Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday 1443871923, 9781443871921

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Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday

Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday Edited by

Lia Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis

Semiotics and Hermeneutics of the Everyday Edited by Lia Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Lia Yoka, Gregory Paschalidis and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7192-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7192-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: That Bloody Riddle............................................................. viii Lia Yoka and Gregory Paschalidis Chapter 1: Concepts and Categories of the Everyday The Everyday is “Insignificant” .................................................................. 2 Hecate Vergopoulos ‘Twelve thousand breakfasts’: Banalizing Anti-Epiphany – A Mathematical View................................................................................ 14 May Chehab The Semiotics of Situationist Urban Theory ............................................. 25 Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos Chapter 2: The Everyday as Marketing Method and Ritual Practice Lifestyle and Consumerism: Neoliberal Biopolitics and Islamist Experiences in the Muslim World ............................................................. 60 Fotini Tsibiridou “Carving the Body”: Ta Moko and the Eternal Play of Being in the Everyday and the Everlasting .......................................................... 82 M.-G. Lily Stylianoudi Trivial Objects, Economy and ‘Attainable Luxury’ ................................ 105 Dimitris Charitatos and Anastasia Christodoulou Everyday Fantasy .................................................................................... 115 Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou

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Chapter 3: Style versus Constraint in the Languages of the Everyday The Clay of the Earth: Everyday Objects, Functions and Thoughts in the Poetic Creation of the Generation of the 1880s ............................. 130 Georgia Pateridou Writing Under Daily Constraint(s): The Case of Administrative Writing..................................................................................................... 142 Helene Campaignolle Subtitles: A Dominant Text Type in Everyday Life ................................ 166 Anthi Wiedenmayer Stilling the Flow of Signs: Everyday Creative Actions and the Discontinuities of Museum and Gallery Display ........................ 176 Chris Dorsett with Sachiyo Goda Everyday Practices on the Internet and the Expansion of Crowdsourced Translation ............................................................................................... 193 Titika Dimitroulia Chapter 4: Representing the Quotidian The African Quotidian of the Ivorian Society as Seen through the Eyes of Aya of Yopougon ................................................................... 238 Karen Ferreira-Meyers Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Two Arab Movies: The Time that Remains, or the Staging of Silence; and Living Here, or the Poetry of Ordinary People ............................................................. 249 Sana Mselmi The Visibility of the Other in Greek Everyday Life: A Semiotic Study of Contemporary Greek Cinema .............................................................. 260 Rea Walldén The Semiotics of Subtitling of Language Variations in Television Advertisements in Greece ........................................................................ 279 Evangelos Kourdis

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“Any day is a whole story, even when you believe nothing’s happened”: Jacques Réda and the Everyday ............................................................... 290 Alexander Hertich

INTRODUCTION: THAT BLOODY RIDDLE LIA YOKA AND GREGORY PASCHALIDIS

‘The proposition here is to decode the modern world, that bloody riddle, according to the everyday’ —Lefebvre 1987

Genre painters, novelists, ethnologists, psychologists and historians have acknowledged the category of the everyday long before its canonization in the intellectual agenda of the late 20th century. As diverse as their concerns were, they all shared a general appreciation of the everyday as a spatio-temporal backdrop, a framework of action, the basso continuo to their leading themes. For cultural historian Johan Huizinga, the latter musical reference would mean much more than a metaphor. Ǽveryday life in mediaeval villages and townships was, according to him, ceaselessly orchestrated by the sound of church bells, whose familiar voices ‘now called upon the citizens to mourn, and now to rejoice, now warned them about danger, now exhorted them to piety’ (Huizinga 2001: 10). Huizinga’s discussion of the structuring role of bell sounds in mediaeval life may well serve as a preface to the science of rhythm analysis that Henri Lefebvre (2004) conceived seventy years later, with the aim of investigating the polyrhythmia of the modern world. A much earlier entry point to this science, however, can be found in Baudelaire’s late work. In his dedicatory preamble to Paris Spleen, the series of prose poems he composed between 1855 and his death in 1867, Baudelaire explains that this open-ended, kaleidoscopic work, unconventionally shaped as ‘a poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme’, was born out of his ‘exploration of huge cities, out of the medley of their innumerable interrelations’ and aimed at ‘the description of our more abstract modern life’ (Baudelaire 1970: ix-x). In the midst of composing his unrhythmic tales of modern metropolitan polyrhythmia, Baudelaire most forcefully brought to the foreground the modernist problematics of the everyday in his essay on The Painter of

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Modern Life. It is here, in the context of his praise of the brisk sketches of Constantine Guys, a newspaper illustrator with a keen eye on contemporary French modes and manners, that Baudelaire defines the objective of modern painting to be the quick capture of the transitory, fugitive and contingent element of modernity (Baudelaire 1992: 393-4). The delayed publication of his essay in the autumn of 1863, a few months after the public scandal provoked by the exhibition of Edward Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe at the first Salon des Refusés, makes it the unwitting manifesto of the nascent impressionist movement which was to excel in meeting Baudelaire’s demand for a vibrant ‘pictorial record of everyday life’ (Baudelaire 1992: 407). Baudelaire’s emphasis on innovative forms and techniques appropriate to the task of apprehending the complexity and transience of the modern everyday permeates the whole of the subsequent course of visual modernism, generating a series of successive waves and resurfaces, from the audacity of the early avant-gardes and the ceaseless inventiveness of photography and cinema, to the bewildering diversity of postmodern polyglossia, encompassing pop and neo-pop art, Fluxus and arte povera, graffiti and performance art, video and digital art. Alongside the seemingly boundless fertility of Baudelaire’s programme of visual modernism, the question of the everyday became perhaps the most distinctive feature of literary modernism as well. From the investigation of the interface between internal and external world in Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, John Dos Passos and Alfred Döblin to the dense thing-worlds of George Perec or Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the imaginary ethnographies of W. G. Sebald, Don DeLillo and Marc Augé, there is a persistent engagement with and immersion in the full breadth and depth of the everyday, and at the same time, a constant reflection upon and experimentation with the means of its literary representation. Freud’s The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) focused on the everyday as the site of a systematic forgetting and repression, and on psychotherapy as the anamnesis and recovery of forgotten and repressed experiences, thoughts and desires. This prefigured, to a large extent, the way the question of everyday life was posed by its manifold subsequent intellectual appropriations as the site at once of forgetting and recovery, of repression and emancipation. For example, in Edmund Husserl’s epistemological ‘return to things themselves’ (Husserl 1983: 35-37) the everyday is the site of non-reflection and inauthenticity, but also of awareness and illumination. (Many would see here an affinity but, despite their common anti-metaphysical tenor, also a stark contrast to Heidegger’s non-phenomenological appreciation of the richness and complexity of the

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Alltag as the fundamental structure of our Being-in-the-world in his 1927 work “dedicated to Edmund Husserl” Sein und Zeit.) In any case, the combined effect of Freud’s analytics of the dream-world in his Traumdeutung (1900) and his approach to everyday parapraxes was not only to expand the remit of psychoanalytic hermeneutics beyond the walls of the abnormal into the realm of ordinariness, but also to effectively transpose the riddle of common behavioral phenomena from the sphere of superstition and mythology to that of psychical dynamics. The concept of the everyday, with its merging of repetitive, cyclical time with progressive, linear time, predicates a type of historical consciousness that weaves together the micro-level of social experience and action with the macro-level of socio-cultural development. In this way it helps theorize the production and reproduction of norms, as well as the breaking and refashioning of norms. Hence the significance it acquired, in the early decades of the 20th century, for cultural sociologists like Georg Simmel and Norbert Elias, for cultural critics like Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer and Adolf Loos, for both left-wing and right-wing radical civil and moral reform programmes aimed at the construction of the New Man, and for cultural iconoclasts like the avant-garde artists of surrealism and constructivism. Most of these strands of early 20th century engagement with the everyday can be found tangled together in a series of texts that have all the quasi-journalistic immediacy, brevity and probing energy that, a century ago, Baudelaire demanded from his fellow artists and strove to achieve with his Paris Spleen: the self-confessedly ‘highly poetic and idiosyncratic’ short pieces written by Roland Barthes in the mid-1950s and published in 1957 under the suggestive title Mythologies. In line with Saussure’s definition of semiology as the science that ‘studies the life of signs within society’ (Saussure 1974: 16) Barthes focuses on a heterogeneous variety of subjects – topical events, toys, popular sports and films, tourist guides, exhibitions, media texts and advertisements – aiming at unmasking the bourgeois ideology underpinning certain pervasive ‘myths of French daily life’ (Barthes 1973: 11). In 1962, Henri Lefebvre also took up the issue of ‘myths in everyday life’, noting the ‘slight difference’ that distinguishes his own ‘methodological interpretation’. By contrast to Barthes, he points out, his approach is ‘more diachronic than synchronic’ (Lefebvre 2003: 102). Indeed, while Barthes takes these myths as a language that, by suppressing the historical determinations of everyday reality, makes it appear as Nature, Lefebvre sees them as the obfuscating products of a disempowering everydayness.

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Barthes’ Mythologies was destined to become the foundational text of post-war semiotics, acting as a template for the subsequent development of semiotics as ideological critique, as “semioclasm” (iconoclasm of signs), as a project of demystifying the social world of signs and meanings analogous to and closely associated with Lefebvre’s simultaneously developing project of the critique of everyday life. The confluence of these two projects during the ascent of the problematics of everyday life in the 1960s stamped the way the counter-cultural politics of the period elaborated its distinctively libertarian but also anti-speculative rhetoric. Raoul Vaneigem’s aphorism that ‘there are more truths in twenty-four hours of a man’s life than in all the philosophies’ (2001: 21), as well as Guy Debord’s key focus on concrete daily life, develop and re-politicise the demystificatory drive inspiring both Barthes and Lefebvre while, at the same time, radicalizing Husserl’s call for ‘a return to the things themselves’ as a return to human praxis. If Husserl stopped short of unmooring the everyday from the fallacies of common sense, failing thus to validate it in a manner that would make it an effective basis for the critique of rationalism, for Michel de Certeau, by contrast, the everyday is inherently marked by the uncontrolled and covert, ‘dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals’ (de Certeau 1988: xiv-xv). His path-breaking researches into the practices of the everyday, the shadowy continent of microscopic, multiform techniques of cultural re-appropriation and re-employment resonate closely with what Umberto Eco (1990) had described as ‘semiological guerilla warfare’, the resistive tactics of media audiences of decoding in unpredictably aberrant ways the dominant media messages. Michel de Certeau’s and Umberto Eco’s rejection of the view of an allpowerful institutional-ideological apparatus or Kulturindustrie, respectively, suffusing and shaping every aspect of everyday life, emptying it, in effect, of all meaning save the insipid mechanics of domination, formed a crucial element in the evolution of Cultural Studies. From their beginnings, in the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, they were instrumental in establishing the interdisciplinary inquiry and appreciation of the everyday as both medium and narrative of social transformation. A pivotal role, on the other hand, in both de Certeau’s and the Cultural Studies’ approach is held by the ethnological method and by the anthropological concept of culture, whose expansive scope includes all the diverse forms of life and popular cultural processes and meanings. This eclectic affinity, however, is symptomatic of a much wider and more farreaching conjuncture.

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The canonization of the everyday in the past few decades is largely due to the anthropological turn in the social sciences and humanities. Heavily reliant on the use of ethnography and participant observation, both versions of micro-sociology – Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology and Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach – advanced the sociology of everyday life as the inquiry into how people make sense of and construct their social world. The anthropological concept of culture, on the other hand, was the engine of growth of a new range of historiographical practices. Beginning with the rise of new social history in the 1960s, the 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of the French nouvelle histoire, the German Alltagsgeschichte, the Italian micro-history, as well as women’s history, new urban history, new cultural geography and new cultural history. The linchpin of the momentous paradigm shift that produced this new hermeneutics of everyday life was a focus on people as active agents in various cultural contexts, uses and practices, the merging of the conventional distinctions between the private and the public, the local and the global, the material and the symbolic, the bridging of the agency/structure divide marking the grand historical and cultural narratives. In their place a wealth of new kinds of narratives was produced out of what had been traditionally taken for granted, condemned or discarded, unmarked and overlooked as mundane, trivial and inconsequential. In his conclusion to the first volume of his magnum opus on the rise of capitalism, whereby he introduced the everyday of life into the domain of modern historiography, Fernand Braudel admits that “to encompass all the many and varied constituents of material life would require close and systematic research, followed by much synthesis and analysis. All that is still lacking. What the text says calls for discussion, addition and extension” (Braudel 1992: 559). Despite the wide range of contributions that have advanced the study of the everyday in recent decades, Braudel’s suggestion is still pertinent. The volume at hand is both a response to the need for more ‘close and systematic research’, for more ‘synthesis and analysis’, and a call for more ‘discussion, addition and extension’. The collection of texts in this volume draws on the dozens of papers presented at the IX International Conference of the Hellenic Semiotic Society held in October 2010, at the University of Cyprus, on the topic of ‘The Everyday’. The fact that we were hosted in Cyprus partly explains its largely Greek, Middle Eastern and North African thematic focus. The conference would not have been realized without the hard work of Professor Apostolos Lampropoulos, then at the University of Cyprus, now at Université Bordeaux III. We would also like to thank Ben Highmore

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and Marc Augé for their contribution to the conference, as well as all the authors in this volume,

Concepts and Categories of the Everyday In the vein of a “third generation” of cultural studies, and also forming part of the inevitable negotiation of semiotic tools and hermeneutical insight, this volume attempts to re-examine dominant and peripheral aspects of the theory, performance and representation of the everyday, pinning a few more flags onto its historical and conceptual map. Hecate Vergopoulos speaks of the everyday as a category that passes through the semiotic to go beyond the semiotic by claiming Roland Barthes’ category of the “neutral” for the everyday. She speaks of the everyday as social experience of time and space, rather than as the time and space of experience, and provides the postwar critical and philosophical itinerary that would lead to Poirier’s literary phrase: Instead of searching for the meaning of things, it might be wiser to appreciate their physical gravity: to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them. Mathematical tools like statistics, the laws of large numbers, the notion of the “average man”, and the underlying probabilistic reasoning behind using those tools lie at the heart of the concept of “everyday man”. May Chaheb examines this reasoning at the cross-section of mathematics and literature, mainly in the work of Robert Musil and Maguerite Yourcenar. Within the context of the abandonment in modernity of traditional categories of identity formation, the literary strategies of nondifferentiation and anti-subjectivism of these writers do not escape the “revenge of the improbable and the insignificant”, the accommodation of chance and the rise of a new radical subjectivism, which opens up anew the dialectics of statistical probability and ethical responsibility. Alexander Lagopoulos speaks of the contradictions inherent in the discourse of the revolutionary everyday, as exemplified by the Situationists’ early experimentations with planning and geography. The Situationist International’s revolutionary politics and architectural endeavors are examined side by side as part of an overarching project to overcome alienation in the city – the city they explored with the techniques of psycho-geography, as well as the city they envisioned in unitary urbanism. Their attempt to engage with “the micro-reality of the everyday”, both in derives and detournements as well as in the theory of unitary urbanism, is the catalyst for our understanding of their contribution to theory and politics. Their positions rely on a semiotic reading of space which positions them within the subjectivist currents of postmodern

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critical geography on the one hand, and on the other within Marxist and radical geographies that see social revolutionary potential in the transformation of everyday culture.

The Everyday as Marketing Method and Ritual Practice The anthropologist Lilly Stylianoudi, in analyzing pre-European Maori tattooing practices and their meanings today, proposes a dialectics of the everyday and the everlasting in order to understand the play of collective identity and history in the practice and ritual of “carving” the body, which links its everyday appearance to primordial moments of society. Fotini Tsibiridou argues that the political production and marketing of religious signifiers amongst the Muslim population, particularly women, in the Middle East (and beyond) has created, since the 1980s, a “new field of bio-power, shaping gender, individuality, personhood, collectivities and civic virtue”. The creation of the identity of the pious Muslim consumer based on manipulating representations of Islam has been the conscious, control-driven collaborative project of both local authoritarian rulers and global market regulators. Continuing the discussion of Salafi religious representations as branding on the level of economic theory, Charitatos and Christodoulou focus on luxury, another aspect of immaterial capital. Their semiotic analysis of traditional economic categories shows how, in the global brand market, the “loop between the creation of imaginary money and the formation of new luxurious categories” is crucial for understanding the shift of small and medium businesses in crisis-ridden countries of the West towards the so-called “attainable luxury products” necessary for preserving and satisfying the imagery of everyday consumption. At the other end of the bio-political spectrum of mass consumption, Karin Boklund discusses the solitary practice and social institution of reading popular literature as part of our “everyday fantasy”. Looking at the far-from-quotidian content of what we read for everyday entertainment, which is, in the main, exceptional plots and protagonists placed in nonexistent, non-realistic worlds, she reaches a convincing and poetic conclusion that “our everyday is a collage of small, necessary epiphanies”.

Style versus Constraint in the Languages of the Everyday The battle of the poetic and the constrictive in the languages of the everyday is the topic of the next section. The first two texts talk about the birth of a modern national style in the literary production of 1880s Greece,

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a turning point and school textbook reference for national ideology, and in French administrative writing that attempts to create a supra-stylistic register of state language. The next two texts take the game of signification to its extremes: American action film subtitles seem to oversimplify, compress and level a narrative, while museum and gallery display can completely dissociate exhibited objects from signification or interpretation. Georgia Pateridou examines the new privileging of the “everyday” as object and style of poetry, over the traditional types and narratives of heroic state nationalism. Through little songs, unthreatening form, style at the border of satirical criticism, representations of calm nature and innocent love, the 1880s generation of poets in modern Greece, later to become a prominent part of national literature, were the first to attempt to challenge the heroic moments in the early canonical narrative of the nation-state. Reversing the inquiry, this structural-anthropological issue of the social meanings produced by the systematics of signification of the everyday is visited by Helene Campaignolle on the same testing ground of style and linguistic functions. Exploring whether one can pinpoint the historical moment of passage from the “singularity of writing” to a “system of rules” she asks whether “style” actually exists as a category for understanding what it is that creates a “sense of everyday routine” in formal administrative writing, as opposed to the de-familiarizing effects of literariness. Subtitles are the par excellence formalized and typified text, subject to specific technical constraints and accompanying to a great extent American action films. Anthi Wiedenmayer points to the fact that translated subtitles are the dominant type of written text in the everyday life of Greeks and wonders about the consequences of this on the norms and ideas of its recipients. Chris Dorsett dismantles the formal relationship between style, object and signification by turning to contemporary artistic practices and their museum and gallery display context. There, he suggests, Roland Barthes’ formula of “asignification” can help us see objects as reclaiming their autonomous quality of thinglyness, and moving beyond the utilitarian instrumentalization of material objects within the semiotic realm.

Representing the Quotidian The section on representations of the everyday, where the quotidian is treated primarily as sujet and theme of a creative work, comprises a series

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of media-specific studies. It opens with an exploration of Ivorian everyday life in the six volumes of the comics series Aya de Yopougon. FerreiraMeyers places this sequential story of the 1970s and 1980s as seen by a young woman, her family and friends within the realistic comic book genre thematizing everyday life in Africa. Sana Mselmi turns to the contradictions of the Arab quotidian, where the banality and repetitiveness associated with the modernist Western everyday are not to be taken for granted. She points to the narrative film techniques which allegorize the silence imposed upon the extraordinary Palestinian everyday life in Elia Suleiman’s The Time That Remains, or which highlight the interplay of the subjective and the documentary in Mohamed Zran’s Living Here, about living in a southeastern Tunisian town. In stark contrast to the Arab filmmakers’ expressive intention to inform a global public about their countries, 17 Greek films, all competing for the 2009 Great Award of the Hellenic Film Academy, attempt to critically explore the complexities of self-identity and otherness in contemporary Greek society. Rea Wallden’s semiotic study discusses the narrative and filmic techniques that produce views of racism, sexism and homophobia as forms of ‘othering’ today. A different point of view of othering, for which the dominant identity depends on promoting and co-opting the diversity of local identities, is provided by Evangelos Kourdis’s study of intra-lingual translation in television advertisement. TV product advertisements in historical linguistic variations and accents are a new form of “soft manipulation” by the media of consumers’ sense of regional-linguistic identity, based on perceived signs of a diachronic Greek “traditional way of life”. In cinema and on television, realist tactics enable negotiations of identity and otherness, while poetry verging on the naturalist can retain its hope of radical subjectivity. Alexander Hertich reads the contemporary poetic work of Jacques Réda as a vehicle for reclaiming grandeur and monumentality for the quotidian through representing and recording everyday observations and actions. The poet-philosopher, continuing the tradition of the nineteenth-century flâneur and preserving the rules and historical autonomy of lyrical city poetry, aims at an “osmosis of writing and walking” and experiences everyday life in Paris at the “borders of the banal and the magical”.

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Works Cited Barthes, Roland (1973) Mythologies, trans. A. Lavers. London: Paladin Baudelaire, Charles (1970) Paris Spleen, trans. L. Varese. New York: New Directions —. (1992) ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P.E Charvet. London: Penguin Books Braudel, Fernand (1992) Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th century, vol. I: The Structures of Everyday Life, trans. S. Reynolds. Berkeley-Los Angeles: University of California Press Debord, Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. NicholsonSmith. New York: Zone Books de Certeau, Michel (1988) The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. S.Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press Eco, Umberto (1990) ‘Towards a Semiological Guerilla Warfare’, in Travels in Hyperreality, 135-144, trans. W. Weaver. San Diego: Harvest Books Huizinga, Johan (2001) The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics Husserl, Edmund (1983) Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenoogy and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers Lefebvre, Henri (1987) ‘The Everyday and Everydayness’, Yale French Studies 73: 7-11 —. (2003) ‘Myths in Everyday Life’, in S. Elden, E. Lebas & E. Kofman (eds.) Henri Lefebvre. Key Writings, trans. I. Forster. London/N.York: Continuum —. (2004) Rhythmanalysis. Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. S. Elden & G. Moore. London/N. York: Continuum Saussure, Ferdinand de (1974) Course in General Linguistics, trans. W. Baskin. Suffolk: Fontana/Collins Vaneigem, Raoul (2001) The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. London: Rebel Press

CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTS AND CATEGORIES OF THE EVERYDAY

THE EVERYDAY IS “INSIGNIFICANT” HECATE VERGOPOULOS

Le propre du quotidien, c’est de nous désigner une région, ou un niveau de parole, où la détermination du vrai et du faux, comme l’opposition du oui et du non, ne s’applique pas, étant toujours en deçà de ce qui l’affirme et cependant se reconstituant sans cesse par-delà tout ce qui le nie. —Blanchot 1969, 361

Till the 1940s, the everyday was not studied nor taken into account by researchers and scientists. It thus did not exist as a scientific object. To be regarded as a coherent and pertinent field of research, to be thought of as a legitimate object that could be put under the human and social sciences’ microscope it had to lead quite a few struggles with, on its side, the French Ecole des Annales, Henri Lefebvre, the sociology of the everyday and the Cultural Studies of the Anglo-Saxon world. These fights did have some repercussions on the way the everyday is now offered to scientific research, in the sense that their aim was to provide a series of conclusive proofs which would show how essential it is in our lives and societies, and how important it is to study it in order to better understand our cultures. As a result, the everyday became a political stake. This is what this chapter will insist on. More precisely, it will show the result of the ideological ambitions of the researchers who, starting from the 1940s in France, were willing to institute the everyday, both from a scientific and a cultural point of view, as a legitimate object which had to be regarded. The result of their ideological ambitions was a configuration of the everyday as a daily fact stuck into the conflict of (in)significance. They thus raised a key issue that can now eventually be left aside to better position our actuality in the history of the concept. In order to do so, the concept provides the everyday with a new scientific framework, and more precisely a semiotic one: the one that had been elaborated by Roland Barthes in the 1970’s named “the neutral”. Let us remember that according to Roland Barthes the neutral occupies a tricky position in the world’s order. If it were an aliment, says the author through an amusing Chinese image, it would be rice: “not bland nor tasty, not thick nor loose, not colourful nor colourless” (2002, 122). If it were an

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animal? It would be a donkey – Nietzsche’s donkey – or, more precisely, “the infinitely sad and soft velvet of donkeys’ eyes”, following Léon Bloy’s formula (2002, 122). This neutral space in which contraries can embrace one another, though it can seem strange and labile at first sight, will allow us to renew our relationship to the everyday as it has been constituted as a scientific object. For the neutral is, indeed, an entire theory of the insignificant thought, yet not in terms of semiotic values (related to the issue of meaning or lack of meaning) but in terms of social and cultural ones (related to the essential and the non-essential). It circumscribes a place and time where objects and beings are properly inessential though obstinate exactly in the same way objects and beings do go through the everyday. The neutral, as Roland Barthes defines it, has indeed the property to freeze conflicts of values. In that sense, if one starts to consider the everyday as neutral, one has to admit that it can be seized as a place and time where conflicts stop, where the issues concerning its non-essential qualities are no longer relevant.

