea of the intrinsic value of the act of memory in what it contains of forced, of heroic, of normalized, of reality, deceitful, of representations finally in front of the « historic truth » of a very society subject to the dogma of the iconicity. » The History, itself, can only suffer to want so to strengthen, to solidify, the representation of the memory by the recourse to a dogmatic realism, because this one invariably claims to promulgate also what the situation is regarding the memory normality. Moreover, the examples are not lacking where the History is used for the benefit of a certain artistic normalization. Quite the opposite, that the art chooses to embody the memory in what Pierre Francastel calls a » representational reality » which by-passes or, to say the least, extends as far as possible the system of coded representations, it will invest then a space so arbitrary as if it was abstracted; de facto, i twill be far from the determinism of the memory traditions « , tells us straightaway the author before re-placing the part of the artistic intention, its renunciation, its embodiment and its necessary insurrection in front of systems and of the various memorials (in reference to Walter Benjamin): » Yet, the artist, who wants to do something from the memory, must be able to consider it as an alive process. To confront with it, he has to use trickery with his nature, established partially by forgetting; use trickery with the current artistic constraints and the traditional codes of the mnemonic representation. « . It is so that is introduced the work of Jochen Gerz: The Witnesses who concerned the grouping and the strength of women’s testimonies living in Cahors and having attended Maurice Papon’s trial after war. The artist looked in this historic project to establish the link between the intimate truth and the public truth, to show the gap between the generations and to transcribe the group in the form of short-lived projections, of urban posting or of writings. Then, according to Ricoeur quoted by the author, a unique document where » The mnemonic representation, the vehicle of the link in the past, so becomes itself object of history « , where witnesses are able to live again and sometimes to try to forget the memory or » that took place » of these painful events, to question on the immoderation, the madness or the inescapability of the war. Gilles Guiges ends on the role of the essential needy artist in man » to make memory « : he leans on the esthetic experience to create in this bottomless pit a new object of knowledge. » At this moment » he tells us, resting on the thickness of the bergsonian time seen by inside, » nothing prevents the lighting of the past from appearing as a kind of the truth for the present, because it contributes to forge a new method of approach the memory (so revived, revivified). Because, if the past always appears at us as what reveals our temporal difference with a kind of » having been » indisputable, the passeity of past does not mean for all that its definitive abolition, sound » not more « . And it’s there indeed the success of Jochen Gerz that to have allowed this new direction of the facts through the work of art or according to the author » to make memory of the reality « .
KEYS FOR AN UNDERSTANDING IN THE CREATION – COGNITIVE POWERS AND CREATIVE POWERS IN SYNAESTHETIC CIRCLES
Bernard TROUDE is PhD in Materiologies and Sciences of the Art at the University Paris I and researcher in contemporary sociology at the CEAQ (Center of Studies on the Current and the Everyday life) established in 1982 by Michel Maffesoli and Georges Balandier within the University Paris V. Also engineer and designer, he leads an activity of research and development in industrial architecture, being interested in the rare materials and in their recycling. He applied for as such diverse patents and led his PhD on the societal and artistic components connected to the structure of this waste. He is interested at the same time to the representations of sexuality and published numerous works on this theme, that of the future of waste or real time (cf. Repenser l’ordinaire, 2012, L’art des déchets, Cahiers Européens de l’Imaginaire n°2, 2010, CNRS Eds., PLASTIR 36, 09/2014). In this essay, taking into account at the same time the relationship art-science and the strong synesthetic component present in the genesis of any work of art, he raises the following thorough questions: « How does one become artist (painter, sculptor, writer or musician)? or still: « Or, would there be a predestination to be an artist? We know, we do not become artists, we are. What is for certain, the genesis of the requirement to cause this act? The immediate answer is in this complex process, the thought and the act, making that we are creators; I want to name the sublimation. As this expression instructs, sublimation is the attempt to perfect the act, absolutely distinguish current acts and make it remarkable.” Straightaway we notice the family ties between this interrogation and the object of his previous essay » The art and the plasticity of the brain » treated in the n°36 of PLASTIR, namely where the cognitive plasticity and the creative plasticity join or separate in the authentic creative approach, concerning painting, music or poetry? Subject that he approaches by various biases, such the nature of the neuronal flows committed in the creative act, the links between intuition and intention, the connective intelligence of de Kerckhove, the third included of Lupasco, the principle of enaction of Varela, the eulogy of the sensitive reason of Maffesoli or still the synesthetic » listen-see « . Enrichment which leads us to consider all the phenomenological stake in this question which the author develops with regard to three main trunk roads: the scientific sensibilities including the complexity, the aesthetics and the cognition, the artistic sensibilities, particularly those involving the senses (synesthesia), and the human sensibilities (sociopolitical, relational, psychoanalytical, unconscious, ideological, etc.) the extent of which takes aback, collapse and revealed by potential identical conflicts or memorials in within the same individual or within the community. Bernard Troude handles in depth all these subjects without neglecting it any traces: neural, imaginal, psychic, sensory, creative, memorial. Indeed, that it is about letters, about Street art, iconicity, surrealism, philosophy, societal facts or choseity : Baudrillard, Dotremont, Sebbag, Smells, Bachelard, Jung, Camus or Breton are there to testify of it. And the author to end on the nature of the art, by standing back with regard to this field of research situated between intuition and intention: » After this long time of irradiant subjectivity, a shape of irony of the object can happen. What is it to be said? It is to say that it is necessary to go beyond a questioning of the medical but certainly the philosophy of the subject of which takes care a large part of the contemporary secret relations. These do not question formally their ascendancies but remain taken in boring overstrains, in a ceaseless work of relinquishment. Just like the » subject of the unconscious » of the psychoanalysis, we are immobilized on a » impossible subject « , muddled in illusions. «
THE HAIKUS AS POETIC OBJECTS
Nicolas GRENIER is a lecturer at Science Po Paris, member of the Institute of the High Japanese Studies (Collège de France) and defines himself as a national or hexagonal poet. He was published in particular in American (Tower Journal with Kay Ryan, Pulitzer prize 2011) and French magazines (Europe) and is a member of the selection panel of the Review of the French-speaking Tanka. His contribution to our review PLASTIR arises from a questioning on the essence and the modernity of haiku which he handles in his last book Périphérique(s), Coll. Haikus, Envolume Ed., 2014. Ring road (peripheral) presented at the same time as the privileged route of the modern man and his liminarity or buffer zone between the conscious and the unconscious, the immediacy and the point to be reached, the place of an hesitating pilgrimage and ceaselessly repeated. Routes opening to the wandering, to the wandering of the thought and there, convenient to the concise poetic experience ideally formulated in haiku. Then, the presentation of this article in the form of interview with the author on the nature of haikus as poetic objects, on poets’ contribution contemporary as Borges or Tranströmer in this poetic shape or still on the genesis and the geography of the semantic networks. Poetic networks or strictly concreted very present in the work of the author who does not hesitate to use the symbolism of the figure to form a Paris ring road of 75 haikus in analogy with the department of the Seine, among which 17 illustrate the syllabic volume of the shape and adopt a metric basis of 5,7 and 5 as regards the rest area of the poet! For Nicolas Grenier, the practice of haiku is a matter at the same time of the search for a protolanguage and for an opening on the imagination. However, he sees there not at all a superior rise of the spirit, but a practice anchored in the human existence of which Far East taught us the volatility, the short-lived value and the infinite small size in front of powers of the Cosmos … Drop in the ocean of life, certainly, but is not it there – in this passage from the informed to in the formed – the beginning of anything which escapes us?
SEMANTICS AT TARSKI AND THOM
Abdelkader BACHTA is an epistemologist and a professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis. Faithful collaborator of our review, he published several works on the spatiotemporality at Newton and Kant (University of Tunis, 1991 and L’Harmattan publisher, 2002), the scientific epistemology of the Lights (L’harmattan Ed., 2001), the scientific spirit and the Arabo-Muslim civilization (L’Harmattan Ed., 2004), the constructal law of Adrain Bejan L’Harmattan Ed., 2009) and more recently on “Thom and the scientific modelisation” (L’Harmattan Ed., 2013). And it is about the work of the famous mathematician that he published a series of papers in PLASTIR questioning the dynamics and the modelling, the cognitive sciences or the ontological foundations of the theory of the disasters (cf. PLASTIR n°27 (06/2012), n°29 (12/2012) et n°32 (09/2013)). In this fourth shutter dedicated to the thomist philosophy, Abdelkader Bachta puts face to face two High Schools of mathematical modelling, those of Tarski (logic) and Thom (model making), both recognizing the pregnant role of semantics in depends on the syntax, but opposing on the ground of the modern logic. For the one, Thom, fundamentally geometrician, the logic to be held is realistic and Aristotelian. For other one, Tarski, algebrist, the logic is idealistic and linked to the measure, close to the Platonism. This difference of ontological point of view, if it is more marked at Thom, is the starting point of this new analysis of the mathematical logic, the author of which specifies us straightaway the opposed traditional sources: a syntactic movement questioning the truth (Boole, Gödel, Hilbert) and a fundamental semantic movement (Frege, Russel, Wittgenstein). We let you discover the foundations of this progress.