1. The everyday and the insignificant In 2010, all of those who walked through Paris got the chance to read, written in capital letters all over the city, the following enigmatic message: “Say no to the everyday everyday”. It was the slogan of an advertisement campaign launched by the French retail chain Monoprix that came with the peculiar changing of the packaging of its own products: a can of carrots would announce “Superfine graded carrots. Even dwarf rabbits think they are superfine”, and a box of reblochon, this French cheese well known for smelling like a sock trapped into a stinky shoe, would suggest “Let its fragrance perfume your fridge”. This amusing marketing campaign aimed to show that the everyday does not have to be lived through as ordinary or even banal. It can be surprising and unexpected as long as one is willing to avoid one’s own routine. To do so, one has to pay great attention to the countless humdrum details that compose it. For the everyday is, in fact, the realm of details. More precisely, it is the realm of what will here be called “the minuscules”. Many researchers have indeed defined the everyday as such. Michel Maffesoli explains that it is an “alchemical laboratory of the minuscule creations that do daily life” (1998 [1979], 12) or the sum of “the minuscule daily attitudes, itineraries, discussions, bricolages, cooking, walks, clothing researches, i.e. the attitudes through which individuals

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acknowledge that they altogether compose a group” (1998 [1979], 13). To Michel Foucault, the everyday is a “space of surveillance” made by “the whole of minuscule technical inventions”, i.e. “disciplines” (1975, 256). To Pierre Mayol, the urban everyday is made of “minuscule repressions” that respond to the injunctions of “proprieties” (1994 [1980], 28). The everyday thus appears to be a space of actions and uses, constraints and repressions that would, at first sight, share a size-related specificity: they would all be very small. However, this recurrent poetic of the “minuscule” does not exactly refer to a space scale. Paul Davies and Julian Brown noticed: “The problem of measurement and the observer is the problem of where the measurement begins and ends, and where the observer begins and ends. Consider my spectacles, for example: if I take them off now, how far away must I put them before they are part of the object rather than part of the observer?” (1999 [1986], 48).

In other words, what the observer seizes as a fragment of the world and what he or she studies can sometimes be at least partially configured as the result of his or her own projection onto the world. Taking a closer look at Maffesoli’s, Foucault’s or even Mayol’s researches brings us to understand that what is qualified as “minuscule” is less some property of the daily objects and their daily uses (the everyday as it stands on the other side of the scientific spectacles) than a way to consider them (the everyday as it is being seen through the spectacles). The everyday “minuscules” refer to the difficulties these researchers faced when they tried to seize some fragments of the world that were, till then, rarely taken into account and for which no dedicated theoretical and empirical tool existed. The realm of “minuscules” is thus one of a world somehow almost invisible to science, a world of the evanescent and the fugitive in which social and scientific observation has shown little or no interest. It is that left-aside object that researches had to “invent” (Certeau 1990 [1980]) to better understand it but also to show how dense and complex it was. To avoid any misunderstanding, I suggest that we call this minuscule “the insignificant”. This new terminology simply aims to enlighten the fact that the everyday has been built up, through scientific work, as a legitimate object fighting against a social representation that had made of it a negligible object of science. The word “insignificant” will thus refer to a structural axiology that came with the “invention of the everyday” when it was first studied: dragging it out of the shadow of nonexistent scientific objects and putting it under the light of valuable and legitimate scientific theories. It will help us in differentiating the object from the scientists’

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spectacles. But it will also help in considering the everyday as a place and time that is being lived through, as distinct from the everyday as a scientific and social – shall we here say historical? – construction. The word insignificant, according to Audrey Camus, has three different meanings: “Is insignificant everything that has no interest at all […]. Is insignificant, in a second sense, everything that has no importance, no consequences […]. Is finally insignificant, everything that has no meaning, no sense” (2009, 6-8). Considering this definition, the insignificant appears to come with a series of social and cultural values as it defines the opposite of what is interesting, important and, let us say for want of anything better, the opposite of what is sensible. These values help us in understanding the way the insignificant circulates as a social representation throughout our societies, as the place of the uninteresting, the unimportant and the insensible. If one accepts the idea that the everyday is insignificant, even if it is in order to better defend the idea that it is, on the contrary, highly essential and significant, one admits that the everyday can be regarded (by others) as a social and cultural space that exists as a negation to the values of fundamentality. The main issue that this approach raises is the following: should the fact that the everyday is considered as an uninteresting, unimportant and/or “insensible” part of the daily world be accepted or should this point of view be contradicted in a scientific study, since it can be thought of as a depreciation of the everyday or an underestimation of it? In other words, should the social and cultural values that come with the everyday (uninteresting, unimportant, and insensible) be taken into account through the process of construction of the scientific object or should they be put aside if not contradicted, to better build up the legitimacy of the object?

2. The everyday and the neutral Through what he named in the 1970s “the neutral”, Roland Barthes developed an original approach to the insignificant that will provide us with some key elements to answer the question of values. His neutral, quite different from Husserl’s (1950) or Blanchot’s (1969), is inspired by phonology and linguistics. It has been elaborated as a semiotic concept that aims to specify the way in which some objects do offer themselves to be experienced in the social world or to circulate through it. Roland Barthes’ approach to the neutral invites us to consider that it is precisely the social and cultural values that qualify the everyday and give it its meaning which should be taken into account. They should be

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accepted as a part of the object itself more than rejected and fought against. And after all, before being a noun that designates a time and space of social life, is the everyday not first, grammatically, a qualifying adjective, i.e. a word that comes with the noun to precisely specify the cultural values that make of it a social fact? Roland Barthes’ concept of the neutral was born in 1977, at a time when, since the 1960s, and more specifically with the publication of his book Empire of signs, he starts to reconsider the way he gazes at the world that he is analysing. He then stops what he afterwards called “the breach of meaning” (1970), the one he had in fact himself defended in his Mythologies (1957) when trying to flush out the way in which “cultural” signs pretend that they are “natural”. As Sheringham notes it (2006), when the neutral emerges, Roland Barthes is more focused on the experience of objects (on the spectacles, again, and on the individual who wears them) than on the object itself. In this context, he teaches, at the Collège de France in the late 1970s, a lesson entitled “The Neutral” (2002). To do so, he goes about things using a peculiar method of his own: the one of “scintillations”. It consists in presenting, in a non-exhaustive perspective but also in a random way, twenty-three “figures” that, according to him, deal with the neutral: such as benevolence, tiredness or delicacy. These “figures” are not fragments of the neutral, but rather fragments “in which, more vaguely, there is some neutral [that has to be found] a little like those rebus drawings in which one must look for the silhouette of the hunter and the one of the rabbit”. According to Roland Barthes, what all these figures share is the fact that they refuse to respond to a paradigmatic logic. In order to understand the neutral one has therefore to first focus on paradigms. “What is a paradigm?”, asks Roland Barthes. « It is the opposition of two virtual terms from which I actualise one in order to talk, to produce meaning […] Wherever there is meaning, there is paradigm, and wherever there is paradigm (an opposition), there is meaning said elliptically: meaning is based on conflict (choosing a term rather than another) and every conflict generates meaning: choosing one and pushing another one aside, it always brings to sacrifice to meaning, to produce meaning, to give it so it can be consumed” (2002, 31).

A paradigm is the principle of contrariety on which language and meaning are based. As for the neutral, it can precisely be defined as a way to cancel or distract the implacability of the paradigm. It offers a new logic to the production of meaning that is not based on conflict nor on

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contrariety. According to Roland Barthes, the neutral “does not hide but does not either marks (= quite difficult): all in all, something like The Purloined Letter” (2002, 82). If the neutral does not “mark” – if it is not remarked –, it is because it has nothing of a bright garish shade. It is a kind of shape that goes unnoticed though, exactly in the same way the purloined letter was, it is daily present and obviously offered to everyone’s eyes. One of the “figures” that Roland Barthes analyses is quite interesting, as it helps us to understand some more about the insignificant and the everyday: it is the one of meticulousness. Roland Barthes considers it as a scintillation associated to the greater “figure” of delicacy. He chooses to study it through the way it is been experienced in the Japanese art of tea ceremony. He starts with reminding his audience that Japanese culture of tea has known three different stages through history: tea was first boiled – under the Tang dynasty (618-907) –, it was then beaten – under the Song dynasty (9601279) –, and finally infused – from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) till now. Quoting Okakura Kakuzo and Lu Yu, two masters of tea that have both written a book presenting the beverage’s ritual of preparation, Roland Barthes invites his audience to focus on the meticulousness of their description when it comes to boiled tea: “Ebullition [there are different stages of ebullition]: 1) Small bubbles that look alike fish’s eyes, 2) bubbles like crystal pearls that roll in a fountain, 3) waves furiously leaping in the kettle (the teacake has to be roasted in front of fire till it becomes ‘tender as a small child’s arms’. Then pulverised stuck into two papers; salt has to be thrown during the first stage of ebullition, tea during the second one; and during the third one, a ladleful of fresh water to fix the tea and ‘give the water its youth back again’)” (2002, 59).

Roland Barthes comments: “towards a useless detail or a mysteriously useful one: meticulousness: at the edge of harebrained. All in all: an art of the useless supplement” (2002, 59). Meticulousness is thus a care that can sometimes seem harebrained, not to say superstitious, but that nonetheless works wonders as “an art of the useless supplement”. It is not highly useful to enter so many details since tea can be prepared with fewer words but at the same time it is not highly useless in the sense that it loses a part of its art and ritual when it is not spoken in these terms. The paradigm that the “figure” of meticulousness distracts is, precisely, the one of the (in)significant. The meaning, the strength and specificity of meticulousness rely on the fact that it escapes from the order of values that commonly makes out

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The Everyday is “Insignificant”

of significance and insignificance some principles for reasonable ordering of the world. As for the everyday, it stands in a similar position as the one of meticulousness: it is not exactly significant in the sense that it does not appear, throughout social values, as being properly fundamental (let us remember that is often thought of as uninteresting, unimportant and insensible); it is not, however, exactly insignificant since it keeps being a great structural part of our lives. Considering the everyday as neutral thus brings us to reconsider it so as to approach it as a time and space that are both non-essential and still persistent, at the same time discrete and ineluctable, invisible or blind and omniscient. To put it differently, the everyday, from a neutral point of view, is everything that embraces and surrounds us without, though, being remarkable. It happens in all places and times in which no event occurs to disrupt the world’s order (Bensa and Fassin 2002), in which things do simply go along their ways without breaking an ordinary course. This definition brings a new element to the study of the everyday, in the sense that to analyse the way it is lived through by social individuals does not pre-categorize its object as a time and space of our lives; but to do so suggests that the everyday is everything that occurs to social individuals when no conflict of values or meaning is at stake.

3. The everyday and the paradigm The definition of the everyday as a neutral thus offers an opportunity to consider its object as a time and space that occurs rather than a time and space in which some facts occur. By defining the everyday as a social experience in time and space rather than a time and space of social experience, it allows us to throw a new light on different scientific studies that have analysed it. It enables us, in particular, to illuminate the fact that most of the leading researches on the everyday, and more precisely the sociological ones that were willing to study everyday facts, are based on a paradigmatic point of view that constrains their object to take part in the conflict about social values referred to earlier. In the 1970s, sociology of the everyday clearly appeared to be, at least in France, a pertinent means to renew the political perspective of sociological studies. After Henri Lefebvre (1968), it indeed tried to abandon the dialectic of domination in order to think about the social world differently. Michel Maffesoli wrote:

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“Instead of being obsessed by the couple alienation-liberation, instead of clenching on their perfectly tetanic relationships, it matters to gaze at this everyday life which, up and down, unpredictably, through boredom and exuberance, follows its path in an obstinate and somehow incomprehensible way” (1998 [1979], 23).

As for Luce Giard, she commented on Michel de Certeau’s work on The Invention of the Everyday with these words: “What matters from now on is not ‘scholarly culture’, this abandoned treasure left to the vanity of its owners. It is neither ‘popular culture’, a name given from the outside by clerks who make out stock lists and embalm what a power has already erased […]. Hence, we must turn toward ‘disseminated proliferation’ of anonymous and ‘perishable’ creations” (1990 [1980], VII).

Sociology of the everyday thus started to analyse what it identified as the ordinary part of social life focusing on the way social individuals shop, cook, are dressed, walk or even read. Some researchers such as Michel Maffesoli (1998 [1979]) and Michel de Certeau (1990) [1980]) do not consider all of these activities and actions as processes of submission of the dominated to the dominators anymore, but rather as processes of production and creativity. However, the domination issue is still taken into account since they both think that individuals live though their everyday lives with a sense of “ruse” in reaction to social domination. There thus is a political dimension in these researches that can be summarized by Michel de Certeau’s formula: “it is always useful to remind us that we should not think people are idiots” (1990 [1980], 255). In that sense and at that time, sociology of the everyday suggested that social individuals should be given the social means to help them to understand that they intuitively resist the logic of consumption and the social and cultural rules of the market, whether or not these latter are tacit. It moreover aimed to draw the attention of those who are in charge of this market to the fact that their “consumers”, as users, will have no other choice but the one of resistance. The dominated/dominators and the oppressed/oppressors dichotomies had given away to a somehow different one: the markets and their products vs. the operations of social individuals who use the products in a creative way. In a word, in the 1970s, sociology of the everyday raises the issues of uses, giving Cultural Studies a solid ground on which to keep developing their projects.

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Everyday uses were however not defined in the same way by these two researchers. To Michel Maffesoli, the everyday is a space of an “à présent”, i.e. of the actualisation of oneself through creativity in daily sociability, of the socialized “presentification” of social individuals. To Michel de Certeau, the everyday is a space thought of in “polemological” terms in which creative individuals, taken as users, can evade institutional strategies. However, in both cases, the everyday is a space of social and creative uses that are considered as standing in opposition to the circulating representation that would then see in daily routines nothing more than an uninteresting field of research. Since these researches aimed to prove that the ordinary can be extraordinary, both for those who live through it and those who study it, since their challenge was moreover to show that the everyday is always more significant than it could first seem, their approaches to the everyday can qualify as paradigmatic ones. In fact, most of the studies on the everyday are paradigmatic in the same way. Henri Lefebvre thus wrote to present his book The Everyday life in the Modern World: “What is this all about? A wide research on the facts that are despised by philosophers or arbitrarily separated by social sciences. Specialists of fragmented sciences […] despise the everyday facts as they think that they are unworthy to be study: pieces of furniture, objects and the world of objects, timetables, miscellaneous news, advertisements in newspapers. They thus agree with philosophers, full of contempt for the ‘Alltäglichkeit’. The objective, initially formulated, is to have these facts that can seem shapeless, entered into knowledge and to assemble them not arbitrarily but according to concepts and a theory” (1968, 55).

The objective is, in other words, “to define [the everyday life], to define its changes and its perspective by keeping amongst the facts that can seem insignificant something that is essential” (1968, 59). Michel de Certeau also wrote concerning his book The Invention of the Everyday: “The following essay is dedicated to the ordinary man […] This anonymous hero who comes from far away. He is the murmur of societies. He has always come before texts […]. Slowly, he starts to occupy the central point of our scientific stages. The spotlights have abandoned the actors with surnames and social blazons to look at the choir of figurants amassed on sides” (1990 [1980], 11).

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The objective of these researchers’ studies was to establish the fundamental aspect of this time and space that has for too long been forgotten by science and culture. To do so, they did not hesitate to perform the role of the lawyer who gave the scrivener Bartleby a job: they demand the everyday to signify, and enjoin it to be substantial and consistent. The lawyer, however, had to face it: his questions and exigencies towards the scrivener had no echo. As long as he was trying to apply his own rationality to understand Bartleby’s, instead of considering that he (Bartleby) might have another way of reasoning, he misunderstood his employee’s motivation and logic. He constructed a framework that could provide him with no suitable answer. The question that the analysis of Roland Barthes’ neutral raises once it is adapted to the issue of the everyday is the following: turning this ordinary object into an extraordinary one, does it not bring one to scarify the object itself? Michael Sheringham seems to share this concern when he writes: “The oscillation between positive and negative evaluations is endemic to thinking about the everyday. This means that any appeal to everydayness as interesting or valuable is likely to involve rehabilitation or exhortation: look what you’ve overlooked! See the significance of the seemingly insignificant! Yet, in the sphere of the everyday, such zeal is paradoxical. If we go too far, the everyday ceases to be itself: it becomes the exceptional, the exotic, the marvellous. Transfigured, the commonplace is no longer commonplace.” (2006, 23).

Roland Barthes’ neutral precisely helps us in avoiding this scientific dead end in the sense that it allows us to find the proper commonplace of the common and insignificant everyday.

Conclusion In The Mismeasure of Man, Stephen Jay Gould reminds us that science, since it is defined as the result of human work, “is socially embedded activity”. Thus, “much of its change through time does not record a closer approach to absolute truth, but the alternation of cultural contexts that influence it so strongly” (1996 [1981], 53-54). Frederick Lambert, considering another kind of sciences – the ones that are more “human” and more “social” – invites us to recognize that there is always “a part of I”, i.e. of “subjectivity”, in sciences. Researchers should “be aware of the touch they leave in their texts and

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that reveals their intentions. They have to enounce the place that they occupy towards the observation of the world” (2007, 17). The cultural context but also the way researchers position themselves in this context are two key elements that play a great part in the process of production of scientific discourses, no matter how strong the ambition to objectify is. If, for quite a long time, researchers who studied the everyday have had to force the “order of discourse” and have written the violence of their will into their objects by defining it through a paradigmatic framework, shall we not today rethink our relationship to the everyday? This question disserves to be raised as soon as one admits that a tradition of research emerged in the 1960s to be instituted twenty years later, at least in France (Sheringham 2006), and that as a consequence studying the ordinary has lost its heroic or heretic ambition in itself. The stakes have changed. It belongs to us now to reconsider our actuality in the history of research on the everyday, to position ourselves through the scientific literature, in order to enounce the singularity of a contemporary approach to the everyday. In this perspective, Roland Barthes’ neutral can provide us with a relevant framework of analysis. It indeed allows us to define the everyday otherwise than in a paradigm, both at odds with this tradition of research that has tried to establish it as a fundamental and in continuity with this same tradition. The neutral helps us in taking the insignificant out of the paradigmatic game, and it thus invites us to follow Jacques Poirier’s invitation: “We can inhabit the world only if it has a meaning, and therefore only if every element that composes it, even the smallest one, appears to be ‘significant’: this is what most of artworks seem to repeat – from fairytales to metaphysical fables, or detective novels. […] Instead of searching the meaning of things, it might be wiser to appreciate their physical gravity: to palpate them, to taste them, to feel them….” (Poirier 2009, 167).

Bibliography Barthes, Roland. Le Neutre. Paris: Le Seuil, 2002. —. L’Empire des signes. Paris: Flammarion, 1970. —. Mythologies. Paris: Le Seuil, 1957. Bensa, Alban and Fassin, Eric. “Les sciences sociales face à l’événement. ” Terrain 38 (2002): 5-20.

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Blanchot, Maurice. “La Parole quotidienne.” In L’Entretien infini, edited by Maurice Blanchot, 355-366. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Bloy, Léon. L’Invendable. Paris: Mercure de France, 1909. Camus, Audrey. “D’une insignifiance l’autre. ” Études françaises 45 (2009): 5-12. Certeau, Michel de. L’Invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire. Paris : Gallimard, [1980] 1990. Chaudier, Stéphane. “L’insignifiant : de Barthes à Proust.” Études françaises 45 (2009): 13-32. Davies, Paul C.W. & Brown, Julian R. The Ghost in the Atom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1986] 1999. Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir. Pari : Gallimard, 1975. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, [1981] 1996. Husserl, Edmund. Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie. Paris: Gallimard, 1950. Lambert, Frédéric. L’Ecriture en recherche. Cannes: Parcours(sic), 2007. Lefebvre, Henri. La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. Paris : Gallimard, 1968. Maffesoli, Michel. La Conquête du présent. Pour une sociologie de la vie quotidienne. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, [1979] 1998. Mayol, Pierre. “Habiter.” In L’Invention du quotidien 2. Habiter, cuisiner, edited by Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, 13-185. Paris: Gallimard, [1980] 1994. Poirier, Jacques. “Malaise dans la signification.” Études françaises 45 (2009): 109-124. Sheringham, Michael. Everyday life: theories and practices from surrealism to the present. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2006.

‘TWELVE THOUSAND BREAKFASTS’: BANALIZING ANTI-EPIPHANY – A MATHEMATICAL VIEW MAY CHEHAB

The Poetics of the Banal What is man in his daily existence, the everyday man or woman? Does such a man or woman really exist or is he or she a figment of our imagination? We are going to take up these questions in relation to two very different theoretical domains: the domain of literature and that of mathematics. We know how mathematical tools have fared in the more or less playful effort to sharpen literary creativity. Going back before the riddles of the Palatine Anthology, this play was revived in the twentieth century and was not exhausted by the constraints, graphs and combinations of the Oulipopo.1 What is less well known is the degree to which the probabilistic revolution of the 19th century was exploited by the literature of the twentieth. Focusing on two European writers, Robert Musil and Marguerite Yourcenar, this study will try to show how the statistical law of large numbers – and the theory of the average man that is linked to this law – were involved in understanding the man or the woman without qualities: the everyday man or the everyday woman2.

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There are numerous examples of this interaction between literature and mathematics: from poetry sculpted by mathematics, to sonnets built on the number thirty-one, from the Oulipopo (Ouvroir de littérature policière potentielle) to the Alamo (Atelier de Littérature Assistée par la Mathématique et l’Ordinateur). ٝ I am grateful to my colleagues Colette Gaudin (Dartmouth College), Vivian Kogan (Dartmouth College) and Myra Jehlen (Rutgers State University) for their collaboration in translating this text and some of the cited excerpts that were not already translated (marked as “our translation”).

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Statistics and Literature We can begin by asking ourselves how recourse to probabilistic reasoning can be useful for a writer. Based on impersonality and repetition, it seems irreconcilable with literary writing; it is out of place in a discourse one of whose major characteristics is “to stage individual situations and beings”.3 At the very beginning of his long unfinished novel, The Man without Qualities, Robert Musil describes an automobile accident. Viewed from the sole perspective of statistics, this accident and its implications raise questions about a principle of civilization: namely the value of an individual life. According to American statistics, the gentleman said, one hundred and ninety thousand people are killed in traffic accidents every year and four hundred and fifty thousand are injured. — Do you think he is dead? His companion asked, still on the unjustified assumption that she had experienced something unusual.4

This example is doubly characteristic. It is characteristic of the 20thcentury literary attack on Romantic and post-Romantic aspirations to a transcendent and whole self, in a word against the heroic and unique subject of the entire literary tradition; it is characteristic also in its recourse to statistics or to probabilistic reasoning, with the goal “of taking apart the psychological illusion of the all-powerful subject and of reintegrating into a general statistic those dimensions considered as belonging to subjectivity”.5

The Law of Large Numbers The 190,000 dead and 450,000 wounded in road accidents that are invoked at the beginning of The Man Without Qualities by Musil call up the law “of large numbers”, that minimizes the singular accident by drowning it in statistics. Let us say in passing that it would be more correct, following for example Keynes, to call this law “the law of

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My analysis is indebted to the rich study by Florence Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique (Paris: PUF, 2000), 102-103 and passim. ٝ Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities (hence MWQ), translated by Sophie Wilkins (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 5. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 102.

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stability of statistical frequencies”,6 since the formulation “law of large numbers” is misleading for the lay reader. Leaving the issue of its name aside, this law describes the emergence of global regularities as the size of the sample grows. Its epistemological value is therefore based on the fact that chance phenomena engender on a large scale a strict regularity, where in a sense chance has disappeared. Applied to human society, statistical regularity raises the following immanent or metaphysical question: can our individual acts be other than a confirmation of a general law that transcends us? If a teleological interpretation attributes these constants to a supernatural or divine cause, the lay version questions the determinist or indeterminist nature of the global regularity of individual choices. For Musil, the law of large numbers signifies more or less that: If a man kills himself for one reason, and another man for another reason, what is arbitrary and personal in these motivations disappears when dealing with large numbers.7

In theory at least, the more the descriptive point of view is distant from the individual, the greater, paradoxically, its chance of being true. In other words, the macro-view has more chances of being correct, of putting things in their right places. That is what allows as well the “cosmic view” adopted by Marguerite Yourcenar when in her trilogy The Labyrinth of the World she surveys large expanses of humanity.8 It is that family, or rather those families, whose intertwinings constitute my paternal line; but I’m going to try to keep my distance from them, to return them to their place, which is negligible, in the limitless expanse of time.9

The same is the case in descriptions and narratives that, according to Yourcenar, privilege the protagonists of history. For her, historical truth is

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Jacques Bouveresse, Robert Musil, L’homme probable, le hasard, la moyenne et l’escargot de l’histoire (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, series « tiré à part », [1993] 2004), 191. ٝ MWQ, I, 584. ٝ Le Labyrinthe du monde : I. Souvenirs pieux (1973) (SP), II. Archives du Nord (1977) (AN), III. Quoi ? L’éternité (1988) (QE). The three works are collected in the volume Essais et Mémoires (Paris: Gallimard, séries «Bibliothèque de la Pléiade», 1991), 378. ٝ Marguerite Yourcenar, How many Years, translated by Maria Louise Ascher (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1995), 6.

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distorted by a magnetic force emanating from individualities. This is why she specifies at the beginning of Archives du Nord: Thus I shall not take the time to trace, generation by generation, the course of those Cleenewercks who slowly became Crayencours. The family, strictly speaking, interests me less than the gens, the gens less than the group, the collection of beings who lived in the same places during the same periods of time. […] I would like […] to take advantage of the obscurity and mediocrity of most of those people, in order to discover laws hidden from us elsewhere by the overly splendid figures that dominate the foreground of history.10

On the level of the macro-human, the law of large numbers allows us therefore to induce laws from historical facts. It would therefore be a history with a slow pulse, equal to itself, constituting a routine of long terms. “It’s always the same story,” says Ulrich. On the level of microhumanity, the law of large numbers allows for the revelation of statistical regularities within the behaviors and the ways of thinking that are considered the most personal.11 Breakfast –or the “morning meal” as Jacques Prévert called it in one of his deceptively simple poems– is an emblematic moment of an everyday domestic intimacy. These same moments added up are what Yourcenar chooses in order to sum up the life of her grandparents in a probabilistic perspective. Ultimately, this man and woman —who form a respected couple, who have two lovely children, who sometimes still pant in the same bed, who basically wish each other well, and of whom one is destined to see the other die— will share in this way, amid polite silence or in conversation that is scarcely worthy of the name, a total of almost twelve thousand breakfasts.12

This mathematical formulation is reductive and disturbing, as it levels individual behaviors by invalidating psychological and individualistic interpretations. These subjective behaviors that normally could not be reduced to numerical expression “lose their qualitative singularity to become the objects of quantitative operations in which the qualities that distinguished the human in the idealist tradition –reason, judgment and

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Yourcenar, How many Years, 35. Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 8. Yourcenar, How many Years, 173.

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Banalizing Anti-Epiphany – A Mathematical View

free will– are not taken into account.”13 It is a perspective that allows, as Musil says in his Diaries, “a non-lyrical understanding of life.” On the level of thought itself, we ask ourselves if what one considers as one’s freedom, one’s originality or one’s creativity are not, in the terms of the law of large numbers, simple random fluctuations, simple deviations necessary to establish an average. This is how Zeno, the main character in The Abyss, tries to grasp the true nature of human understanding. He asks himself if what we believe to be a free logos is not instead determined by “calculable curves”, forces of pressure (or of inertia) that are very precisely measurable – in a word, the opposite of what a spiritualist tradition attributes to human thought: A philosopher who was trying to consider human understanding in all its aspects would behold beneath him a mass molded in calculable curves, streaked by currents that could be charted, and deeply furrowed by the pressure of winds and the heavy, inert weight of water. […] Zeno watched this disordered flood go by, sweeping with it, like so much wreckage, the few palpable verities of which we had felt assured.14

Every human being would then be subjected to the law of small and large numbers, and the originality of each of us would be an illusion. We would be, according to the theory of the average man, nothing but a fluctuation in relation to a central value, or to some median, or arithmetical average, a divergence less and less significant as the sample enlarges, a simple Mr. Everybody or Mrs. Everyday. For Musil, personality is composed of impersonal elements belonging to everybody and none. It follows that thought is not the product of a voluntary act, of a thinking “I” since it is the “id” that thinks. “It thinks in him”, says the man without qualities, renewing Rimbaud’s “I am being thought” or the Nietzschean critique of the cogito. This standardization of the subject affects the most intimate areas of our life, with no exception for love: Who can cry out in conscience today: “Oh, my only unique one!”? Everyone knows that one must say in truth: “Oh, my typical one!”15

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Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 106-107. Marguerite Yourcenar, The Abyss, translated by Grace Frick with the collaboration of the author (New York: Farar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 169. ٝ Robert Musil, Proses éparses (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1989) 221. ٝ

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The Average Man Once again it is probabilistic reasoning that is at the origin of the current notion of the everyday man. In the middle of the 19th century it allowed the elaboration of the notion of the average man, by the Belgian astronomer-mathematician-statistician Adolphe Quételet.16 His innovation was to have applied probabilistic calculations “to biological and social phenomena while considering that the average number attained described an objective characteristic of the population under observation”.17 Of course, Quételet was not so naïve as to suggest that this human type18 existed concretely, but he considered that it could sum up the human group from which he emerged mathematically.19 Still, non-specialists did not hesitate to go one step further in proposing that the average man constituted in some way an ideal type that nature tries to realize with a certain probability of error, this last expressing itself through such extremes as the types of the saint or the idiot, the genius or the criminal. As the man without qualities reminds his sister, the life of an individual is possibly only a small oscillation about the most probable mean of a series. The notion of “the average man”20 therefore changes rapidly in the process of its elaboration into a concept of the normal man on the one hand (the normative aspect), and the mediocre man on the other (the axiological aspect). As Musil’s Ulrich says, what remains is what we the uninitiated call simply the mean, that is to say something we have absolutely no idea what it is.

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See the Catalog of Marguerite Yourcenar’s personal library, no. 5022: Adolphe Quételet, 1796-1874. Exposition documentaire présentée à la Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er à l’occasion du centenaire de la mort d’Adolphe Quételet (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1974) 205 pages + 16 illustrations. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 118. ٝ The notion of the average man, or typical man, as Quételet calls him, earned him attacks from positivist thinkers. See Stéphane Callens, Les Maîtres de l’erreur. Mesure et probabilité au XIXe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1997), 8-9 and passim. ٝ Bouveresse, Robert Musil. L’homme probable, le hasard, la moyenne et l’escargot de l’histoire, 172 ff. ٝ It should be noted here that the notion was rehabilitated by mathematics from the fifties on. See for example Maurice Fréchet, Réhabilitation de la notion statistique de l’homme moyen (Paris: Palais de la Découverte, séries “Les Conférences du Palais de la Découverte”, 1950). Quételet is present also in the inquiries on “the end of certainty” such as Morris Kline’s Mathématiques: la fin de la certitude (Paris: 1989).

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Banalizing Anti-Epiphany – A Mathematical View

If what happens to us (or what we think to have made happen) is always probable, even in its exceptional character, this means that it would be without effect on the series: despite their belief in an individualism that expresses itself through acts and works, Musil and Yourcenar remain skeptical of the idea that exceptional men ultimately have power over history. In Memoirs of Hadrian, the Roman emperor (and the European leader lurking behind him) says “The mind of man is reluctant to consider itself as the product of chance, or the passing result of destinies over which no god presides, least of all himself”.21 Similarly, through his refusal to become “a man with qualities,” Ulrich abandons the traditional supports of identity that define the classic hero.22 He “has actively freed himself from fakeries of subjectivity by renouncing his ‘person’ and his so-called personal qualities.”23

Return to Human Amorphism The abandonment of traditional formative categories of identity characterizes the birth of Mr. Everybody. This return to non-differentiation appears in the very form of the human being. In his unfinished essay of 1923, The German as Symptom, Musil lays out in mathematical terms what seems to me an anthropological truth. According to his “Theorem of Human Amorphism”, man does not have a proper form but borrows it from his sociocultural environment. “‘He polishes himself on the world’ is much too mild an image; it ought to read: He pours himself into its mold.”24 Similarly, for Yourcenar the “self” emerges from the chisel like a statue from its gangue, in the same way that the body of the child Marguerite emerges from the kisses of her nurse, Barbe: At about age two or three, I remember having been raised up from my small bed, and my entire body being covered with warm kisses which traced for me its unknown contours, thus giving me, so to speak, a form.25

ٝ

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated by Grace Frick (New York: Modern Library, 1984), 26. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 23. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 24. ٝ Robert Musil, The German as Symptom, in Precision and Soul; Essays and Addresses, edited and translated by Burton Pyke and David S. Luft (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), 165. ٝ (Our translation)

May Chehab

21

At the same time, whereas Musil Man is formed by the backlash of what he has created, by contrast the epigraph to Marguerite Yourcenar’s The Abyss declares that each of us has to discover not a universal nature but his proper form. 26 Yourcenar’s grand oeuvre is itself the mighty sculptor who calls forth its author from the unformed. That uncertain and floating self, that entity whose existence I myself have contested, and which I only feel to be truly delimited by the several works that I have happened to write.27

If the idea of an absence of original form permits us to sweep away all substantialist presuppositions,28 man can nonetheless contribute to his own fashioning; it is therefore also his acts that sculpt him: “And gradually, in turn, says Hadrian, my actions were forming me”.29 Yourcenar takes great care to specify in Memoirs of Hadrian that the “true birthplace is that wherein one looks intelligently upon oneself; my first homelands have been books”.30 Musil draws up as a methodological rule the imperative of an empirical and inductive approach to human behavior. The metaphysical question of “who am I?” is displaced for the sake of the more empirical “where am I?”31 This is how the voyages, physical or mental, acquire more importance: they are acts of displacement, of dislocation.

1. The Revenge of the Improbable and the Insignificant The Poetics of the Hazardous: Small Causes, Large Effects The poetics of the banal and the revalorization of the average (“what could be more absurd, observes Ulrich, than to reproach an average for

ٝ

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oratio de hominis dignitate: “O Adam, […] I have placed you at the world’s very center, that you may the better behold from this point whatever is in the world. And I have made you neither celestial nor terrestrial, neither mortal nor immortal, so that, like a free and able sculptor and painter of yourself, you may mold yourself wholly in the form of your choice”. Yourcenar, The Abyss, 3. ٝ Reception Discourse at the French Academy. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 7. ٝ Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 56. ٝ Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, 33. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 7.

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being average!”)32 finally finds its mathematical base in a characterization of chance that Yourcenar may have found in Henri Poincaré: it is contained in the formula “small causes, large effects” and “serves to explain complex systems where there emerge reactions incommensurate with the causes that produced them”.33 Yourcenar defines their validity vehemently in an interview with Matthieu Galey: I said it, and I reiterated it in Archives du Nord [How Many Years], I repeated it to you: people don’t like to discover how much their lives depend on chance; that troubles them. They like to have a life they more or less control […] But that it might simply depend on the bus one takes…34

The New Insignificance How far do Yourcenar or Musil follow the path of anti-subjectivism? All this detachment in the face of phenomena, all this statistical leveling of the human, this unceasing denigration of the lyrical and romantic subject, all this seems to advocate a “counter-epiphanic art par excellence, one which was determined to show things in their crude, lowly reality, and to dispel any illusion of a deeper meaning inhabiting them –the very reverse of a transfiguration.”35 Indeed the flattening effect that derives from this unforgiving representation of the illusory character of romantic aspirations to an epiphanic and whole self –this effect is not an end in itself. On the contrary, the power of writing resides in “its extraordinary ability to capture this banality”, 36 to invest it with sense, to seize it as an object of contemplation, to enact a transfiguration upon it. There where acceptance of the banal and the demystification of the illusory self seemed to be the final goal of an absolute denunciation, the “unveiling of things in their meaninglessness involves its own kind of transfiguration”.37 In the same way, if these authors take from the theory of probability their cardinal hypotheses, it is not in order to verify their validity, but in order to test them, to explore their validity and their limits.38 Even “the ٝ

MWQ, II, 484. Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 110. ٝ Marguerite Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts, 171 (our translation). ٝ Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 431. ٝ Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, 431. ٝ Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity, 431. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 7. ٝ

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primacy accorded to the idea of amorphism is essentially a warning against ideological and political strayings to which could lead substantialist interpretations of man”.39

From Illustrious Men to Men without Lustre Thus, and contrary to what one might have thought, neither Robert Musil nor Marguerite Yourcenar believed in determinism, any more than they believed in indeterminism. The circumstances are so entangled that one cannot always give a rational explanation of them. One can say that everything is predestined, that everything is an extremely skillful arrangement of which we see only a very small part. One can also say that everything is chaotic, and I shall come up against that dilemma until the end.40

Despite having recourse both to the theory of the average man and to the law of large numbers, Musil and Yourcenar investigate them rather than taking them as sacred, in contrast to the pseudo-positivist infatuation of many of their contemporaries, as Ian Hacking depicts it: As for France [...], the term ‘law of large numbers’ became entrenched, and [...] against the device of skeptics, statistical law was enthroned. [...] It was not something to be checked against experience; it was the way things had to be. Not because there was a mathematical demonstration of the law – no one paid much heed to what Poisson had proved. The law of large numbers became a metaphysical truth. [...] Thanks to superstition, laziness, equivocation, befuddlement with tables of numbers, dreams of social control, and propaganda from utilitarians, the law of large numbers – not Poisson’s theorem but a proposition about the stability of mass phenomena – became, for the next generation or two, a synthetic a priori truth.41

The laws of the mathematics of chance, generated out of common usage, have served to create a distance from anthropological philosophies with a universalist or essentialist bent.42 But if certain writers explore the critical and heuristic potential of anthropological phenomena, they don’t ٝ

Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 9. Yourcenar, Les Yeux ouverts, 171 (our translation). ٝ Ian Hacking, The taming of chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, series “Ideas in Context”, 1990) 104. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 3. ٝ

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always do this by yielding to the demon of interpretation that would bring them either to metaphysical speculation, or to the search for an immanent causal principle. For, “to deduce a possibility out of a possibility, or a fact from a fact is one thing, and to deduce, as the law of large numbers seems to do, a fact from a possibility, is another.”43 Musil and Yourcenar explore the probabilistic hypothesis in order to show that its application to the human phenomenon is inane, and to attempt on the contrary to lay bare that which, in the understanding of man, resists.44 The tactic used is that of an experimenter testing a working hypothesis. It is characterized by a concern with restoring sense, against all statistical fatalism, to the ethical question of individual freedom and responsibility. In other words, when the probabilistic hypothesis is taken to its extreme, it is in order to isolate that which in human beings is capable of escaping statistical regularity.45 Despite all the strategies launched with the help of mathematics that retain their formal seductiveness, it is still unworkable to generalize from probabilistic analogies to human reality because causal relations objectified offer an account neither of the totality of things nor of their complexity. But we must not deceive ourselves: persisting belief in the power that individuals have to inflect daily reality does not rest on anything measurable either.

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Bouveresse, Robert Musil. L’homme probable, le hasard, la moyenne et l’escargot de l’histoire, 192. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 102. ٝ Vatan, Robert Musil et la question anthropologique, 102-112.

THE SEMIOTICS OF SITUATIONIST URBAN THEORY ALEXANDROS PH. LAGOPOULOS

After more than thirty years of published research concerning the Situationist International (SI, Internationale Situationniste), it is today possible to assess its position in the domains of architectural, geographical and planning theories.1 Since it is not possible to understand the situationists’ spatial views outside the general context of situationist cultural and political philosophy, it is necessary in order to deal with the former to turn first, briefly, to the latter. For the situationist views on space, which focus on the city, I rely primarily on Tom McDonough’s anthology The Situationists and the City2 and two other very useful discussions, Simon Sadler’s The Situationist City3 and David Pinder’s Visions of the City.4 There is also a set of important studies by human geographers, starting with the pioneering articles by Alastair Bonnett5 and continuing with Pinder,6 Andy Merrifield7 and Erik Swyngedouw.8 These authors address major topics of

1

A brief version of this paper was presented at the IXth International Congress of the Hellenic Semiotic Society, held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in November 2010. 2 Tom McDonough, ed., The Situationists and the City (London and New York: Verso, 2009). 3 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998). 4 David Pinder, Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in TwentiethCentury Urbanism (New York: Routledge), 2005. 5 Alastair Bonnett, “Art, Ideology, and Everyday Space: Subversive Tendencies from Dada to Postmodernism”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1989): 69-86 and “Situationism, Geography, and Poststructuralism”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1992): 131-46. 6 David Pinder, “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City”, Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405-27. 7 Andy Merrifield, Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 93-111.

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situationist urban theory and emphasise its revolutionary nature. However, I believe that a semiotic perspective and an attentive analysis of the spatiality of key situationist concepts and their interrelationships reveal a peculiar situationist semiotics of space. In other words, the situationist city is a city essentially constituted on the level of signs, of meaning, in the revolutionary context that they favoured. This semiotics presents some interesting comparisons with semiotically-oriented tendencies in human geography.

The Situationist International As is well known, the Situationist International (SI) was founded in 1957 and dissolved in 1972. Its major figure was Guy-Ernest Debord, who had earlier founded the pre-situationist group Letterist International (LI, 1952-1957), which was transformed into the SI. The SI played an important historical role and its theory is a major contribution to cultural studies. The Situationist International was influential in three ways: as an artistic movement, as a political group and as a theoretical tendency. Artistically, the SI started as an important avant-garde movement, which took on a markedly political character from 1962 on. It is the direct heir of dadaism and surrealism, although Debord criticises both of these on the grounds that these currents were not able to achieve the surpassing of art.9 In post-revolutionary society, the avant-garde would be eliminated10 and its role passed to the revolutionary proletariat. Politically, the presence of the SI was strongly felt during the events of May ’68, although it never numbered more than ten members. Its influence was due to its continuous presence in the series of student movements that began in France towards the end of 1966, the wide diffusion and impact of its ideas before May ’68 and its revolutionary slogans and graffiti of this period.11 In terms of

8

Erik Swyngedouw, “The Strange Respectability of the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (2002): 153-65. 9 Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), thesis 191 and Rapport sur la construction des situations (France: Mille et Une Nuit, 1997), 5556. 10 Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 40, 56. 11 Tom McDonough, “Introduction”, in The Situationists and the City, 1, 28; Ken Knabb, ed., Situationist International Anthology (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public

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theory, situationism and the events of May ’68 were a major influence on the formation of poststructuralism,12 which like the SI was influenced by dadaism and surrealism (and existentialism),13 as well as on the American version of poststructuralism, postmodernism.14 The SI formulated an integral and radical theory of cultural revolution, condensed in Debord’s La société du spectacle of 1967 and his collaborator Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life15 (French title Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations, 1967). Many consider Debord’s book as the Capital of the new generation; it is a version of Western Marxism, i.e., the Marxism of the New Left, with Hegelian connections. Debord’s book offers a systematic elaboration of situationist ideas as they were formulated from the 1950s, and in my opinion provides the necessary context for the analysis below. A brief account of situationist views, focusing mainly on Debord’s theses, can be thought of as having three parts, all of which are anchored in the urban.

The society of the spectacle Capitalism produces the spectacle. According to Debord, commodity relations, that is, alienated social relations, have penetrated and mastered the whole of everyday life, culture, art, leisure, even personal behaviour, a process accelerated by the new systems of technology, information, and communication; every domain of life is transformed into a commodity. Modern life under these conditions is characterised by the spectacle. The spectacle is associated with class society and power, and the material aspect of the spectacle indicates the distance between people, because it involves only false consciousness, the illusion of social encounters; the spectacle is a social relationship mediated by images and created by the existing mode of production. Life is contemplative, passive and boring, and social experience is marked by boredom, apathy and frustration; any Secrets, 2006), 509; Simon Ford, The Situationist International: A User’s Guide (London: Black Dog, 2005), 125. 12 See also Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, “From Sémiologie to Postmodernism: A Genealogy”, Semiotica 178 (2010): 225-27; on the similarities between situationism and poststructuralism, see Bonnett, “Situationism”, 139-43. 13 Robert Wicks, Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003), ix-x, 11, 14-16, 295-96, 298. 14 Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 5-6, 107, 111-12. 15 Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life (U.K.: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1994).

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real experience of life becomes impossible. In this world of images, the unity of life is lost. Ways of life are sold in the marketplace as lifestyles. The consumer lives an absurd life and cannot find identity in anything except identification with the commodity and pointless consumption.16

The possibilities offered under the present condition of capitalism Though for Debord it is the spectacle which dominates our lives, it is nevertheless not invincible and it is possible to surpass it. For the situationists, although the economic and technological development of capitalism offers the prospect of increasing free time and leisure, alienated social relations are unjustifiably perpetuated. Economic development is marked by the independence of the commodity, and society is not liberated from its bonds. Revolutionary criticism and class struggle will turn against the alienated social relations and the deep impoverishment of the everyday, and this struggle presupposes a proletarian revolutionary organisation in the form of the total democracy of autonomous councils. A major struggle in the field of leisure and culture is necessary and must take place together with the economic and political conflicts.17

The revolutionary prospects for society Debord’s critical analysis of capitalism is followed by a revolutionary plan – which by no means excludes violence – for the transformation of capitalism through the proletariat in spite of its structural obstacles. This situationist action will take the form of a new kind of play, coextensive with everyday life, which is an ethical choice. The post-revolutionary society, like the one envisaged by dadaism and surrealism, aims at a new totality of social relations which will negate existing capitalist ones and, since the latter are attached to a class society, aims at the abolition of classes, as clearly stated by Debord. This ‘revolution of everyday life’ also entails the abolition of the state, a Marxist idea elaborated by the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ group. Like dadaism and surrealism, the SI rejects the separation of poetry and art from everyday life. Art is necessarily an avant-garde art, but its actual realisation is its disappearance

16

Debord, La société du spectacle, theses 1, 2, 4, 6, 23, 42, 72, 193, 215, 217-18; Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 9-10, 11, 14, 23, 25. 17 Debord, La société du spectacle, thesis 40 and Rapport 29, 36-37, 42; Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 18, 22.

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(i.e., its absorption into the everyday); according to Lefebvre,18 this is Marx’s aesthetic project. Post-capitalist society will be characterised by the abolition of work, the unification of art, politics and scientific disciplines, and the achievement of a playful life, which will involve pleasure, uncommodified leisure and the satisfaction of desires.19

The major situationist concepts and their relation to urban space The central imperative of the SI is the creation of desired situations, a concept influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, who was in turn influenced by Martin Heidegger. The situation is at the heart of situationist spatial theory. The spatial views of the SI are focused on the city20 and constitute an urban theory, which may be considered as having two branches, a geographical theory and a theory of urban planning. The urban theory of the SI is a radical critique of human geography and the practices of urban planning and proposes a revolutionary perspective for both.21 This integral urban theory does not, however, represent the peak of the situationist project, but only that of its first stage, the ‘architectural interlude’ from its foundation to 1962. In fact, by 1962 most of the artists no longer figured in the SI and Debord gave greater emphasis to the political aspects of the spatial.22 Situationist urban theory is founded on a set of concepts and a set of their relationships. A graphic representation of these two sets appeared on the cover of the first issue of Internationale Situationniste in 1958 (Figure 18 Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. II. Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L’ Arche, 1961), 42. 19 Debord, Rapport, theses 53, 186, 187, 190; Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 2, 3, 4, 31; Ford, The Situationist International, 122-23. 20 Guy Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 63; see also Ford, The Situationist International, 33-34. 21 Guy Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 8-12 and La société du spectacle, theses 169, 172-73, 177-79; Attila Kotányi and Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 86-89. 22 Sadler, The Situationist City, 2, 12. This formulation is midway between the emphasis on discontinuity between the two periods of the SI (for example, Sadler, The Situationist City, 3-4, 12) and David Pinder’s (Visions of the City, 130, 23234) insistence on continuity, a point to which I shall return.

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1); in the same issue, we find the “Definitions” of the major concepts of the SI.23 The first five terms had appeared between 1954 and 1956 in different issues of Potlatch, the journal of the Letterist International.24

Fig. 1. Debord, New Theater of Operations within Culture, Internationale Situationniste 1, 1958. Reconstruction by the author.

According to Simon Sadler, these were concepts that the SI believed to be revolutionary, but the above representation shows that they were unable to integrate them into a coherent program.25 For McDonough, on the other hand, the representation, expressing the radical cultural experimentation of the SI, shows that the construction of situations is its ultimate aim, unitary urbanism and experimental behaviour are the means of achieving this aim, and psychogeography, détournement (twisting), and situationist architecture are three dependent elements, the interaction of which founds unitary urbanism.26 This interpretation is close to the situationists’ 23

Situationist International, “Definitions”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 51-52. 24 Sadler, The Situationist City, 11, 168 n. 38. A concise presentation of the key concepts of the SI can be found in Bonnett, “Situationism”, 135-37 and Merrifield, Metromarxism, 97-100 and a wider discussion of them, mainly of unitary urbanism, in Pinder, Visions of the City. 25 Sadler, The Situationist City, 157. 26 McDonough, “Introduction”, 14.

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intention, but the analytical discussion of these concepts will help us to a more substantial understanding and allow us to propose a more rigorous organisation of this diagram.

The construction of situations The standard reference for any discussion of the construction of situations is Debord’s own text on the matter. Life, he writes, is a sequence of situations, which are generally today undifferentiated. Instead, chosen situations must be constructed, and this is the ‘ultimate goal’ of the SI. These situations start beyond the collapse of the spectacle, presuppose participation, and are collective ‘ambiences’ and a play of events (which is a signifying practice), a sum of impressions that determine the quality of a unique moment. The object of study will be which choice of participants, which organisation of the site, and which activation of events may lead to the desired ‘ambience’ to be experienced by its producers. Thus, another concept should be added to the situationist conceptual arsenal, that of the anti-authoritarian ‘ambience’. According to Debord, the play of poetic (i.e., semiotic, constituted on the level of meaning) subjects among poetic objects must be organised. The plan of situations must be prepared as a scenario and their construction must produce unknown and superior feelings, but the situations themselves are transitory and futureless.27 The nature of the situation is emotional, but also aesthetic, since only a situation can be the vehicle of the new beauty, and the aim of the situation is to transform life into an exciting game.28 The experimental activity leading to a situation is a kind of ‘situationist-oriented psychoanalysis’, which unlike Freudian psychoanalysis aims at the realisation of desires, of what is loved and attractive.29 I have already made reference to the kinship between Debord’s situation and Sartre’s existentialism (although Sartre, like many others, was subject to the usual dismissal by the SI). Sadler30 also observes that very likely the term ‘situation’ itself derived from Sartre’s use of the term,

27

Debord, Rapport, 33, 39-41; see also Guy Debord and Gil J. Wolman, “A User’s Guide to Détournement”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 21. 28 Debord, “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”, 9, 11. 29 Situationist International, “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 49. 30 Sadler, The Situationist City, 45.

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but it also recalls Lefebvre’s concept of the ‘moment’.31 David Harvey correctly points out that Lefebvre’s moment ‘foreshadowed and to some degree paralleled the ideas of the situationist movement’.32 Lefebvre states that this relation between situation and moment ‘was the basis of our understanding’, but the situationists criticised him for connecting moment with history, while they wanted to create new moments, a view that Lefebvre considered an abstract, not concrete, utopia.33 Ben Highmore indicates a connection between Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau,34 one aspect of which is the influence of surrealism on both. He observes their common concern with the everyday as a domain of a poetics of living, but also indicates their divergent political agendas.35 We may now better understand how concepts such as situation are of interest for a cultural approach to the everyday. However, I agree in principle with Sadler that this situationist concept is caught in a circular reasoning, because, as he argues, the constructed situations are considered as the means for a revolutionary transformation; but the revolution is seen as the prerequisite for the construction of situations. In practice, not a single situation was ever constructed by the SI.36 If we compare the nature of situation with Debord’s later description of post-capitalist society in La société du spectacle, it becomes manifest that the situation represents a condensation of the ideal of post-capitalist life, with the difference that the general pattern of the latter is permanent. This means that the ephemeral situations emerging in it are structurally expected, while the present creation of situations is extraordinary; life in the post-capitalist future will be an incessant sequence of different situations. But situation is not just a general semiotic concept; it is emphatically socio-spatial, due to the 31

Which, according to John Roberts, is also derived from Sartre; see Roberts, Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory (London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2006), 80. 32 David Harvey, “Afterword”, in The Production of Space, by Henri Lefebvre (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 429. 33 On the moment and its nature as la fête (festival), see Lefebvre, Critique, 346, 348, 350-52, 355, 357. See also Kristin Ross, “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002), 271; Merrifield, Metromarxism, 8, 108. 34 Who acknowledges his debt to Lefebvre (Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1984), 205 n. 5. 35 Ben Highmore, Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 150-51 36 Cf. Sadler, The Situationist City, 105, 106, 116, 153, 157.

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geographical component of the site’s organisation, which provides the poetic objects. The core of the situation with its ambience is emotional and aesthetic (which are both dimensions of meaning) and the cultural interaction it implies takes place ideally within a spatial labyrinth, appropriate for creating ‘the pleasurable fear of the sublime’, a sublime disorientation found in New Babylon37 (see below). This focusing on ambience leads to an approach significantly different from, for example, Kevin Lynch’s approach to the conception of urban space, which concentrates on the ‘imageability’ of urban space.38 While, in semiotic terms, Lynch is interested in the denotative level of the perception of the urban image, the SI focuses on the connotative (symbolic) level of it. Currently, semiotic analysis of this level concentrates on its cognitive component, but in the case of the SI the orientation is towards the affective component (a semiotics that much later Algirdas Julien Greimas called the ‘semiotics of passion’, that is, of the affective register of the semiotic actors39). Thus, the situationist theory encompasses a semiotics of space, more specifically an urban semiotics since its exclusive interest is urban space, oriented towards the experiential recuperation of space. While the semiotics of the SI diverges from Lynch’s approach, its aim overlaps with that of humanistic geography. It is true that views are not identical within this approach to human geography. For David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels40, the foundation of humanistic geography is anthropocentric and its primary concern is human meaning. The same anthropocentrism underlies Yi-Fu Tuan’s41 phenomenological (Husserlian) views, which, according to him, are closely related to existentialism. Tuan focuses on what he believes to be the essence of man’s experience, that is, on ‘man-in-the-world’, and the (assumed universal) essence of meaningful space. On the other hand, both anthropocentrism and existentialism are

37

Sadler, The Situationist City, 115, 145. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960), 2, 3, 6, 9, 10. 39 Algirdas-Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du language, vol. 2 (Paris: Hachette, 1986), “Passion”. 40 David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels, “Introduction: Contexts of Modern Humanism in Geography”, in Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, ed. David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels (Chicago: Maaroufa Press, 1978), 5, 11. 41 Yi-Fu Tuan, “Geography, Phenomenology, and the Study of Human Nature”, Canadian Geographer 15 (1971): 181-82, 191. 38

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criticised by Edward Relph,42 who, departing from Martin Heidegger, considers that not only the human being but being as a whole is essential, and man has responsibility for all existing things. This ‘environmental humility’ leads, for him, to a focus on the individuality and identity of the man-made landscape as a cultural artefact that expresses values and is comparable to architecture, literature and art. Another disagreement comes from John Pickles,43 who, following Husserl and Heidegger, opposes his ‘phenomenological geography’ to what he calls the ‘geographical phenomenology’ of Tuan and Relph. While, he argues, space is for them pre-given, in reality the geographical objects are experientially constituted by the subject itself in consciousness. In man’s mode of being in the world, the place-character of things is fundamental and man conceives of a universal spatiality. There are, then, diverging orientations within humanistic geography, but their common denominator is the existential recuperation of space. This is also the mark of situation. However, this overlapping does not lead to a coincidence of these two approaches, because a major factor distinguishes them: vis-à-vis the political neutrality of humanistic geography, the concept of situation is by contrast centrally political, and more than that, revolutionary.44 Situation does not only imply ambience, but also the activation of events by poetic subjects. These subjects, who read urban space as a text, also form part of it as a living text. This text is part of a wider living text, because as we shall see in the concept of dérive (drifting) it also includes encounters with other subjects; but despite the interactions taking place, the urban space as text dominates the wider text. Through this living dynamics, a behavioural semiotics emerges, a semiotics of signifying practices45 which unfolds in continuous interaction with spatial semiotics, both together constituting the semiotics of space. There is a difference between these two semiotics. The spatial semiotics is simply a reading, that is, a semiotic consumption, of space, which does not lead to the actual 42 Edward Relph, Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography (London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981), for example 49, 143, 15556, 185, 189, 191. 43 John Pickles, Phenomenology, Science, and Geography: Spatiality and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), for example 5, 37, 42-44, 94-96, 154-55, 158, 164-65, 168-70. 44 Cf. Bonnett, “Situationism”, 138. 45 Algirdas Julien Greimas and Joseph Courtés, Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage (Paris: Hachette, 1979), “Pratiques sémiotiques”.

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production of new space, as happens with unitary urbanism, while the semiotics of signifying practices runs through the whole communication circuit, continuously producing text upon text. The articulation of these two texts, that is, the integration of spatial semiotics with signifying practices, aims at activating feelings, and this aim refers to the reader/consumer of the double text, who is the end point of the communication circuit of signifying practices, a circuit activated/produced by the practices of the initial poetic subjects. We observe at this point that the situationist communication circuit is not the typical one, the linear addresser (producer) ĺ message/text ĺ addressee (reader, consumer), but forms a loop, its two ends coinciding, since both addressers and addressees are the initial poetic subjects themselves. This loop circuit can also be found in other cases: in the case of the monologue with respect to individuals, and with respect to collectivities it appears in ‘primitive’ religious rituals, as Edmund Leach points out. As Leach writes: ‘When we participate in ritual we “say” things to ourselves’, we ‘transmit collective messages to ourselves’.46 Thus, as Sadler points out,47 if situations were realised, they would be a sort of performance, acted out by performers who use urban space as a performance space, whence his comparison with experimental theatre.

Unitary urbanism The situationist city as a whole is a complex network of situations and follows the principles of ‘unitary urbanism’ (urbanisme unitaire),48 which is the second situationist urban concept that I will examine. As we saw, the situation is composed of two components: a play of events, that is, a certain playful behaviour, and ambience, the material setting, the former leading to the latter. Similarly, the new architecture must not, according to Debord, play with poetic forms, but with atmospheric effects (that is, spatial signs) resulting from both architectural space and the gestures contained in it. For urban space as a whole, Debord sees a need to attach urban problems to social, psychological and artistic perspectives, so as to achieve a spatial synthesis, connected to a style of living. The full development of the material setting is unitary urbanism (better called ‘integral urban planning’), a planning which will create experimental cities, and which is dynamic because of its relationship to 46

Edmund Leach, Culture and Communication: The Logic by Which Symbols are Connected (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 43-45. 47 Sadler, The Situationist City, 105. 48 Sadler, The Situationist City, 117.

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styles of behaviour. Before this full development, however, the minimum realisation of unitary urbanism is the spatial extension of play in selected parts of an old city, contesting any value (that is, axiological signs) attached to them, the same approach to urban space that we saw above in the concept of situation. In unitary urbanism, separations such as work/leisure and public/private will be dissolved. Also, it is only through unitary urbanism that integral art may be realised, an art which can no longer correspond to the traditional definition of aesthetics. We see that, contrary to the situation, which addresses the micro-scale and is transitory, unitary urbanism is a general and lasting (general) ambience. However, the construction of situations is the means leading to unitary urbanism and the latter is the indispensable basis for the former in the context of a freer society.49 Sadler’s criticism of the status of unitary urbanism parallels his criticism of that of situation, namely that it is unclear whether the context of the realisation of unitary urbanism is capitalism or some postrevolutionary society.50 Debord in fact connects unitary urbanism to ‘a freer society’, manifestly a post-capitalist one, a connection which brings us back to the circularity of situation. In the years that followed the SI abandoned both the concept of unitary urbanism and the constructed situation, that is, the spatial component of their initial theory, in favour of a redefinition of situation as a function of a revolutionary consciousness independent of spatial elements.51 The SI conceptualised unitary urbanism not as a doctrine, but as a critique of urban planning.52 Their general critique of capitalism takes a specialised form in the case of urban planning. The spatial expression of unitary urbanism was undertaken by Constant with his project of New Babylon, formerly ‘Dériville’. This project was embraced by the situationists during the stage of their ‘architectural interlude’ and was akin to Lefebvre’s ‘experimental utopia’, itself probably influenced by Constant’s work. However, within the SI a wider critique of planning 49

Debord, Rapport, 30, 33-34, 35, 39 and “Situationist Theses on Traffic”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 69; Guy Debord and Constant, “The Amsterdam Declaration”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 104; Situationist International, “Definitions”, 52. 50 Sadler, The Situationist City, 151. 51 See also Sadler, The Situationist City, 12, 161. 52 Situationist International, “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 100.

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developed, according to which any urban model was inescapably absorbed by capitalism. This critique was elaborated during the first half of the 1960s and represents, according to McDonough, ‘one of the most compelling analyses of contemporary planning available on the Left’.53 It eventually led to the abandonment of unitary urbanism by the SI. For Constant, the city is an artificial environment, built collectively, in which the game of life unfolds. The aim of unitary urbanism is not primarily urban planning, but a revolutionary approach to urban living. It is to harmonise everyday life with human needs and to realise it in a dynamic manner, recognising no goal or meaning in life, but setting as goal life itself; unitary urbanism is designed for pleasure (that is, it is conceived as a semiotic production process aimed at investing space with specific signs). Intervention in the material environment is a collective game, and the aim of unitary urbanism is to cause a profound change by using the material environment to psychological effect (that is, to communicate specific spatial signs) and for the creation of new behaviours (signifying practices). The key area of intervention is collective social space, such as the street,54 which is the major determinant of everyday life because it allows frequent personal contacts, a vital factor for the mass culture to come. In the context of unitary urbanism, architecture, as well as the other present-day arts, will disappear. They will be replaced by unitary urbanism as a totally original universal art and by the integration of art and life.55 It is the city beyond commodification, the city of non-alienated everyday life.56 The (post-revolutionary) ‘psychological space’ of New Babylon is a continuous network spatial construction above the existing city, able to expand in an unlimited way and devoid of fixed streets. In deliberate opposition to the garden city, New Babylon is a city consisting of a set of levels raised above the ground, supported by huge pillars; all traffic is 53

McDonough, “Introduction“, 19-20, 22, 28-29. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication”, in The Post-Modern Reader, ed. Charles Jencks (London: Academy Editions and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 153. 55 Constant, “Unitary Urbanism”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 114-16, 119, 120, “Inaugural Report to the Munich Conference”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 108 and “Contribution to Forum Special Issue on Fusion of the Arts and ‘Integration?…of What?’”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 110-11; Pinder, Visions of the City, 162. 56 Swyngedouw, “The Strange Respectability”, 160. 54

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limited to the ground level and the overhead flat terraces, and most of the fully automated factories are located underground. Social space dominates, with an amazing percentage of 85% compared to 15% for permanent housing and hotels. Like Debord, Constant conceptualises the city as composed of many sectors (Figure 2), and their regularly and consciously changing ambiences, of a labyrinthine nature, are intended to create new sensations and psychological effects. In the interior of the city artificial light, ventilation, and temperature regulation are considered necessary and these technical facilities are viewed as vital for the creation of ambiences and hence for the psychogeographical game in social space. The whole spatial organisation of the city facilitates the wanderings and chance encounters of its inhabitants.57 New Babylon wants to be the model situationist city, composed of ambiences as situations and allowing endless drifting; it is the support for a (participatory) civilisation of leisure and play.58

Fig. 2. Constant, New Babylon, hanging sector, profile, 1960. © Pictoright Amsterdam 2012.

57

Constant, “Unitary Urbanism”, 117-22 and “Another City for Another Life”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 71-73; see also Pinder, Visions of the City, 200-06, 219. 58 Situationist International, “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s”, 102.

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Constant’s project is in line with the architectural research of the time on mega-structures,59 with the crucial difference that it is the embodiment of a political programme.60 The importance of unitary urbanism culminated in the period from 1957 to about 1961, after which the views of the SI on it shifted. Constant was accused of acting like a specialist in architectural form instead of promoting its content, playfulness and creativity in everyday life.61 Unitary urbanism had to be a critique of urban planning.62 By the time Constant completed his project in 1974, its dominant representational means had slipped from three-dimensional models to two-dimensional representations, and in the context of the latter from drawing to paintings. This was a shift from concreteness to abstraction, in line with the situationist critique. Constant’s paintings, mainly those of the 1970-73 period, display at times intense dysphoric representations of aggression and violence, which could be understood as comments on a negative aspect of the city.63 Let us now concentrate on the signifying aspect of this essentially semiotic project. Some caution is needed to distinguish the semiotic from the material aspect, which both collaborate in the building of New Babylon. Erik Swyngedouw sees this city as integrating the material and the technological with the artistic, the discursive and the representational (i.e., the semiotic).64 However, a strict hierarchy is established between them. Material social life is either spatially peripheral (traffic on the ground level and above the city, industry underground), or spatially central (within the city) but marginal (housing) or subordinated to the semiotic (transformation of uses according to the needs of the moment). The technical part is also either peripheral, as supporting (structural system) the semiotic, or central (technical facilities) but used for the creation of semiotic effects (ambiences). Thus, the actual material city is simply a vehicle for a conceptual, a signifying city, a fact acknowledged by Pinder,

59

Sadler, The Situationist City, 127-28; McDonough, “Introduction”, 20, 22; Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970 (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007), 74. 60 See also Pinder, Visions of the City, for example 210, 213. 61 Situationist International, “Excerpt from ‘Situationist News’”, in The Situationists and the City, ed. Tom McDonough, (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 137-38. 62 Kotányi and Vaneigem, “Basic Program”, 88. 63 Pinder, Visions of the City, 130, 194, 202, 224-25, 258-59; see also Sadler, The Situationist City, 153; Ford, The Situationist International, 78. 64 Swyngedouw, “The Strange Respectability”, 160.

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who notes the priority of play and desire in the city.65 The real city, the supported one, is semiotic, the psychological space of the continually changing ambiences, and this affective spatial semiotics parallels the similar semiotics of the ambience of the situation. That the situationist viewpoint on the city is semiotic is beyond contestation, as corroborated already by Ivan Chtcheglov (Gilles Ivain) in 1953 with his reference to ‘symbolic urban planning’.66 The semiotics of unitary urbanism is more complex than that of situation. As in the case of situation, two semiotics are articulated, but space now acquires an even more important role as the actual product of playful behaviour, indeed within the framework set by the architect; space is not only read, as with situation, but also produced. Unitary urbanism and situation follow the same semiotic logic, but two other important differences characterise unitary urbanism: its produced space-as-text has a strong intentional impact on signifying practices, and its human component, in its triple role as producer-text-consumer, is not composed of a few individuals, but of a whole collectivity.

Psychogeography Situations and unitary urbanism are normative constructs, i.e. they are guided by ideology, but situationist psychogeography seems to emphasise a descriptive, objective and scientific method. It is the study of the laws of the geographical environment, whether consciously organised or not, and the environment’s effects on the emotions and behaviour of individuals. It is based on the statistical generalisation of its methods of observation and mainly on experimentation through concrete interventions in urban space.67 However, despite this apparent desire for scientific objectivity, psychogeography like situation is mainly concerned with emotion and the subjective reading of space. Sadler indicates that psychogeography conceptualises groups of buildings as words in poetry, thus approaching space poetically rather than analytically.68 In fact, psychogeography is not about ‘the relationship between social space and mental space’,69 but about social space in mental space. For Debord, psychogeography is the 65

Pinder, Visions of the City, 256. Ivan Chtcheglov, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 2. 67 Debord, Rapport, 35-36 and “Introduction”, 8, 10; Situationist International, “Definitions”, 52. 68 Sadler, The Situationist City, 77, 79, 81, 85, 95, 160. 69 Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 415 (my italics). 66

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product of dérive. He states that the structure of the situationist city should be sought within the context offered by psychogeography, whence we understand that psychogeography, like situation, is a prerequisite of unitary urbanism70 and thus envisages ‘the future and the possible’.71 Psychogeography opposes objective mainstream cartography; more than that, it aims at subverting cartography and the urban spectacle through détournement72 and uses for these purposes psychogeographical maps. The latter represent, according to Debord, a renewed cartography, following from dérive, old maps and aerial photographs.73 Referring to one of these maps, McDonough74 rightly observes that it represents a combination of cartography and art. Debord discusses the main elements identified by the first surveys of the psychogeographical organisation of the city. He mentions precisely delimited unities of distinct ambiences, occupying a specific space constituted by certain main components. These unities are characterised by principal axes of passage, exits and defences, as well as the existence of important psychogeographical pivotal points; currents and vortices create obstacles to the entry into or exit from these unities.75 There is a striking similarity between these characteristics and the elements composing the ‘mental image’ identified by Lynch76 a few years after Debord and traversing all of behavioural geography. The correspondences (each pair starts with Lynch’s concept) are: district – unity of ambience; path – axis of passage, slope; edge – defence, current, vortex; node – entry, exit, pivotal point; landmark – pivotal point. Both conceptualisations, then, deliver the same typology of unitary visual signs used in maps. The typical example of psychogeographical mapping is the map entitled The Naked City, 1957, a screen print prepared by Debord and Asger Jorn. The subtitle of The Naked City describes it as an Illustration of the Hypothesis of Psychogeographical Turntables: it depicts a situationist urban system (Figure 3). The term ‘plaques tournantes’ could be borrowed 70

Debord, Rapport, 35 and “Introduction”, 9, 11. Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 421. 72 Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 405, 416, 420, 421, 423 and Visions of the City, 153, 159; Andrew Hussey, “The Map is Not the Territory: The Unfinished Journey of the Situationist International”, in Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City, ed. Steven Spier (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2002), 217-18. 73 Debord, “Introduction”, 11 and “Theory of the Dérive”, 66. 74 McDonough, “Introduction”, 8. 75 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”, 62, 65, 66 and “Introduction”, 10. 76 Lynch, The Image of the City, for example, 46-48. 71

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Fig. 3. Debord, The Naked City, 1957. Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, Gravenhage.

from the railway turntable, which allows the change of direction of locomotives, and describes metaphorically the function of the unities of ambience as nodal areas of the urban system, with some exceptions where these unities are termini. The arrows (‘slopes’) represent the spontaneous changes of direction of a moving subject, regardless of the habitual useful connections that govern his behaviour, and bring time and narrative, a semiotic mode, into the spatial context; their direction, shape and weight correspond to the course, duration, and strength attached to spatial movement. Most of the arrows lead from one ambience to another, but a few of them curve, avoiding certain ambiences. McDonough observes that the map is a collage that decomposes a typical map of Paris, that its eighteen fragments are not oriented to the points of the compass and their relationships do not follow topographical logic. In his excellent critical discussion of it Pinder notes, besides its fragmented nature, the absence of scale.77

77 Tom McDonough, “Situationist Space”, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA and

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Two years after the Naked City, Debord produced Life Continues to Be Free and Easy, a collage of postage stamps and hand-coloured figures of soldiers around the central nucleus of the Naked City. The new elements added are thus superimposed on the background situationist reading of Paris and refer to a set of metaphors: colonialism, war, playfulness.78 I find of particular interest the kinship (which does not necessarily imply historical influence) between the approach to historical cartography of a postmodern geographer such as Brian Harley and the above map by Debord. Pinder classifies Harley’s deconstructive approach together with criticism of hegemonic cartographic representations, and he differentiates those from situationist cartography, which he considers as not really counter-hegemonic since it still uses conventional material, albeit as a political use of this material.79 However, the two mapping logics are closely connected. Harley believes that historical representations are not objective and technical but imaginary. The map is a system of signs and the study of cartography is not concerned with accuracy, but is a theory of textuality and as such belongs to semiotics. We should note that Harley, like the situationists, searches for new objects and styles of cartography, with the rhetorical character of the map predominating. Maps for him must convey a feeling of place by using a narrative form and showing minorities and women, views of past cities, landscapes with people and artefacts, and architectural and archaeological drawings.80 I referred above to an evident overlapping between psychogeography and behavioural geography. However, beyond this common area, these two approaches move in opposite directions. First, Debord’s maps use as a substratum the abstract and universalising maps, however distorted, of mainstream cartography – that of ‘capital and planners’, according to Pinder81 – while behavioural geography displays a completely mental cartography; psychogeographical maps do not formulate an integrated semiotic system. Second, maps of behavioural geography are as static as abstract maps, while psychogeographical maps are more dynamic (though London: The MIT Press, 2002), 241-43, 245, 246-48 and “Introduction”, 12-14; Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 415-23; Sadler, The Situationist City, 88-89. 78 Cf. Sadler, The Situationist City, x. 79 Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 406, 408-09, 410-11, 414, 419, 421, 423-24. 80 Brian J. Harley, “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”, in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 278, 300 and “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion”, Journal of Historical Geography 15 (1989): 80-91; see also Sadler, The Situationist City, 182 n. 52. 81 Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 423.

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not dynamic enough, if we think of de Certeau,82 who contrasts the poetic and mythical spatiality of being in the world of the ordinary walker to the simple trace of it on a map, a point also made by Pinder83). Third, behavioural geography, like Lynch, focuses exclusively on the denotative aspect of space. In contrast, psychogeography is a special case of mental mapping: it is a case of affective mapping. This is well expressed by Pinder, who connects psychogeographical maps to the way urban spaces ‘are … lived’, to experiences, feelings and desires.84 Fourth, psychogeographical maps suggest an urban space which has revolutionary potential, springing from the existing city, while such a political stance is lacking in behavioural geography: the semiotics of the psychogeographical map has a political function. There is finally another major divergence between the two geographies: behavioural geography uses scientific methods and techniques to examine the cognitive images of the users of space, while psychogeography relies on auto-elicitation of data on the part of the investigators. Thus, behavioural geography is sensitive to the difference between social groups, while the SI universalises its own reading of the environment:85 psychogeography replaces the study of the semiotics of the users of space with the situationists’ own semiotics, which leads to a boomerang effect, reproducing the same semiotic loop we encountered in the case of situation.

Dérive The method of psychogeography is dérive. Dérive, together with constructed situation, is a crucial concept of situationism and the prerequisite for the construction of situations, as for psychogeography and the construction of psychogeographical maps.86 Debord considers it as one of the basic practices of the SI and, according to him and the text of the “Definitions”,87 it is ‘a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiences,’ which causes an affective disorientation (which is a semiotic

82

De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 92-93, 97. Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 422. 84 Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 415, 422, 424. 85 Bonnett, “Situationism”, 140; Pinder, “Subverting Cartography”, 422 and Visions of the City, 158; Sadler, The Situationist City, 82, 160; Highmore, Everyday Life, 139, 142; Merrifield, Metromarxism, 98. 86 McDonough,” Situationist Space”, 246; Hussey, “The map is not the territory”, 218. 87 Situationist International, “Definitions”, 52. 83

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goal), in order to subvert, as McDonough88 puts it, the city of pure visuality and disrupt, according to Bonnett,89 the banality of the everyday. These ambiences are urban, because the open country does not offer enough chance interventions and the dérive in the countryside is ‘naturally depressing’ (a view of the countryside that Debord later revised). Dérive involves a new mode of experimental, playful, constructive behaviour (it is a game90) and demands openness to psychogeographical effects.91 We conclude, then, that the meaning of the origin of psychogeography in dérive is that dérive is the method that reveals psychogeography.92 For Debord, the dérive integrates two components: the study of a terrain, and an affective aspect in the form of affective disorientation; it is thus not surprising that the goal of dérive is a landscape of labyrinthine spaces. 93 Dérive has its temporal limits. Debord gives an extremely large temporal range for it, lasting from brief moments or a few hours to a couple of months for a sequence of dérives. He later agreed, however, that dérive involves dangers, when Chtcheglov pointed out the utterly negative corporal and psychological effects of the practice for a period longer than a few weeks.94 Dérive and the three other concepts previously discussed are strictly isomorphic in the sense that they revolve around two standard components: playful behaviour and ambience. They are almost interchangeable, though they acquire individuality through a turn to different aims; thus, they are marked by great redundancy. The interrelationship between these two components constitutes the semiotic nucleus of the situationist semiotics of space, and as we shall see, détournement is attached to the same nucleus. What is revealed here is a minimalist theoretical, more particularly semiotic, construction of urban space. An essential object of the dérive is social encounters in everyday life; these hold a central position in both the critique of the society of the spectacle and the description of post-capitalist society in La société du spectacle. However the term is not mentioned in the book, neither generally is that of ‘encounter’,95 being absorbed by the more abstract

88

McDonough, “Situationist Space”, 259. Bonnett, “Situationism”, 136. 90 Situationist International, “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s”, 102. 91 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”, 62-63 and Rapport, 38. 92 See also Merrifield, Metromarxism, 97. 93 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”, 64. 94 Debord, “Theory of the Dérive”, 64; see also Pinder, Visions of the City, 220. 95 For an exception, see Debord, La société du spectacle, thesis 217. 89

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concept of ‘social relations’. This shift contributes to our understanding of the relation between the two periods of the SI. Situation was transformed, according to Sadler,96 ‘from a revolutionary art project to a metaphor for a more fully lived life’. It is difficult to agree with this view, because, as I already argued, post-capitalist life in La société du spectacle is envisioned as an extended version of the situation, and this revolutionary life still includes the revolutionary project of the surpassing of art.97 In his theses 178 and 179, Debord relates the proletarian revolution and notably the workers’ councils to the critique of human geography and here the semiotic nucleus emerges, as he mentions ambience (‘le site’) and events (‘les événements’) that are spatially playful (‘espace mouvant du jeu’); through these, individuals and communities will appropriate their ‘total history’ and achieve autonomy of place, which will lead to the reality of life as journey. The coexistence of this nucleus with geographical critique recalls his earlier paper,98 in which this critique involved psychogeography as well as situation and its future. However, in the theses the future is envisaged as future-as-situation. Psychogeography is not explicit, and for reasons already explained unitary urbanism has disappeared as a specifically elaborated project. Thus, I cannot agree with Pinder’s insistence (which he nevertheless softens) on the continuity of spatial concerns.99 There is a despatialisation of the situationist theory, in the sense of less elaboration of the specificities of space, though without essential change of the overall philosophy. Although dérive has a specific situationist character, as a general idea it is not a situationist invention but was born much earlier. A first regression takes us back in time to André Breton and the surrealists, and this regression leads from a psychogeography of the map to one of the written word. This French, or rather Parisian, line goes back to Charles Baudelaire’s ‘flâneur’, the urban wanderer, in his 1863 essay Le peintre de la vie moderne. However, as Merlin Coverley reminds us, this French prehistory of the dérive can be traced even further back in time, to an English, or rather Londoners’, prehistory involving many authors. Coverley locates the source of urban drifting in Daniel Defoe’s 1722

96

Sadler, The Situationist City, 163. Debord, La société du spectacle, theses 184-92. 98 Debord, “Introduction”. 99 Pinder, Visions of the City, 130, 232-34. 97

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Journal of the Plague Year, which he considers as the first urban psychogeographical survey.100 Coverley reminds us that the domain of surrealism is walking and the street, and considers that, in all the tradition of urban walking, walking is seen as independent from established routes, offering the possibility of exploration of marginal areas, and allowing the street-level gaze to challenge the official representation of the city, thus becoming an act of subversion.101 The street is also central for Debord,102 who, in the context of his programme for a revolutionary avant-garde, states that ‘That which changes our way of seeing the streets is more important than that which changes our way of seeing painting’103 and observes that, since the French Revolution, all authorities have suppressed the street to maintain order.104 While dérive as such had unravelled as a concept during the 1960s, the uprising of May ’68 revived the reality behind the concept: given the paralysis of normal life, a kind of dérive entered into everyday life through mass wanderings and continuous interpersonal exchanges. As to situation, something of the sort was realised in practice during this period. Situation or moment, May ’68 showed their common trait of a revolutionary rupture within the everyday; it was the combination of urban revolution and la fête, unleashing, besides violence, playful activities expressed in behaviour, slogans, songs, comic strips.105 Dérive is a behaviour, a playful one, absorbing significant encounters, activating affective reactions, and integrating scientific observations, all of these activities being subordinated to feeling and lived experience.106 It is thus a semiotic phenomenon. It does not, then, come as a surprise that de Certeau compares the act of walking to the speech act and considers it as a space of enunciation.107 Dérive is a signifying practice, a practice absorbed into situation, absorbed into and produced by unitary urbanism108 and producing psychogeography. 100

Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2006), 15, 19-20, 36-38, 58. 101 Coverley, Psychogeography, 12, 73. 102 See also Merrifield, Metromarxism, 106. 103 Debord, Rapport, 42-43. 104 Debord, La société du spectacle, thesis 166. 105 Cf. Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 101; Harvey, “Afterword”, 429-30; Merrifield, Metromarxism, 108; McDonough, “Introduction”, 28. 106 See also Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 59; Hussey, “The map is not the territory”, 218. 107 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 97-98. On these semiotic concepts, see Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique, “Acte de langage”, “Énonciation”. 108 See also Merrifield, Metromarxism, 98.

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Détournement Détournement is the second major situationist method, which like dérive has a very large scope. Plant observes that the meaning of détournement lies somewhere between ‘diversion’ and ‘subversion’.109 The concept is present unaltered in La société du spectacle, but is associated exclusively with the language of critical theory, without any spatial or other extension.110 Earlier, Debord related it to the operations of the kind of poetry that in his opinion shows that the bringing together of (I clarify: the meaning of) two elements that were initially inserted within different contexts produces a new relationship (I clarify: leading to a meaning) of greater efficiency. The effect is parodic, but the aim is not comic; rather, it is to create a parodic-serious form implying a certain sense of the sublime. Debord refers to a multitude of areas where détournement can be applied, and mentions twisted phrases in posters, records, and radio broadcasts, skilful undermining of the classical novel form, the twisting of the titles of different kinds of books which twists the whole work, and of musical pieces, as well as the creation of films from the fragments of previous ones. As concerns the situationist preoccupation with space (which remained theoretical111) Debord states that it will be possible for everyone to twist constructed situations as a whole by deliberately changing one of their factors. The architectural complex – the unit of unitary urbanism – will according to Debord create new forms and also twist existing architectural forms, extending to the plastic and emotional use of any kind of twisted objects, such as sculptural ones. This urban ultra-détournement could include the exact reconstruction in one city of a neighbourhood belonging to another city. At this point, Debord links détournement to disorientation.112 Debord hoped that the twisting of existing space would be the starting point towards unitary urbanism, but given the distant and utopian horizon of the situationist city as a material reality, all that remained was this twisting itself, whence its importance as a main instrument, even if, as Bonnett observes, it ended up just being a socially inoffensive reaction

109

Plant, The Most Radical Gesture, 86. Debord, La société du spectacle, theses 204-11. 111 Bonnett, “Situationism”, 139. 112 Debord and Wolman, “A User’s Guide”, 15-16, 19-21; see also Situationist International, “Definitions”, 52; René Viénet, “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art”, in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), 274. 110

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without real political extensions.113 I recall here that détournement is also a basic ingredient of dérive – and situation – in the context of which we encountered it as affective disorientation. Thus, by extension, it has an impact on psychogeography and should be considered an integral part of its affective connection to space. Détournement, which is in line with the estrangement of the pre-war avant-garde, completes our comprehension of the semiotics of situationist urban space. In order to understand this point, a quick visit to semiotic theory is necessary. Umberto Eco has proposed a ‘Revised Model’ for compositional analysis in semantics, represented by a semantic treestructure which starts from a unitary sign and identifies its possible meanings. Starting from one or more common denotative meanings, different meaning paths are opened depending on contextual (that is, of the same semiotic system) and circumstantial (that is, of another semiotic system) factors that lead to additional denotative, as well as to connotative, meanings. In this manner, the model attempts to predict the possible meanings that a sign, for example a word, may acquire in communication. Eco clarifies that such a theory of settings is of a statistical nature and includes only the culturally and conventionally recognised occurrences of meaning.114 Two main traits in combination characterise détournement. The first is the double movement of de- and radical re-contextualisation. In the second part of this movement, Eco’s ‘orthodox’ model is neutralised, because the new meanings are anti-conventional, attacking the dominant culture, and thus statistically non-predictable. The element twisted ‘is disrupted and exposed as a product of alienation’115 and this action aims at an intellectual and material de-commodification of urban space.116 The second, which follows from the first, is intertextuality, in a looser sense than that of the transference of models from one text to another.117 Intertextuality is an integral part of unitary urbanism, since twisted forms are planned to coexist with new ones: the situationist city is a revolutionary experiential semiotic text – ‘a poetic urban revolution’, according to Merrifield118 – traversed by intertextuality.

113

Bonnett, “Situationism”, 143. Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976), 105-107, 110, 111. 115 Bonnett, “Situationism”, 135. 116 See also Swyngedouw, “The Strange Respectability”, 160-61. 117 Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique, “Intertextualité”. 118 Merrifield, Metromarxism, 110. 114

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Semiotics and revolution In the preceding analysis of the major concepts of the SI, which are markedly socio-spatial, I followed a two-step procedure: the first step was the analytical presentation of the situationist elaboration of each concept and the second my own semiotic analysis of it. I hope that I was able to demonstrate that the latter more or less fully accounts for the former, which implies that the relation between the two is a relation between a semiotic meta-language and a semiotic object.119 As a consequence, my whole paper revolves around semiotics and I have tried to show that the situationist spatial theory is a specific semiotics of space, i.e., a specific manipulation of spatial signs, used as the crucial instrument for a revolutionary praxis – an ‘oppositional and transformative utopianism’,120 opposed to the other, mainstream, urban utopias of spatial order and fixed form.121 In this paper I have used the concepts of ‘space’ and ‘semiotics of space’ and considered that both refer to meaningful space, a restriction that presupposes the existence of an opposition, a space that is not considered as ‘meaningful’, not of course in a general sense, since any kind of space (or thing) is necessarily meaningful, but in the sense of a space that is not approached through the perspective of the integration of values. This opposition was elaborated by humanistic geography and is the one between two different kinds of space: the one is physical space, which follows from an abstract and neutral way of indirectly and conceptually understanding geographical objects as external to the subject, while the other confronts space not as an entity ‘out there’ but as internal meaningful place, founded on the direct and intimate internal experience of a concrete space in consciousness, invested with meaning, value and feeling. This existential recuperation of space makes accessible its original inner structure (cf. mutatis mutandis psychogeography) and also presides over the production of space, in which thoughts and feelings are materialised in the built environment, which is shaped by them.122 We may call the first super-paradigm ‘objectivist’ and the second, which is of a semiotic nature, ‘subjectivist’ (or ‘conceptual’). 119

Cf. Greimas and Courtés, Sémiotique, “Sémiotique”. Pinder, Visions of the City, 105. 121 On this issue, see Pinder, Visions of the City, 2005. 122 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 5, 17; Thomas Saarinen and James L. Sell, “Environmental Perception”, Progress in Human Geography 4 (1980): 531; Pickles, Phenomenology, 161 – cf. unitary urbanism. 120

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There is a long tradition of subjectivist proposals in human geography, from Vidal de la Blache’s cultural ‘milieu interne’ and John K. Wright’s geosophy, through Erich Isaac’s geography of religion, to the more elaborated (positivist) behavioural and (phenomenological) humanistic geographies. These currents are not in fashion anymore, but today’s most fashionable trend, the new cultural, i.e. postmodern geography, with its tendency to enclose itself within the world of signs, is the latest version of geographical subjectivism. This orientation was explicit from the very formative period of postmodern geography. For example, Lester B. Rowntree orients human geography mainly towards the interaction between culture, as a constructed system of communication, meaning and symbols, and the landscape, as a constructed textual system with which its inhabitants and users interact.123 Denis Cosgrove points out the symbolic qualities of the landscape, which must be considered, according to him, as a formation of signs and symbols, as a text.124 James S. and Nancy Duncan define three objects for human geography: the mode of the discursive construction of the landscape on the basis of written or oral texts (that is, the semiotics of the sender of the text, the semiotic production of space), the mode of reading the landscape (the semiotics of the receiver, the semiotic consumption of space) and the influence of the latter on behaviour (the pragmatic part of the semiotics of space, belonging to signifying practices).125 All three positions display a purely semiotic agenda, quite comparable, on this level, to the situationist agenda. Situationist psychogeography, then, overlaps with the subjectivist currents of human geography and is part of the subjectivist superparadigm. However, it departs radically from most of the currents discussed due to its political orientation. There is a certain kinship with postmodern critical geography, which adopts a counter-hegemonic stance, but this stance is far from the revolutionary cutting edge of the SI. From this point of view, situationist geography encounters other currents of human geography, namely the closely related Marxist and radical geographies, which, just as situationist geography, are not limited to geographical analysis, but aim at social change. However, the fact remains that the revolutionary orientation of psychogeography, just as that of unitary urbanism, is founded on and animated by subjectivism, semiotics and place. 123

Lester B. Rowntree, “Orthodoxy and New Directions: Cultural-Humanistic Geography”, Progress in Human Geography 12 (1988): 583. 124 Denis Cosgrove, “New Directions in Cultural geography”, Area 19 (1987): 96. 125 James S. Duncan and Nancy Duncan, “(Re)reading the Landscape”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 120-21, 124, 125.

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I already presented the situationist diagram showing the major situationist concepts and their relationships (Figure 1). This diagram does not render the situationist theory with precision, both because the organisation of the concepts in it is misleading due to the lack of logical typology, and because in reality the lines uniting them have varying meanings. Thus, instead of trying to understand the situationist theory from the diagram, as we saw that McDonough, for example, did, it seems advisable to reverse the procedure by projecting the theory into a suitable diagram. We may find a first step in this direction in Coverley’s understanding of the relationships between the concepts presented in the “Definitions”. Coverley argues that there is a Russian-dolls effect: there is an outside, situationism (I would write situation); then unitary urbanism as the agenda for transforming urban life; and then psychogeography as the methodology for unitary urbanism, a methodology giving way to two techniques, dérive and détournement.126 We may remark that psychogeography is not the methodology of unitary urbanism, since, although it has its own methodology, it is related to unitary urbanism as survey to proposal, two typical stages of an integrated planning methodology; similarly, dérive and détournement are not techniques, but methodologies with their own techniques. However, my analysis of the concepts corroborates in principle Coverley’s suggestion and allows us to define with precision the organisation of and relationships between the concepts, as shown in Figure 4. I believe that it delivers the essence of the situationist urban theory, a theory of ‘alternative urban practices’,127 of ‘engagement with everyday space’, as Bonnett writes – or, theoretically speaking, of its affective semiotics – an engagement that aims ‘to subvert and explore revolutionary possibilities within the urban space’.128 Psychogeography, unitary urbanism and the other concepts of the above diagram (which, I repeat, refer to the ideas of the first stage of the SI) indicate the situationists’ faith in achieving social revolution by means of cultural revolution, which is of course a utopia. Historically, these concepts, as well as the later theoretical orientation of the SI, had a very limited influence on architecture129 and none on planning theory. On the other hand, its later orientation had, as we saw, a strong impact on postmodernism and through the latter it exercises a growing influence on 126

Coverley, Psychogeography, 94. Swyngedouw, “The Strange Respectability”, 161. 128 Bonnett, “Art, Ideology, and Everyday Space”, 76, 77, 83. 129 We may refer in this context to Bernard Tschumi and Nigel Coates, consecutive leaders of the group ‘Narrative Architecture Today’ (NATO). 127

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Fig. 4. Organization of and relationships between the major situationist concepts.

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social thought. Nonetheless, forgotten psychogeography deserves a place within the recent history of human geography, just as unitary urbanism deserves to be a part of the corpus of planning theories. Both indicate the importance of the socio-political factor for geographical theory and planning practice, as well as reminding us that – without abandoning, in my opinion, the macro-approaches to social life – we must leave room for the micro-reality of the everyday, approached by the SI through a revolutionary perspective.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication”. In The Post-Modern Reader, edited by Charles Jencks, 151-57. London: Academy Editions and New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. Bonnett, Alastair. “Art, Ideology, and Everyday Space: Subversive Tendencies from Dada to Postmodernism”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 7 (1989): 131-46. —. “Situationism, Geography, and Poststructuralism”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 10 (1992): 69-86. Busbea, Larry. Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960-1970. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007. Chtcheglov Ivan. “Formulary for a New Urbanism”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 1-8. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Constant. “Another City for Another Life.” In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 71-73. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). —. “Contribution to Forum Special Issue on Fusion of the Arts and ‘Integration?…of What?’”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 110-11. London and New York: Verso, 2009. —. “Inaugural Report to the Munich Conference”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 106-09. London and New York: Verso, 2009. —. “Unitary Urbanism.” In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 112-22. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Cosgrove Denis. “New Directions in Cultural Geography”. Area 19 (1987): 95-101. Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Harpenden, Herts: Pocket Essentials, 2006.

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Debord, Guy. La société du spectacle. Paris: Gallimard, 1992 (first published 1967). —. Rapport sur la construction des situations. France: Mille et Une Nuit, 1997 (first published 1957). —. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 8-12. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). —. “Situationist Theses on Traffic”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 69-70. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). —. “Theory of the Dérive”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 62-66. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Debord, Guy, and Constant. “The Amsterdam Declaration”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 103-04. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Debord, Guy, and Gil J. Wolman. “A User’s Guide to Détournement”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 14-21. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA and London: University of California Press, 1984. Duncan, James S. and Nancy Duncan. “(Re)reading the Landscape”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 6 (1988): 117-26. Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1976. Ford, Simon. The Situationist International: A User’s Guide. London: Black Dog, 2005. Greimas, Algirdas Julien and Joseph Courtés. Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette, 1979. —. Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage, vol. 2. Paris: Hachette, 1986. Harley, Brian J. “Maps, Knowledge, and Power”. In The Iconography of Landscape, edited by Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, 277-312. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1988. —. “Historical Geography and the Cartographic Illusion”. Journal of Historical Geography 15 (1989): 80-91. Harvey, David. “Afterword”. In The Production of Space, by Henri Lefebvre, 425-32. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Highmore, Ben. Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2002.

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Hussey, Andrew. “The Map is Not the Territory: The Unfinished Journey of the Situationist International”. In Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City, edited by Steven Spier, 215-28. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press and Tate Liverpool, 2002. Knabb, Ken, ed. Situationist International Anthology. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets 2006 (first published 1981). Kotányi, Attila and Raoul Vaneigem. “Basic Program of the Bureau of Unitary Urbanism”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 86-89. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Lagopoulos, Alexandros Ph. “From Sémiologie to Postmodernism: A Genealogy”. Semiotica 178 (2010): 169-253. Leach, Edmund. Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Connected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne, vol. 2. Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté. Paris: L’ Arche, 1961. Ley, David and Marwyn S. Samuels. “Introduction: Contexts of Modern Humanism in Geography”. In Humanistic Geography: Prospects and Problems, edited by David Ley and Marwyn S. Samuels, 1-17. Chicago: Maaroufa Press, 1978. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1960. McDonough, Tom. “Situationist Space.” In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough, 241-65. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002. —. “Introduction”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 1-31. London and New York: Verso, 2009. ņ, ed. The Situationists and the City. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Merrifield, Andy. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pickles, John. Phenomenology, Science, and Geography: Spatiality and the Human Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Pinder, David. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City”. Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405-27. —. Visions of the City: Utopianism, Power and Politics in TwentiethCentury Urbanism. New York: Routledge, 2005. Plant, Sadie. The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

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Relph, Edward. Rational Landscapes and Humanistic Geography. London: Croom Helm and Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1981. Roberts, John. Philosophizing the Everyday: Revolutionary Praxis and the Fate of Cultural Theory. London and Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto, 2006. Ross, Kristin. “Lefebvre on the Situationists: An Interview”. In Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, edited by Tom McDonough, 267-83. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002. Rowntree, Lester B. “Orthodoxy and New Directions: CulturalHumanistic Geography”. Progress in Human Geography 12 (1988): 575-86. Saarinen, Thomas and James L. Sell. “Environmental perception”. Progress in Human Geography 4 (1980): 525-48. Sadler, Simon. The Situationist City. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1998. Situationist International. “Definitions”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 51-52. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Situationist International. “Preliminary Problems in Constructing a Situation”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by Ken Knabb, 49-51. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Situationist International. “Excerpt from ‘Situationist News’”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 137-38. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Situationist International. “Unitary Urbanism at the End of the 1950s”. In The Situationists and the City, edited by Tom McDonough, 99-103. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Swyngedouw, Erik. “The Strange Respectability of the Situationist City in the Society of the Spectacle”. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (2002): 153-65. Tuan, Yi-Fu. “Geography, Phenomenology, and the Study of Human Nature”. Canadian Geographer 15 (1971): 181-92. —. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. U.K.: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1994 (originally published in French as Traité de savoir-vivre à l’usage des jeunes generations, 1967). Viénet, René. “The Situationists and the New Forms of Action against Politics and Art”. In Situationist International Anthology, edited by

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Ken Knabb, 273-77. Berkeley, CA: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006 (first published 1981). Wicks, Robert. Modern French Philosophy: From Existentialism to Postmodernism. Oxford: Oneworld, 2003.

CHAPTER 2: THE EVERYDAY AS MARKETING METHOD AND RITUAL PRACTICE

LIFESTYLE AND CONSUMERISM: NEOLIBERAL BIOPOLITICS AND ISLAMIST EXPERIENCES IN THE MUSLIM WORLD FOTINI TSIBIRIDOU

This analysis is based on ethnographic data and further sociological analysis conducted either by anthropologists or experts doing fieldwork in the broader Middle East and the Muslim world, outside and inside Europe. However, it was my systematic fieldwork among Muslim minorities in Greek Thrace (Tsibiridou, 2000) that first motivated me to attempt this comparative macro-analysis. The latter seems to have acquired further meanings after several ethnographic studies I have been involved in for the last 10 years in some Muslim countries, such as the Sultanate of Oman, Turkey and Syria. These include fieldwork done in old suqs, new malls and open-air markets; in Bedouin and bourgeois houses; in public baths (hamam) and in national bureaucratic institutions. For the formulation of the present analysis, virtual representation in both Eastern and Western countries has also been very inspiring (see cinema, popular literature, advertisement etc.) (Öncü, 2002; Mutlu, 2009; Annisa, 2009; MacLarney, 2009). After consulting relevant studies, teaching and some publishing experiences I feel the need to describe my understanding of the ways a new Islamic life-style, such as fashion in clothes, has been adopted by different Muslims, particularly women, as a result of specific social, economic, political and emotional processes, related to: -

the reconceptualization of Islam as a puritanical protestant kind of religiosity, people’s bourgeois aspirations coming into conflict with the Salafi version of Islam; the meaning that American mass consumerism has acquired as “cultural imperialism” (Herzfeld, 2004) within the Muslim world, since the 1990s; the close relationship (economic, political, ideological) of neoliberal governmentality to Islamism and the local political elites;

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the significance of previous orientalist fantasies such as the distinction between “Islam and the West”, for the objectification of a new Islamic subject, through mass consumerism policies and practices; the selective use of Islamic tradition, made to serve both the establishment of local authoritarian rule and the needs of neoliberal global market economics.

This endorsement of all the above has not just happened: biopolitics within a framework of government-inspired neoliberalization has been promoted in particular Muslim countries (Atasoy, 2009; Pink, 2009; Haenni, 2005; 2009; Koloschka, 2009). Local authoritarian rulers, in collaboration with globalized market regulators, have generated since the 1980s a new field of biopower, shaping gender, individuality, personhood, collectivities and civic virtue (Hirschkind, 2001; Kanna 2010; Al Quasimi, 2010; Shechter, 2009). All the above, to my eyes, seems to formulate an interesting arena for an anthropological macro-analysis and commentary, starting from the political economy of Islam in a global context (Roy, 2002; Soares & Osella, 2009; Schielke, 2010) and focusing on local politics, with human experiences acting in the name of Islam in a local context (Starett, 1996; Schielke, 2009; Saktanber, 2002; Meneley, 2007; Gökariksel, 2009; Navaro-Yashin, 2002; Mahmood, 2006; Willer, 2009). More particularly, my hypothesis is as follows: it is not enough just to prove the close relationship between neoliberalism, the practices of massconsumerism and Islamism, from the viewpoint of those elites who make plans as neoliberals and realize their plans as Muslim politicians and so accumulate wealth and power (see references below). We have to challenge the present condition using the analytical frame of “mimesis and alterity”, defined by Michael Taussing (1993), looking for the impact of the colonial encounter and the Enlightenment on the colonized people. By extending this bipolar modality into the present globalized era, we should further investigate another issue, namely: how marketing based on cultural and religious criteria, combined with the modalities of mass consumption and the market (Haenni, 2005), turns out to launch biopolitics as imposed by the implementation of market economy and glocal (global+local) governmentality, using Islam and its representations instrumentally. These glocal biopolitics, promoted equally by the neoliberal global market economy and by local authoritarian rulers in the post-colonial condition, seem to equally (re)shape lived embodied experiences, strategies and expectations of different subjectivities. In other words, people seem to incorporate these biopolitics into everyday reality, whether through

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mimesis and alterity, essentialism or subversion.1 By commodifying religion, culture and the body in accordance with Salafi religiosity and citizenship,2 we end up being inspired by a unique puritanical version of Islam, in order to build subjectivities and accomplish social progress. However, experiencing both Western aspirations of bourgeois Modernity (thanks to the global hegemony of Western values) and the Salafi virtue (as both subverting and selectively using Western Modernization) does not lead in practice to a homogenized Islamic life-style. This happens because social subjects are differently inspired, depending on their past, (historical and spatial context), as well as on their present position, status, feelings and motivations, on a personal or collective level. In any case, these homogenized characteristics could be understood as inscribed in the Modern puritanical ethics, based on Western assumptions defining religion as culture (Anjum, 2007; Mahmood, 2009) and the East as the alter ego of Europe, thus defining Muslims as a “religious minority” in Europe (Asad, 2003). This is not just about old and new governmentality of otherness and exception. Through the modalities of a positivist description of otherness, through material evidence and through sight, the objectification and dis-embodiment of religious experiences 1

Here I use biopolitics beyond the proposed conceptualization by Foucault (cours 1978-79), in order to include the new biopower dynamics, incarnated by the encounter of autocratic political governance with the new market’s modality, at the era of Globalization. In addition to biopolitics we need to analyze the impact of all that on people’s experiences. The latter are interactively constructed in the particular frame consumption practices and bourgeois class aspirations are generating to people as social agents bargaining with homogenizations, imitations and distinctions. 2 We read in Wikipedia: A Salafi (Arabic: ϲϔϠγ) is a Muslim who emphasises the Salaf ("predecessors" or "ancestors"), the earliest Muslims, as model examples of Islamic practice. The term has been in use since the Middle Ages but today refers especially to a follower of a modern Sunni movement known as the Salafiyyah, which is related to or includes Wahhabism, so that the two terms are sometimes erroneously viewed as synonymous. Salafism has become associated with literalist, strict and puritanical approaches to Islam and, in the West, with the Salafi Jihadis who espouse violent Jihad against civilians as a legitimate expression of Islam. It's been noted that the Western association of Salafi ideology with violence stems from writings done "through the prism of security studies" that were published in the late 20th century, having persisted well into contemporary literature. More recent attempts have been made by academics and scholars who challenge these major assumptions. Academics and historians use the term to denote "a school of thought which surfaced in the second half of the 19th century as a reaction to the spread of European ideas," and "sought to expose the roots of modernity within Muslim civilization."

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(Mahmood, 2009) have been established as the grammar of the Enlightenment, inspiring faith in human progress globally. With this hegemonic grammar, in the frame of post-colonial conditions and mass consumerism, all the above hegemonies and the will to be different and dissociate from previous dominant hegemonies, turn into a puritanical conservatism which endorses the re-appropriation of religion through fetishization of the body. In other words, Muslim social subjects seem to become more and more attached to material goods, detached from embodied experiences of religiosity and re-attached through the intensive commodification of religion. This might show up as obsession with orthopraxy and as ambiguous conduct regarding sexuality and emotional impulses (Scheilke 2009)3. In other words, we could be interested in discussing people’s controversial attitudes generated by neoliberal biopolitics, both of which count on Islam as cultural tradition. I hope I will be able to prove that all these assumptions have been proliferating and are establishing a unique aspiration for a Modern Islamic Salafi life-style, in just the same way modern institutions did during the last two centuries (see state, bureaucracy and official representatives, such as Al Azhar University); or the religious authorities (Sunni Ulemas and Shia mullahs) did in the medieval past of Muslim history. During the present era of Globalization, markets seem to act according to the authority of “every man of learning”,4 as was and still is the case in every authoritarian or fundamentalist Modern ruling. All those twisted religious interpretations, by using the modalities of the grammar of Western Modernity, not only make homogenized assumptions on religion, culture, knowledge, education and personal progress, but they definitely bring more personal

3

One example seems to be those young men in Cairo “who fast and pray in Ramadan and derive their ideas on religion from religious programs on satellite television who also grabbed and harassed women in downtown Cairo” (Schielke, 2009: 160). 4 “One needs not have credentials as an established Islamic scholar in order to have one’s ideas taken seriously. As Sudan’s former attorney general and speaker of the parliament, the Sorbonne-educated Hasa al-Turabi (also leader of his country’s Muslim Brotherhood)” … “Because all knowledge is divine and religious, a chemist, an engineer, an economist, or a jurist are all men of learning. Bin Laden, a civil engineer, exemplifies Turabi’s point. Some in his audience do not look for ability to cite authoritative texts; instead, they respond to his apparent skill in applying generally accepted religious tenets to current political and social issues” (Eickelman, 2002: 44). “This ‘theology’ does not go back to ancient roots or to the Qur’an, although some extremists make such claims, but is thoroughly modern” (Ibid: 41).

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confusion, by looking since for the “essence” and the “truth” (Schielke, 2009).5

Neoliberal governmentality: mass-consumerism, biopolitics and authoritarian protectionism In the first decade of the 21st century, social research about the Muslim world is taking place into the pragmatic aspects of Islam and people’s practices in their everyday life. Field research tends to investigate the economic dimension, such as consumption practices, as being more pragmatic, compared to the theological parameters stressed by orientalists, which make Muslims seem to be just pious personae in everyday life (Starrett, 1996; Haenni, 2005; 2009; Stokes, 2002; Hirschkind, 2001). In this frame, the Islamic religion does not seem to be the only factor responsible for the propagation of Islamist civic virtue. The close relationship of neoliberalisation processes with some forms of political (see governmental) Islamism has already been revealed, for example in Turkey (Atasoy, 2009; Tunç, 2009). Since the 1990’s businessmen have been investing more and more in the production of Islamic fashion, making assumptions about Islam and using the new neoliberal network, functioning between governments and markets.6 A more sophisticated form of this kind of systematic collaboration has been detected in Indonesia, leading to the production of new practices promoting a kind of spiritual capitalism (Rudnycky, 2009; Willer, 2009). Anthropologists have also stressed the close collaboration of the Gulf monarchs with 5

This seems to be the case of “immodest modesty” in Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, for instance (Al-Qasimi, 2010). 6 All the above practices as well as the wearing of the abaya, the black coat from head to toe, within Gulf countries, or the Islamic veiling in Turkey, constitute a proper ‘covering’ or protection for visiting places of new consumerism ethics, such as the commercial mall, the organized beaches etc. More and more young girls are wearing the new Turkish or Iranian style veil, in the diaspora, too, not only because these people often visit their “mother country”, but also because since the 1990s Turkish industrial textile companies, after having invested in Islamic wear, have exported their cheap products to the local markets of Greek Thrace, for instance, where a Muslim minority lives, as well as all over Europe and other Western countries where the Muslim diaspora lives. This localized and life-style consumerism, as a product of the cooperation of neo-liberalism and market-driven economy on the one hand, and Islamist policies, on the other, proliferates new modest puritanical values as life style all over the globe (Akçao÷lu, 2009; NavaroYashin, 2002; Durakbaúa & Cindo÷lu, 2002; Öncü, 2002).

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construction companies, founding malls, supermarkets and hotels in the core of the Arab world, promoting a lifestyle of luxury based on intensive consumerism, fashion and entertainment, usually described as “Middle East life-style” (Al-Quasimi, 2010; Kanna, 2010; Tsibiridou, in press). The latter seems to have been born through assumptions, practices of adjustment and/or subversion, permitting us to proceed to some interesting remarks about biopower and people’s agency upon it. As many related researches have shown (see above) “neoliberalism is not only a package of policies, ideologies and political interests; the localized discursive and ideological configurations [we could add also negotiations] are shaping neoliberal policies, too” (Kanna, 2010). Let us start with a typical example of Orientalist fantasies applied on behalf of entrepreneurs and targeting the most tender and malleable of consumers, children. Distinctions between Islam and the West could and do produce distinct religious ethics as well as cultural distinctions; but most importantly, they infuse personal morality with puritanical ethics. As a typical representative example we could mention the story of the role model doll. An Islamic Barbie called Fulla, promoted in Middle Eastern markets, as well as Razanne or the siblings Sara and Dara promoted among the Muslim people of the American diaspora and Iran respectively, become commodities of mass consumption, adopted by upper, middle and lower class children all over the Muslim countries. We read from the Wikipedia: “Fulla is the name of an 11½ inch Barbie-like fashion doll marketed to children of Islamic and Middle-Eastern countries as an alternative to Barbie. Her concept evolved around 1999, and she hit stores in late 2003. Fulla was created by a UAE manufacturer from Dubai called NewBoy FZCO.7 Fulla is also sold in China, Brazil, North Africa, Egypt, and Indonesia, while a few are sold in the United States. Although there had been many other dolls in the past that were created with a hijab, such as Razanne and Moroccan Barbie, none of them had ever been as popular as Fulla. Fulla is a role-model to some Muslim people, displaying how many Muslim people would prefer their daughters to dress and behave. Fulla is sold with a line of accessories, including umbrellas, watches, bicycles, corn flakes, cameras, CD players, inflatable chairs, and swimming pools. She was designed to be unlike Barbie and to be the traditional Muslim 7

We read in the company’s web page: 2003 NewBoy launches Fulla. The 11.5inch fashion doll has rapidly ascended to be the number 1 fashion doll in the Middle East. Fulla represents every girl’s dream and role model with her consideration to the culture and family values in addition to her glamorous look and style.

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woman whose life revolves around home and family. Some Muslim parents have claimed that if girls dress their dolls in headscarves, they will be more encouraged to wear a hijab themselves. Fulla has been praised as giving girls a Muslim role model…Toy creators NewBoy Design Studio developed the doll, who was dressed in a traditional Islamic headscarf and overdress and came with her own pink felt prayer rug… Razanne is a series of dolls designed and produced by Ammar Saadeh, a Palestinian expatriate living in Michigan, United States.The dolls hit the consumer markets in 1996. Inspired by the American doll Barbie, Razanne is aimed, according to Saadeh, to help Muslim girls develop self-esteem and to dream. Razanne has a pre-pubescent figure, and all Razanne dolls are equipped with hijab. The United States media already calls Razanne the Muslim Barbie.] There are also some further toys and accessories featuring Razanne as a character including a colouring book. Saadeh hopes the doll will sell well in countries such as Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, where it has been sold since 2004. The doll is expected to sell well in Saudi Arabia, where the doll also debuted in 2004, because Saudi Arabian religious police have banned Barbie there, citing it as a threat to Muslim values. Apart from sales in the United States, the dolls are also sold in the United Kindom, Canada, Germany and Singapore. Fulla is sold more profitably than Razanne. In many of the countries in which the doll is sold, Fulla is relatively expensive at about $10 for the standard doll. Because of this, NewBoy created a cheaper version of the doll called Fulla Style. Sara and Dara dolls are Iranian toys. They were first introduced in 2002, as an alternative to the Barbie doll. 100,000 of the dolls were made in the first round of production, by a manufacturer in China. The dolls cost less than Barbie dolls, and are meant to promote Iranian culture over American culture. Sara and Dara are available in different styles. Each style is modeled after a traditional clothing specific to one of the 30 Iranian provinces. The siblings help each other to solve problems and turn to their loving parents for guidance. They are both supposed to be eight years old, young enough under Islamic law for Sara to appear in public without a headscarf. However, the creators have decided to include headscarves with the toy… Reading about Fulla and its replicae in websites helps us formulate some very interesting hypotheses. As already pointed out in detailed analyses (Yaqin, 2007; Terrebonne, 2008; Kuppinger, 2009) Fulla, in contrast to the Western Barbie, can not have a boyfriend but only female friends and siblings; she does not engage in sports activities but only in praying, cooking etc. Additionally, for the activity of praying, the prayer

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rug accompanying the Fulla doll as an accessory made of pink satin is meant not for the doll but for the small girl herself. This accessory obviously indicates and creates new aspirations and habits of religiosity among young girls, for private as well as public consumption. The fact that within the Muslim diaspora of Western countries Razanne, being even more modest, with a more puritanical lifestyle and static attitude/stance than the previously mentioned Islamic Barbie (Yaqin, 2007; Terrebonne, 2008; Kuppinger, 2009), and mostly bought through the internet, leads us to interesting remarks about Muslim migrants’ ethics in diaspora, related to the endorsement of extreme-protestant austerity as civic ethics. However, this happens in the midst of a mass-commodification of religious practices leading to the re-Islamizing of the self in public and in private terms. If “the consumption of religious commodities is [or better becomes] an automatic trigger of devotional acts” (Starrett, 1996: 61) in this way, consumption practices seem to become the dominant modalities of modesty and religiosity through particular technologies of devotion and “covering” (Al-Qasimi, 2010; Kanna, 2010; Starrett, 1996; Kokoschka, 2009). Let us picture that through a typical dense ethnographic description: “What is a religious commodity? Qur’ans, prayer beads, skullcaps and rugs are only the beginning. Spend a day in Cairo and you can find bumper stickers, coloring books, fans, clocks, framed Qur’anic verses, banners, greeting cards, decorative items in ceramics, brass, wood, cloth, and paper, cassette tapes and videos, paper models of mosques, miniature plates in ceramic plastic, apotropaic devices of various sorts, gigantic strings of prayer as big as your fist, and the ultimate in Egyptian syncretism: Qur’anic verses hand painted on papyrus or fired in blue ceramic to resemble the ancient faience found in pharaonic tombs. What characterizes these diverse items as religious is either a direct association with acts of worship, as with prayer beads, or, more commonly, their bearing of sacred images or writing, often only the single world “Allah” or “Muhammad”. Objects for decoration that humans cannot regularly touch. Jewelry yes, cloth not” (Starrett, 1996: 53). Following the ethnographic data we need to focus on the modalities and technologies by which new biopolitics have been imposed. These seem to be related to the ways civic virtue relates to mass-consumerism in the market economy, and are regularly established in the Muslim world through the reproduction of religious puritanical morality, the reinvestment in familism, combined with systematic authoritarian state protectionism.

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Islamism as civic virtue of the mass-consumer A first point I would like then to raise, obviously, concerns the idea that this new Puritanism, justified through Islamic morality, is claiming gender features and directly concerns, at first, the female body.8 Through the promotion of a new Islamic life-style, marketing of a new “female modesty” is established in the public sphere (new markets, malls and open markets and other public spaces). This time, this modesty has not been produced by the old and Modern institutional ideologues/guardians of Islam (see Ulama, or the mufti of the Al Azhar University), but by global entrepreneurs. The latter proceed to an instrumentalized use of religion as “culture”, and make a priori assumptions about the female body and its modesty. These entrepreneurs and designers, usually collaborating with local politicians (as is the case in Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia for instance)9 use Islam instrumentally in order to either keep control over social order, or negotiate citizenship. This is the case in the Islamic Republic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, where the local political rulers use Islamic ethics in order to keep control and justify social inequalities and the privileges of the ruling class. For instance, because of extreme inequality within Saudi Arabian society after the emergence of the petroleum economy and collaboration with the American companies, the ruling elite is systematically investing in women’s modesty, in order to save the country’s morality (Shechter, 2009; Al-Qasimi, 2010). Let us notice that the new Islamist morality can not only be justified as resistance to Western hegemonical rational thinking, because of the preexisting colonial conditions (Mahmood, 2006); this is a phenomenon justifiable also by more contemporary material conditions: new governmentalities combine Western hegemonical grammar, people’s aspirations and displacements, with previous local ethics of sociability, religiosity and civics. This is about a “great transformation” in Karl Polanyi’s terms during globalization, generating new habits and new expectations through glocal governmentalities, biopolitics and people’s experiences. Since the 1970s, for instance, poor Muslim immigrants in the Gulf countries, and particularly in Saudi Arabia, were in a sense ‘rebaptised’ through modernization and also into a Salafi/Wahhabi puritanical local style of morality. Since then, by means of their imitation of and desire for the luxury of rich people in the Gulf countries, migrants 8

Muslim male modesty in public spaces has also become an issue. However, it is not such a politisized one in order to generate narratives, practices and policies in the line of reconsidering civic virtue. 9 See relevant studies in the references.

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carry along to their countries of origin this lifestyle of modesty and moral discourse as a material good, too. New veil practices, as well as listening to tape-recorded religious speeches, are new habits introduced into Egypt not only in private but also in public spaces (Mosques, Taxis etc.)10 (Starrett, 1996; Hirschkind, 2001). The hegemonic assumption about Islamic religiosity and morality has been adopted by businessmen making assumptions about Islam and Muslim culture. It is important to mention that businessmen have a particular interest in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries (see the high national income and the birth rates in these countries). If, back in the 1970s, businessmen had to deal with these petrol economies and promoted luxury goods, in our globalized era markets and businesses are focusing on overpopulated areas of Muslim societies, by promoting religious commodities and fashionable imitation ones, at very low prices. However, using religion as culture in line with the puritanical version of Protestantism is not a new idea. This also means hegemonically adjusting all the other religions to the previous Western conceptual category of religion and Protestant ethics, too (Asad, 2003; Mahmood, 2009). Nevertheless, the new selective use of the Islamic religion derives not only from the collaboration of the authoritarian and corrupted local elites with neoliberal governmentality making themselves richer and richer; a selective use of the religion occurs because of the degeneration of knowledge per se, thanks to the processes of mimesis and alterity during post-colonial conditions, as well as mass-consuming neoliberal governmentality. In other words, in the frame of post-colonial conditions and because of continuous authoritarian rule, unemployment, lack of meritocracy, and patron-client social relationships within systems of state protectionism, a big part of Enlightenment Western knowledge has degenerated from its respectful critical meaning (Eickelman, 1992; 2002). Instead, we notice the rise of theological moral reasoning, spread all over the post-colonial, usually Muslim, world, in an effort by the local elites to control their populations. Part of the technology includes the opening up local elites to the new coming neoliberalization.11 This hypocritical stance of local elites,

10

See the novel, The Yacoubian Building, by the Egyptian novelist, Alaa Al Aswany. 11 “One consequence of this democracy deficit is to magnify the power of the “street” in the Arab world. Bin Laden, speaking in the vivid language of popular Islamic preachers, builds on a deep and widespread resentment of the West and the local ruling elites associated with it. The lack of formal outlets for opinion on

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investing in cultural difference, nationalism and morality in the name of religion, systematically hides their collaboration with the ex-colonial hegemonic global elites. The moralizing discourse dominates, and after the 1980s has led the neoliberal agenda to spread out and try to establish a civil society which is in line with religious morality. Consumerism of religious commodities seems to become the way and the means. This includes specific technologies of space and of the body for the great transformation of civic virtue, as experienced by people through religious morality. Experience of a new kind of embodied religiosity through the commodification of religion, and its conceptualization through abstract and individual praxis, could mean not only a praxis of subversion to European domination, but also an act of adjustment to market-oriented hegemonies, reshaping religiosity through civic virtue and vice-versa. In doing so and thus assuring a similar reasoning to previous religious experiences in the Mediterranean world (Mahmood, 2009), the previous embodied experience of religiosity has been inscribed through the grammar of Enlightenment and through neoliberal biopolitics and governmentality. These transformations have not only reshaped religiosity through individualism, consumerism and orthopraxy, but seem to have de facto established Islamic religious morality as a civic virtue (Hirschkind, 2001; Mahmood, 2009; Gokariksel, 2009; Kanna, 2010; Al-Qasimi, 2010). Taking into consideration all the above, we may conclude that morality, based on culture and supposedly religious tradition, covers all kinds of economic, social and political transactions. Religious morality becomes a new kind of reasoning in cultural terms of otherness and alterity, distinguished from western secularism. The latter is supposed to be based on critical reasoning, dissociated from any kind of religious morality. Nevertheless it was this underlying fog of orientalist assumptions which foreshadowed the implantation of protestant ethics onto the formation of western secularism and its basic modalities (Mahmood, 2009; Asad, 2003).

Market familism and state authoritarian protectionism A second point to raise is about the ways in which neoliberal biopolitics instrumentally uses the concept of “family” and manipulates knowledge, much more than western modernizers did, in order to public concerns makes it easier for zealots, claiming the authority of religion, to hijack the Arab street” (Eickelman, 2002: 46).

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commodify society intensively and control individual desires. Family in the Muslim world becomes the key issue, opening opportunities to businessmen and bringing, without representatives, women and children to the public space of contemporary Markets, the malls, the temples of high consumerism in contrast to the old suqs, male dominated covered markets. “Family” as a concept circulating in those post-modern public spaces ends up becoming a key-point customer through the idiom of citizenship, shaping and reframing genders and personhood. This management policy adopted by multinational companies seems, at the end of the day, not only to reshape the logic of segmentation between gendered spaces of the past in the Muslim world, but also to bring many changes into the homosocial attitudes of people, reframing intra- and inter- gendered relationships, sexuality, emotions, sociability etc. Let me mention some typical examples from my fieldwork in Oman. In Oman and the Arab Emirates but also in other countries of the broader Middle East, the “family section” becomes the main segregated category used by businessmen in the public space. Into these new temples of globalera consumerism (the mall, the fast-food outlet and other places of entertainment), personhood and gender, subjectivities and collectivities are progressively reshaped through the desires, the modalities and the technologies of the consumption (clothes, objects, food). On the other hand, through social policies of modernization, nationhood and citizenship, the concept of family relates immediately to the protectionist policies of the local state as provider (Tsibiridou, in press). As typical examples we could mention the commercialization of national festivities. (See the national festival of Muscat in Oman.) On the other hand, Saint Valentine’s Day, the Western consumers’ fiesta par excellence, instead of being celebrated as a romantic day for two people in love, acquires locally the features of an event for family and relatives12. This family idiom is undoubtedly undermining Western individuality, but still perfectly corresponds to the flexible idea of individual consumer and citizen, promoted by neo-liberal policies of growth in situ. However, all modern liberal and socialist discourses on the economy and state control of the family have, through law and bureaucracy, institutionalized the priority of family over modern political governmentality,. Feminist bibliography is very rich, covering both Western and non-Western countries, such as in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Both cases converge on the modern governmentality ideal 12

Saint Valentine’s Day is a family matter and a day for celebration organized at hotel lobbies. Parents and children celebrate together by eating, drinking and listening to live music, performed by far-Eastern musicians.

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of the family having disciplinary control over individuals, as well as its practical dimension of keeping control by favoring/promoting the dream of family, submitting women to men or prioritizing motherhood over womanhood. By doing so, especially under authoritarian rule as was the case during Communist regimes, amoral familism, antagonistic protectionism among families and highly materialistic purposes were evident (Issoupova, 2000). Similar phenomena have also been detected under the authoritarian rule of liberal regimes in the capitalist world. This is the case of post-colonial Muslim - and non-Muslim - states, where there has been for decades a large gap, for most poor people, between desired and received commodities. This is the case for the Egyptian poor living in cities, for instance (Wikan, 1982). However it has been the neoliberal market economy which has offered access to low-cost goods since the 1990s, bringing about a proliferation of the practices of high consumerism among poor people, too. All those practices have probably reshaped (and continue to reshape interactively) personhood and subjectivities, gender and citizenship, and the sense of belonging at national and supranational levels. Even knowledge is family-oriented as the chain of “family bookshop” shows us in the case of Oman. This seems to be product of the managerial practices of businessmen who are exercising protectionism in line with local authoritarian rule. At this point we would like to do a kind of parenthesis and raise the importance of new conceptualizations regarding the ‘knowledge’ acquired at the era of Globalization, under neoliberal governmentality. To do so, we need to bring into consideration previous distortions of the concept within post-colonial conditions and authoritarian rule.13 Neoliberal governmentality derives from globalization, and includes the foundation of infrastructures to support the growth of the market economy (e.g. malls, supermarkets, fast foods outlets etc.) as well as the commodification of everything, including knowledge in higher education. Mass consumerism goes handin-hand with the accumulation of managerial skills, investment in accountability and speed-writing of reports instead of deep intellectual activity; in this frame there is no time or priority given to critical thinking.14 In the Gulf countries for instance, in strong support of 13

See above, notes 4 and 11. At this point I would like to stress my fieldwork remarks, which prove the lack of encouragement of critical thinking in the Gulf countries, preventing social and political sciences from endorsing a critical and reflexive stance. This is the case in the Sultanate of Oman, for instance, where social and political analysis must be avoided, as I noticed through personal interviews and by participant observation of

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authoritarian rule, any development of critical social sciences or humanities is avoided (Tsibiridou, in press) or discouraged. As a result, there is evident confusion about academic knowledge, as uncertified experts come to fill the void in social reasoning and in interpretations of inspired cosmology.15 Messages mediated through new technologies (television, radio, internet, mobile phones etc.) by uncultivated ‘experts’ raise additional complications. To this confusion the mediation of messages through new technologies has add even more complications (Schielke, 2009; Öncü, 2002). All the above confusion about knowledge and whom to trust amongst educated personae seems to find a safe haven under the auspices of the concept of ‘family’. This is probably the reason a respectable bookshop ends up being labeled a “family bookshop”.

Old grammar and new agency: experiences of mimesis and alterity, essentialism and subversion If we keep away from simplistic representations and explanations, such as “Islam is to blame for all”, and we accept the above-described instrumentalized ways of using religion, we would be surprised at the importance those everyday practices, habits and techniques of material consumerism can acquire in people’s lives, beside or through religion. Post-modern approaches usually attribute the new Islamic morality to the practice of symbolic resistance (Abu-Lughod, 2002) to previous colonial hegemony and pressure. They thus miss the pragmatic circumstances (i.e. development of the market economy in the era of globalization) which favour the new Islamist morality in the manner of Salafi Wahhabism. the academic life of Sultan Qaboos University, where management, business administration and accountability are the top options for University studies. It is worth mentioning that this practice as well as the directive not to develop political sciences comes in addition to government policies for University studies, adopting the neoliberal agenda for academia. (For a critical approach see: Olssen & Peters, 2005.) 15 In other cases as in Egypt, “ the government [felt], however, that publication policy [was] potentially effective weapon against the current Islamic opposition movement, and it has embarked on programs to reprint and distribute cheap subsidized copies of classic works of Islamic and secular-philosophy, distributing them sometimes solely through public sector unions, youth and sporting clubs, sometimes on the market. Such programs are always controversial” (Starrett, 1996: 56).

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Looking for the effects of neoliberal biopolitics and how they contribute to people’s experiences, we could stress the importance of the modalities of Western grammar, which, based as they are on essentialism and alterity, could lead to a praxis of imitation and subversion, endorsing both bourgeois expectations and modern Salafi morality. In other words Muslim people, by consuming religious commodities (or supposedly religious ones) as objects of desire (Friedman, 1991; Ramamurthy, 2003), are imitating the high-society standard of living of the bourgeois Muslim and non-Muslim Other. In so doing they are subverting hegemonies but at the same time they are essentially homogenizing about Others and the self. They thus definitely adjust themselves to the global hierarchy of values promoted recently by the markets. They make assumptions about religion and, at the same time, try to negotiate local hegemonic assumptions such as patriarchy and protectionism, among generalized governmentality practices which give prime place to maleness and to religious morality as civic virtue. The new puritanical and conservative life-style is changing first and foremost not only the look of the public sphere in the Muslim world and the Muslim diaspora in Western countries, but the perception of the body and the ways selfhood and personhood can be redefined and reshaped. This is the case of the Sharia, which was in the past a customary path, but which turned out to become law, following its adjustment to Western modern hegemonic institutions (Asad, 2003). In present times, the proliferation of Islamic commodities and practices of consumerism has led to an excess of fetishism, mostly of the female body. Bedouin women in Egypt and Arab women generally are buying, for instance, sophisticated nylon underwear probably because they fantasize themselves with romantic bourgeois love (Abu-Lughod, 1990), but they end up regularly wearing them in the public baths, in a semi-public exhibition area in front of other women’s eyes, according to my fieldwork data in Syria. More explicitly, Bedouin young women in the 1980s, by imitating Western bourgeois habits such as buying luxurious underwear and investing in romantic love after marriage, were fighting against the control and the hegemony of older women, within the frame of the patriarchal family. Halepi women in Syria, on the other hand, already middle class women at the beginning of the 21st century, wear colorful sophisticated underwear over full-body tracksuits and tights in the public baths. Such habits are increasingly leading mostly young women to antagonize each other as regards the accessories they wear in the public baths, rather than let themselves indulge in enjoying the beneficial procedure of cleaning and relaxation in there. Such a dress code, which may seem bizarre in places

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where women have traditionally been naked, generates insurmountable difficulties in the care of these women’s bodies. In my experience, you cannot get to know the body, love it or feel its needs when you are expected to take care of it by the use of clothes and accessories. My informants have huge difficulties in such places in taking care of their bodies. However, wearing underwear in public baths permits them to accomplish their desire to be seen by others. To my eyes those Halepi women seem to act in a post-modern reality of bourgeois expectations and Salafi morality, without investing in romantic love, or, at least, not exclusively in that. From 1980 to 2005, their experiences of bourgeois expectations were deeply transformed, and new habitus and moralities were born in public spaces such as in public baths or elsewhere. By imitation or mimesis, accomplished within a framework of colonial encounter leading to previous power, hegemony and discrimination, in our days the new life-style of the modernizers quickly proliferates modest and puritanical assumptions about female Muslim attire. It is characteristic of this process that educated Bedouin women in Oman (another field research from my ethnographic experiences of the issue) were the first to wear the imported black abaya in their villages. This is the reason why the Sultan of Oman in mid-2000 had to issue a royal decree by which he appealed to women all over the country, begging them to resist the black uniformity and continue the colourful Omani local traditions. It should be noted that this change of attitude on the part of women is endangering the folkloric face of the country, which is engaged by the state with a view to attracting tourist investment. That is what accounts for the Sultan’s intervention. Islamism as civic virtue and citizenship as customer’s habitus constitute a kind of great transformation in Polanyi’s terms that has not just happened in the Muslim world, for religious or cultural reasons. It seems to be the product of the post-colonial condition, a double-bind process of colonial otherness/alterity and the interiorising of both the dominance of Western values as well as the desire to be different; in other words, the desire to be modern has been inscribed into the desire to be different, and vice-versa. This desire for otherness generates new essentialisms and assumptions globally. This gave, for instance, the opportunity for the production of different Islamic commodities for ‘covering’/protection (see veil, abayas, burkini,16 16

We read from Wikipedia: A burqini (or burkini) swimsuit is a type of swimsuit for women designed by Lebanese Australian Aheda Zanetti under the company name Ahiida [2003]. The suit covers the whole body except the face, the hands and the feet (enough to preserve Muslim modesty), whilst being light enough to enable

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as well as Islamized apotropaic devices of various kinds, etc.). Specific commodities were promoted for protection or for religious pedagogical reasons. Islamic Barbies (Fulla, Razanne etc.) were spread as toys; at the same time children’s books and other electronic toys are adapted for pedagogical reasons to religious ethics. All these Islamic toys spread by the markets seem to instruct children towards a homogenized written, material or virtual representation, promoted as a “proper Islamic way”, against the oral and multiple verbal traditions of theological learning of the past (ĝisler, 2011). Via such toys, not only is religious meaning reshaped according to intellectual technologies, producing essentialism and radicalism, but also children’s bodies and minds are educated and directed in order to produce purely moral discourse and religious modesty instead of reflexive critical reasoning. On one of my fieldwork missions in Oman I observed that in the living room of young single girls who were working as executive managers in the banking system and the university’s administration, apart from modern furniture and the necessary work-out equipment, there was a rudimentary bookcase with just four items of religious popular literature. This fact embarrassed my informants not because of the lack of intellectually cultivated reading material, but because of their lack of pure Islamic instruction. As I was informed later by them, they felt ashamed in the eyes of the Sharia expert from Egypt who was accompanying me into their house, and not because they were completely uncultivated in literature and humanities. The new kind of modesty endorses morality spread to all levels of life, touching not only the locals but the life of tourists as well. This is probably the reason why, by imitation, more and more Muslim women all over the word are wearing burkinis in order to swim in the sea, as foreign women can not anymore, since the 2010, be totally naked within the touristic public baths of Istanbul, for instance.17 However, all these practices can at the same time work as experiences of subversion, too: this is the case when women, by submitting to power and biopolitics to wear an abaya or veil and burkini, are also using technologies of body and mind in order to subvert their otherness and exclusion. See, for instance the tight abaya and the elegant Iranian overcoats, or the colourful veils in Egypt and Turkey, etc. swimming. It was described [by whom?] as the perfect solution for conservative Muslim women who want to swim but are uncomfortable with revealing bathing suits. It looks rather like a full-length wetsuit with built-in hood, but somewhat looser and made of swimsuit material instead of rubber. 17 I wonder about the impact of such moral puritanical practices on the spas in Greece, too. The last two years, it is obligatory to wear at least pants as underwear.

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To cut a long story short, in the era of Globalization Islamist religious morality seems to dominate public space and impose morality and reframe the agenda of citizenship and civic virtue. Through neoliberal biopolitics promoting the commodification of the body and of knowledge, gender, subjectivities and citizenship are reshaped through the practices and habitus of high consumerism. However, neoliberal biopolitics proliferate religious morality within the frame of the previous hegemonic Western colonial and post-colonial governmentalities, generating inequalities among the ruling elites (locally and globally) and among ordinary people in a longue and infinite durée process.

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Saktanber, Ayúe (2002) “ ‘We Pray Like You Have Fun’: New Islamic Youth in Turkey between Intellectualism and Popular Culture”, in Deniz Kandiyoti & Ayúe Saktanber (eds), Fragments of Culture. The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris & Co: 254-276. Schielke, Samuli (2010) Second thoughts about the anthropology of Islam, or how to make sense of grand schemes in everyday life, ZMO, Working Paper. —. (2009) “Ambivalent Commitments: Troubles of Morality, Religiosity and Aspiration among Young Egyptians” Journal of Religion in Africa 39: 158-185. Shechter, Relli (2009) “Consumers’ Monarchy: Citizenship, Consumption, and Material Politics in Saudi Arabia since the 1970”, in Joana Pink (eds) Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Politics, Culture and Identity between the Local and the Global, Cambridge Scholars Pub.: 89-104. ĝisler, Vít (2011) “Video Games, Video Clips, and Islam: New Media and the Communication of Values” in Joana Pink (eds) Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Politics, Culture and Identity between the Local and the Global, Cambridge Scholars Pub.: 241-269. Soares, Benjamin & Osella, Filippo (2009) “Islam, politics, anthropology” Journal of Royal Anthropological Institute 15 (1): 1-22. Starrett, Gregory (1996) “The Political Economy of Religious Commodities in Cairo” American Anthropologist 97 (1): 51-68. Stohrer, Ulrike (2009) “Consumption in Yemen: Continuity and Change”, in Joana Pink (eds) Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Politics, Culture and Identity between the Local and the Global, Cambridge Scholars Pub.: 129-143. Stokes, Martin (2002) “Recognising the Everyday”, in Deniz Kandiyoti & Ayúe Saktanber (eds), Fragments of Culture. The Everyday of Modern Turkey. London: I.B. Tauris & Co: 322-338. Taussing T. Michael (1993) Mimesis and Alterity. London: Routledge. Terrebonne, Renee (2008) “Fulla, the veiled Barbie: an analysis of cultural imperialism and agency” MAI Review 2. http://www.review.mai.ac.nz Tsibiridou, Fotini (in press) “State culture and Ibadhi tradition in the Sultanate of Oman”. A. Ziaka (ed) Ibadhism, Ibadhi Studies and the Sultanate of Oman. London: Harptree Pub. Tunç, Emin Tanfer (2009) “Between East and West: Consumer Culture and Identity. Negotiation in Contemporary Turkey”, in Joana Pink (eds) Muslim Societies in the Age of Mass Consumption. Politics, Culture and Identity between the Local and the Global, Cambridge Scholars Pub.: 73-86.

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“CARVING THE BODY”: TA MOKO AND THE ETERNAL PLAY OF BEING IN THE EVERYDAY AND THE EVERLASTING M.-G. LILY STYLIANOUDI

Introduction In this study I wish to examine and interpret Ta Moko, the tattooing of the Pre-European Maoris of New Zealand linking it with the myth of origin of the ancestor- hero Mataora and his journey to the underworld. Although I do not consider myself an expert1 on Maori culture and civilization, I was quite intrigued by the Maori tattooed body as well as by the preservation of their ancestors’ heads and very likely the heads of their valiant enemies, the use of certain symbols and their repetition on tattooed bodies, carved wood or bones, and weaving patterns. What I propose in this article is another reading of the Maori tattooed body. In this perspective and according to my understanding, moko has to be considered not only as an art form but also as an initiation rite or rite of passage, a norm of acquiring identity and existence within the community of ‘people’. And as an initiation rite moko is interwoven with its myth of origin. In this way the tattooed body corresponds to different levels of signification, one of which can also be aesthetic, although from the Maori perspective it means more. The tattooed body in this study is considered as an open text recording identity and existence, a sort of living personal archive, which in contact with other tattooed bodies re-enacts collective memory in the everyday, evoking the everlasting. The concept of everyday life appears in modern thinking as a negative extension to Marx’s idea of alienation. The first to comment on it was a

1

For this reason I ask my social anthropologist colleagues who are specialists on the Maori of New Zealand to forgive any lack of relevant references and to address me with any remarks they would like to make, taking into account the fact that this article is only partly based on (modern) fieldwork observation.

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prominent figure amongst French Marxist sociologists, Henri Lefebvre,2 who described everyday life as mind-numbing, alienating sets of social conditions, linking it with Marx’s theory of alienation. The concept remained the core of the conflict school of theory in sociology; through the years it has been enriched with different aspects of everyday life outside work, and has evolved into a well-known realm for modern feminist sociology due to the reemergence of the discussion of the private and public spheres. Existential sociology, being the “study of human experience-in-the-world (or existence) in all its forms”3 provides us with the term of change as an integral part of the understanding of the individual self, the existential self, in its efforts to grasp the reality of the everyday. All these concepts are contemporary and form a new problematic of modern man and his need in his everyday life to evolve from ‘being’ to ‘becoming’, and from becoming to actively participating in social change. There is a lot to be said in this discussion of the everyday as the concept has appeared in recent times and more or less as a result of the structural influences of capitalism, but my intention is to link the everyday with the everlasting, both being concepts embodied in the experience of the self of the traditional man, as provided by symbolic anthropology. The concept of time, which is linked with the concept of the everyday, and which is defined within the cultural context of the lived experience, individual as well as collective, differs from society to society. This therefore introduces a major difference between a traditional, i.e. exotic, society and the modern, western one. In this context trying to define the concept of the everyday for the pre-European Maoris of New Zealand is, to say the least, culturally presumptuous, as I believe that the modern conception of the everyday cannot be easily applied. This does not mean that the everyday does not exist; on the contrary it does exist but the lived experience of this is differently interpreted. Thus, when Ben

2

The first volume of this great study was published in 1947: Critique de la vie quotidienne, (Paris: L’Arche). Two other volumes followed, the second in 1961: Critique de la vie quotidienne, II. Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté (Paris: L’Arche); and the third one in 1981: Critique de la vie quotidienne, III. De la modernité au modernisme (Pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien), (Paris: L’Arche). His book La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne (Paris: Gallimard) which appeared in 1968 completes his studies on the everyday, with which, in fact, Lefebvre proposed an alternative social anthropology. 3 Joseph A. Kotarba, Existential Sociology, in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, ed. George Ritzer, (USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2007) Vol. III:1519.

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Highmore4 considers the everyday “not as segments of discreet time, but as different durations or temporalities running simultaneously”, then from another perspective his concept encompasses the concept of time examined as symbolic procedure in which the moment ‘here and now’ comprises the moment ‘beyond and by that time”; in other words, durations and temporalities running simultaneously. Although new discourses in Social Anthropology do not accept binary oppositions and relations so easily5, nevertheless I will construct a tree/table of binary oppositions related to the visible and the invisible body and its relation to the everyday and the everlasting, as the Maori tattooed body stands on the threshold between the everyday and the everlasting; in Maori words, between the ‘upper’ and the ‘lower’ world respectively. In such an approach the body per se acquires an importance of its own as it becomes the vehicle of signification. Tattoo, being a corporeal imprint, corresponds to a certain communicational as well as an identity process, as it conveys different kinds of meanings, inscribing thus the subject in his/her social environment. The skin, the “interruptor”,6 the boundary between the inner self and the outer world, becomes through and by the tattooing visible to the visible as well as to the invisible parts of the perceived Maori universe comprised by the upper and the lower world. The tattooed person can be recognized by the guardian of the lower world and thus his/her entrance to it is assured. The upper world is the world of the here and the now, the visible one, marked by the presence of bodies, physical bodies which you cannot see or you can see only if they are tattooed, acquiring thus an existence of

4 “Introduction to Part One,” in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore (London: Routledge, 2002): 38 5 We encounter, for instance, the use of “key symbols” or other phrasings of that sort, which invoke the use of ‘camouflaged’ semiotics. See e.g. Sherry B. Ortner, “On Key Symbols,” in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 75, 5(Oct., 1973): 1338-1346 as well as Clifford Geertz’s remarks on this matter in his books The Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000): 16-17, and in The Interpretation of Cultures. (Basic Books, Inc., 1973): 3-30 his chapter on “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture.” 6 David Le Breton, “Corps et individualisme,” in Diogène, 131(1985) : 27-50; Anthropologie du corps et modernité, (Paris : PUF, Collection « sociologie d’aujourd’hui », 1990); Sociologie du corps, (Paris : P.U.F.: « Que sais-je? », 1992).

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their own through and by the procedure of tattooing. David Levi Strauss7 refers to the non-marked body as a silent, inarticulate, unrefined body. Only when the body acquires the signs of civilization does it begin to communicate and becomes an active part of the social body.8 And the lower world, the world of spirits, is marked by the absence of physical bodies, as we shall see in the myth of Mataora. The data regarding the pre-European Maoris presented here are mostly based on the writings of Europeans at the time of the first European voyages and missions to the confines of the earth and to the islands of the Pacific. These texts bear all the prejudices of contact with the Other, the “exotic” in its true sense of the word (the one who is not here but out = exo there). Because the most educated voyagers of that time were the priests accompanying the expeditions, naturally all the peculiar and ‘savage’ customs of the Maori were judged and condemned under Christian scrutiny. One of the eminent scholars of Maori culture and religion, Elston Best,9 in 1920 noted that even certain myths of origin were transformed by the use of a Christian vocabulary in such a way that many notions and concepts of Maori culture have been lost forever. The researcher of today thus encounters many difficulties in trying to understand these texts. I have tried to find traces and reminiscences or even certain elements of the beliefs of the old culture in the city people of Maori today, but those memories are effaced or transformed, due to their mingling with Europeans in sport and work for many years, and the holders of that knowledge are long gone.10 In 1921 only seven living men were reported to be tattooed.11 And that is a pity because the social anthropologist finds 7

“Modern Primitives,” in Modern primitives: an Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual. Ed. V. Vale et al. (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1989). 8 Le Breton, Sociologie du corps. 9 Elsdon Best, Maori Religion and Mythology: Being an Account of the Cosmogony, Anthropogeny, Religious Beliefs and Rites, Magic and Folklore of the Maori Folk of New Zealand, II Volumes, (New Zealand: Te Papa Press, 2006). 10 Michael King insists that ethnologists like Elsdon Best, who were “most interested in manifestations of ‘old time’ Maori culture” disregarded, ignored or even condemned the acculturation process, launched by the Tuhoe prophet Rua Kenana, claiming that Maori independence depended on the merging of Western ideas and technology with Maori needs. See Michael King, The Penguin History of New Zealand, (Penguin Books, 2003), 249 and FN. 11 R. D. Simmons thinks that the “decline in moko resulted from a lack of war, and a religious and social atmosphere that did not favour continuation of the old ways.” See D. R. Simmons, Ta Moko. The Art of Maori Tattoo, (New Zealand: Reed

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himself facing a very complex society with a very complex system of myths of origin12, some of which can be traced to the Stone Age, and a highly sophisticated hierarchical social system where women held a significant position, very often outranking men. This was not at all understood by the writers of that period, especially as regards the high status and rank of women, some of whom outranked men and were regarded as male. Today, young Maoris in an attempt to reestablish an identity have started to reproduce certain of the old customs and usages, and one of them is tattooing. But whilst pre-European Moko was part of an expression of a unified view of life, post-European tattooing grew out of a new awareness of the Maori as a threatened minority group that needed to assert its identity,13 a means for the individual not to be incorporated into society and established as an adult, but to affirm himself.14 Some of the ways of decorating the surfaces of different objects as well as of the body in various traditional societies are linked, among other things, to the sense of belonging to a certain group. Colours, symbols, ornaments relating to flora and fauna, jewels and hairstyles denote group, class (age or other), as well as position in the social hierarchy; in the last analysis, what makes the individual exist. In addition to the different festivities and meetings which the individual is obliged to attain, in his everyday life this ‘identifying’ being has to be shown and redefined continuously; abode, personal objects, arms, jewels, stools, boats, canoes, etc., are contained in the space of personal expression of the traditional collective subject. Any ornamentation of the body, be it jewels, cloths, any kind of paint or inscription, is the result of a long cultural evolution in which the desire of belonging expresses itself in the use of these ornamentations in everyday life. Durkheim15 was one of the first to underline the symbolic significance of tattoos: he distinguished an instinctual intention of men to draw or incise on their bodies images which remind them of their community of existence.

Publishing, 2007), 150, referring to James Cowan, “Maori Tattooing Survival. Some Notes on Moko”, Journal of the Polynesian Society 30 (1921), 242. 12 As for instance the arrival on Aotearoa of the seven original canoes, or their origins in divine descent or descent from certain stars, etc. 13 Michael King, Moko. Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century, (Wellington: Alister Taylor), 1972. 14 David Le Breton, Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercing et autres marques corporelles, (Paris : Métailié, 2002). 15 Émile Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris : PUF, 1998).

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Our study tries to understand certain aspects of traditional Maori tattooing, as it offers a challenge for the modern social anthropologist to understand its significance for traditional Maori society. Although a lot of ink has flown since then concerning Maori tattooing, especially in designs, paintings and photos (when that art was introduced and some of the old ones were still alive and could be photographed), few aspects of the position and importance it held for Maori society have been understood and/or recorded. We can extrapolate certain aspects by comparing and analogically applying data from other cultures16 which use body ornamentation as a semantic element of their identity, individual and/or collective. But these semantic elements are acquired through very specific rituals of initiation, during which the signs are imprinted on the bodies. Evidently, we encounter different techniques within different cultures, but the goal is the same, to be a member of a certain group in full capacity according to your status, position and social hierarchy: “That individuals have identities is indispensable for social life because that is what enables them to identify a particular human body with an actor who has a certain history and place in the system of social relations in his society”.17 What constitutes your identity has to be shown immediately and be clearly understood by others. At the same time you exist only if you can recognize yourself as a member of a certain group: “the crucial point is that a person cannot know his identity until he knows how he is known by others” (op. cit.). The state of “being” (= existing), the way you understand yourself, derives from the notion of belonging, which is acquired through and by the initiation rites. The fragments in the texts of European travelers, explorers and missionaries relate and refer only to matters they were interested in. Add to that the lack of specialized training and what they describe is what made an impression on them; naturally, since the Maoris were eaters of human flesh18 and preservers of human skulls, this produced a certain fear 16

Mostly the African cultures, which have been studied very profoundly by social anthropologists in the field, and about whose symbolic systems many essays were written while symbolic anthropology was in fashion in social anthropology in the 1980s. See on this point Anita Jacobson-Widding, “Subjective body, Objective Space, in Body and Space. Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience, ed. A. Jacobson-Widding (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala Studies in Cultural Anthropology 16, 1991). 17 From Paul Riesman’s unpublished MS as quoted in Jacobson-Widding 1991: 45 FN.8. The MS was after Riesman’ death published as First Find your Child a Good Mother: The Construction of Self in two African Communities, (Rutgers University Press, 1992). 18 See Paul Moon, This Horrid Practice. The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism, (Penguin Books, 2008).

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and (Christian) horror in confronting them.19 The only reference I have found and which might indicate that Moko was linked with or played the role of an initiation rite is in Pottier de L’Horme’s narrative: “… It is not the same with the paintings on the hips, all men and all the women without distinction have them painted, which are bands about an inch wide in spiral shape. They made me understand that painting was an act of religion…”20 Modern scholars have elaborated on moko being an initiation rite, but de L’Horme’s citation is of great value because spirals on the hips are indicators of belonging to a certain group for both men and women alike.21 A person’s descent or lineage had to be recognized formally by their parents and by the Tohungas, who among other things were the guardians of genealogies, and during the course of a person’s life personal achievements and deeds were subject to tattooing, but they had to be recognized formally by the different councils of superiors. Ta Moko was part of a very formal procedure throughout an individual’s life, following a certain ritual performed by the tohunga ta moko (the one who has the right or skill to perform moko)22 and approved and authorized by the council of superiors. Considering the whole process an initiation rite, then, one can understand why the Maoris were unwilling to describe the procedure in 19 I am tempted to use at this point the title of Christina Thompson’s biographical book “Come ashore and we’ll kill and eat you all” as it positions clearly the European concept of the Maori people. We can also refer to Nicholas’ description “… [they use] blue paint or charcoal, which gives to the countenance a most disgusting appearance, and makes it truly hideous to the eye of a European”. J. L. Nicholas, Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand performed in the years 1814 and 1815 in Company with the Rev. Samuel Marsden, Principal Chaplain of New South Wales, II Volumes (London: James Black, 1817) II: 9, to give an idea of the usual European reaction. 20 My emphasis, (quoted in Simmons, Ta Moko, 126) 21 See also Simmons, Ta Moko, 101, Figure 132. Simmons also thinks that “Buttock tattoo, whether on males or females, always had a religious connotation”, op. cit. 136. 22 The term tohunga is a multi-level term, applied to the high-ranking priest of the cult of Io, the Supreme Being, to the lesser priest, and to local chiefs, as well as to any person of expertise. These formed the class of wise men, were skilled in many ways and had received an education appropriate to their skill. Supposedly they were chosen because of their ability to learn and preserve sacerdotal lore, customs, rituals, and superior knowledge including the community’s genealogies. They possessed great power with the invisible and were highly regarded by the community, as they could know and speak of the will of the unseen and act as gobetweens (Best, Maori Religion, 260-271).

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detail and give names and meanings for the designs; the presentation would end with phrases such as:23 “that ends that moko”, “that ends that”, “that is that”, “enough”, “this ends this; it is all finished”. In addition, at the beginning of the narrative it is noted that “the first tattooing is the opening of the way…” It is interesting to read in the incantation during the procedure for a male moko: “… to be left by you to cross the nothingness… this is the boundary, a descendant of the gods, I am a descendant…” and finally the invocation to Te Rongorere “coming from above and man coming from below… guide the loved one, leave the untattooed, leave the children leave the women…” Similar incantations exist for women as well, with references to the house of weaving and of dancing, as from now on she will be recognized: “when you go to the weaving house it is asked: where does this woman come from?” etc. A common phrase in incantations for both male and female moko is “… Roll along, like a board on shore. Dream, taken by the glinting sea…” which might be an allusion to drugs used during the procedure in order for the tattooed to be able to endure the excruciating pain of carving the skin, and which might have provoked dreams or visions guided by the tohunga. If such is the case, then certainly these drugs were prescribed for the successful completion of the procedure, as one had to endure the pain without fainting or protesting or even uttering any sound.24 These fragments gathered from various texts show the importance of moko as part of an initiation rite or the initiation itself.25 It was a process taking place throughout an individual life, as personal deeds were inscribed on 23

In Simmons’ translation of the Sir George Grey N. Z. Maori MS 89, “A minute description by a New Zealand chief, of all the ceremonies observed on the occasion of tattooing a chief and of the mode of performing the entire operation” (Simmons, Ta Moko, 159-171). 24 The use of specific drugs during rites of any sort is well known and studied by social anthropologists and I am applying this knowledge, mutatis mutandis, for the moko procedure as well. 25 For other references to moko being an initiation rite, see for example King, Moko; Davidson and Starzecka, Maori Art and Culture; Lewis and Forman, The Maori: Heirs of Tane; Gell, Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia; Roble, Moko or Maori Tattooing. Honoris causae I would like to mention a Greek scholar, Prof. N.K. Moutsopoulos who writes that “the process of tattooing acquired a pure ritualistic dimension” based on the fact that the performer was not allowed to touch any food while he performed the tattoo and was fed with a “special funnel”, or that he was not allowed “to be in contact with any other person who was not in the same state as he was”. N. K. Moutsopoulos, The Tattoo. A Diachronic Investigation of the Phenomenon, (Thessaloniki: Elliniki Epitropi Spoudon Notioanatolikis Europis, 1996), 33-34.

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specific facial areas at different moments in an individual’s life. In other words, it was an ‘everlasting’ identity process, (to be) inscribed at any (authorized) moment of everyday life. It is very significant that Ta moko is linked with an initiation rite because during an initiation rite (which is literally a rite of passage), when the myth of origin or part of it was enacted, time stood still or in limbo, enabling thus the performance to take place on the threshold, ‘betwixt and between’26 the visible and the invisible world.27 Rites constitute specific codified systems enabling persons or groups to establish a relation with the supernatural or an ideal, presenting a “quasi-immovable” character28 for very long periods of time. The Maori body while untattooed is unrecognizable and non-existent; only after the imprinting on it of those elements that characterize its bearer’s identity does it acquire existence in the visible world and recognition in the invisible world. To the Maori, the word tatu was unknown,29 as was the term Maori. The Maori term for tattooing is “ta moko” “to carve” or “whakairo” to “ornament with a pattern”; this last term is the usual term for “woodcarving” as well, linking thus the two aspects of carving: carving on wood and carving on (of) the flesh. The word tattoo came to Europe with Captain Cook, who used the word “tattow” when he witnessed it for the first time in Tahiti in 1769.

The myth of Mataora and his visit to the lower world30 of Rarohenga We can understand better the significance of moko if we relate it to the myth of its origin and the ancestor-hero Mataora. Mataora fell in love and took as his wife Niwareka, a member of the race of Turehu, a fair skinned people with light-coloured hair, having slender but well-formed figures, who lived in Rarohenga, the spirit world 26

Victor W. Turner, “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period”, in Rites de Passage, Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, (1964), 4-20. 27 Arnold Van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, (London: Routledge, 1960). 28 J. Maisonneuve, Les Conditions Rituels, (Paris: PUF, 1999). 29 The word tattooing is of Tahitian origin, and might mean “design (ta) which gives breath to the creatures of the earth (tau)”, hence, “the design which gives the protection of the god”. 30 The visit to the lower world is a theme found in other Maori myths in which the knowledge of tattooing and weaving are more or less related to it. See on this matter the article of Adele Schaffer “Visits to the Underworld in Maori Mythology”, Te Hao Hou, The Maori Magazine, 51 (June 1965): 43-46.

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situated in the lower world. In the beginning they lived very happily but with time Mataora became very jealous and one day he struck her and so she left him and went back to her folk. Mataora went after her and entered Rarohenga where he finally arrived at the house of Uetonga, his wife’s father. There he saw that Uetonga who was also chief «was engaged in tattooing a person, and the blood of that person was flowing freely, hence he called out: “Your mode of tattooing is wrong; it is not done so in the upper world.” Uetonga replied: “This is the way we tattoo in the lower world. Your method is wrong”. Mataora said: “Our method is the hopara makaurangi”. “That mode of tattooing”, said Uetonga, “is so termed when applied to house decoration, but when devices are merely marked on a person it is known as tuhi”. Then Uetonga put forth his hand and wiped the painted devices from the face of Mataora. All the folk laughed to see tattooing effaced, and Uetonga remarked: “O the Upper world! Ever is its adornment a farce, behold how the tattooing is effaced; it is merely a marking. Know that there are several methods of Whakairo (adornment); there is the female branch, the embroidering31 of cloaks; there is the male branch, the carving on wood; that on your face is simply a marked pattern”». Then Mataora learned that these people of the lower world tattooed by puncture, theirs was not a mark on the skin. He said: “You have spoiled my tattooing and must now do it properly.” So Uetonga called to those who delineated the tattoo patterns, and told them to mark them on Mataora, which was done. He then commenced to tattoo him, puncturing the marked lines with his chisel. After having being tattooed Mataora persuaded his wife to follow him back to the upper world, and he promised her father upon leaving: “By the token of the incised tattooing you have embellished me with, the ways of the underworld shall be my ways.” As a parting gift Uetonga gave to Mataora the famous cloak called the Rangi-Haupapa, which was the pattern from which all garments of this world were made. The belt that confined it was the origin of all belts of this world…”32 In other versions different kinds of gifts are enumerated, because of their significance for the acquisition of the knowledge of carving and weaving, the use of certain patterns, etc.; in other words, all the components of material culture derive from a myth of origin. After Mataora’s visit the Door to the lower world closed for humans and they can visit it only as spirits after their death. It is from that moment on that human bodies can no longer enter this world. “After the return of 31

In Best’s recital the word is embroidering, in other’s weaving, (Best, Maori Religion.) 32 Best, Maori Religion, 76-77, 227-229.

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Mataora to this world the art of tattooing by puncture became known, and the fame of it… spread to the different islands in the region of the Tawhiti… The upper world invented wood carving;33 it was first performed by Rua-i-te-pupuke and Nuku-te-aio, who so embellished the first house…”34 The designs for decorating houses were originally derived from designs of the ‘heavens’. Painted or carved, the designs were of ‘celestial’ order. From this myth we note two interesting things: that tattooing and weaving both came from the lower world, the spirit world, Rarohenga, which is described as “a realm of light and benevolence”; but wood carving was an invention of the upper world. Tattooing (Mataora) and weaving (Niwareka) came along with the basic devices of tattooing, which are poniana, the design on the nose, pihere near the mouth, ngu on the nose and tiwhana, lines on the forehead.35 These terms, with local linguistic differences, can be found in all Maori tribes. In these activities two assignments are put forward, one for men and one for women. Tattooing results in men carving the wood and the right to do so has to be gained after a battle, if the person does not have an inherited right; and in women in weaving, which also comprises net-making, defining thus a male and a female domain respectively, but giving women a preponderance in status as women come from the lower world (linked to Mataora’s wife) and accordingly weaving is of the ‘divine’ (=lower world) order. This myth of origin, although in many ways the way they are transcribed is influenced by the concepts of the first Europeans who started writing of the Maori people,36 nevertheless gives us significant information on the matter under discussion here, especially the fragment on the closing of the doors of the lower world to human bodies. The closing of the gates transformed the lower world into a spirit world and created the division between ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ world. At the same time this division made Catholic priests rename it the “underworld” and assign to it notions of evil belonging to the Christian concept of good and evil and pertaining to Christian dogmas, although its description does not evoke any form or image of the Christian underworld, e.g. hell.37 33

My emphasis op. cit.: 230. 35 op. cit.: 240. 36 op. cit.: 231 37 “But the most interesting thing in this ancient myth is the picture it presents of life in the underworld of spirits. It is not a dark or gloomy realm; it is a place of light and all things desirable. Evil is unknown there, it pertains only to the upper 34

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The ‘art’ of Moko Ta Moko follows very strict rules in regard to its procedure and application. Face and buttocks were the main areas for the male tattoo; lips and chin for women. As we have already mentioned at a very early period, in 1769, as reported by Pottier de L’Horme there was a common spiral pattern tattooed on the hips for both men and women alike, an “act of their religion”. In this very limited presentation we present only the facial tattoo of men and women alike, because face constitutes the first visible part of the body and in its topography the Maori society conveys all the necessary information about its members. The moko areas were design areas with clearly defined boundaries inside which the patterns and motifs are placed. Facial male moko divides the face, first of all, into two major parts, the upper and the lower part of the face, corresponding to the upper and lower world respectively. These two parts are divided into four major fields and a number of secondary design areas. The major design areas are symmetrical and are the left and right forehead down to the eyes, and the left and the right lower face. In this dual design field, with secondary design fields along the jaw line, on the chin, by the ears and on the upper forehead, we clearly distinguish on the face of the male moko the following areas: Area 1, centre forehead, is for rank: in its upper part you bear the mark of God and then the design of your rank; area 2 is your position in life; in area 3 are lines of rank by hapu; 4, first or second marriage; 5, your signature; 6, your work; 7, your mana (strength); 8, position at birth – left side mother, right side father.38 The major design fields are filled with fairly symmetrical designs, but the secondary designs areas may be filled with an individual design that is not necessarily symmetrical in the opposite design field. The junctions between the lower face fields are also subject to individual variation at the chin, upper lip, nose and root of the nose. The areas of individual variations are thus at the edges or at the junction points of the major design fields, along the centre line from chin to forehead, or along the junction world. Such was an old time Maori belief, but unfortunately for anthropologists our Maori folk adopted the myths and teachings of Christianity, hence ideas of the spirits of evil persons going to the underworld, and those of the good ascending to the heavens, have crept into their statements. Such beliefs were unknown to the Maori in premissionary days.” (op. cit. 231). 38 Simmons, Ta Moko; Ko Te Riria and David Simmons, Moko Rangatira – Maori Tattoo (New Zealand: Reed Publishing, 2000).

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between the forehead fields and the lower face fields, that is at the corner of the eyes and temples.39 Individual history (bravery in battle, personal deeds, anything that an individual accomplishes in his life which gives him a right to recognition) is inscribed on his face. Personal history stands at the junctions of the collective; it is that which needs to be recalled, revivified, in such a way that this personal history inscribed on the junctions reinforces the collective history, adding to it the personal dimension.

Figure 1. The topography of the male face moko

Male moko was not finished in one session, but all along the life of an individual different ceremonies filled in the blanks, inscribing in this way onto his body-archives his personal deeds and history, in such a way that in the next generation his sons and daughters will carry on this memory to the next generations. As the Maori Te Pehi who travelled to England in 1826 stated: “Europee [sic] man write with pen his name – Te Pehi’s is here”, indicating his face. Moko, whether male or female, can be read or understood to give information. For a man, starting from the differing patterns on the right 39

Simmons, Ta Moko, 25.

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and left side in front of the ears where hereditary patterns of a man’s family from both parents gave a full account of his birthright, and ascending to the other areas filled with the deeds of his life, every Maori was an open book of collective and individual history, defining thus his identity as a member of his tribe. Every secondary field of design was assigned to different occupations and was recognized by every other person in the tribe as well as by neighboring tribes. Ta Moko is very important to the lineage because it enables its history to come to the fore, and that is why its operation is very important to the family. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, the full extent of the ritual’s exact performance by pre-colonial Maoris has not been recorded. The position of women in this highly sophisticated society was not at all understood by the Europeans of that period; on the contrary it was completely misunderstood. Thus the fact that some women wore a certain amulet with the god Io because of their position, which gave them sole right to bear this mark, was easily disregarded and the amulet interpreted as a fertility symbol. Many things must have been lost during those years, as for instance the hip spiral tattoo on both males and females. Women were reported as being tattooed on the lips and chin to denote their rank and position in the community. As we have seen in the incantation songs during the moko, the tattoo bestowed recognition of their right to enter the house of weaving and be allowed to start weaving and net-making. Some women because of their genealogical descent outranked many men of their generation; that is why they usually remained unmarried as there was no suitable husband for them. They were regarded as men with the rights and privileges of male chiefs; their position was marked by part of a male moko. This male tattoo marked the woman as a virgin, therefore any child born of her was a disaster for the group because it was considered the result of a supernatural act. The significant part of the female face moko is that it does not follow the quadruple division of the face as is the case with the male moko. We could say that the main division of the face into two major parts, the upper and the lower part, is the rule also for women. Or we could say that in women’s facial moko, because of the lack of any other design fields, the only dimension is the vertical one, as verticality depicts the direct connection of women to the lower world, their connection with Niwareka and weaving.

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Figure 2. The topography of the female face moko

Another very interesting point in Mataora’s myth is that in all the versions of the myth, one way or the other, is mentioned the fact that Mataora says to Uetonga “in your way of tattooing there is free flow of the red liquid, whilst ours calls for no such shedding of blood”40. With these words Mataora marks a change in the social order produced by the free flow of blood,41 as new knowledge came with him when he returned to his people. We will encounter this free flowing of blood in the human ritual killing during the tattooing procedure of a tohunga, a chief, and most certainly during a woman’s tattooing, where humans (if she was born to a high-ranking family, Best 2006 I: 230) or animals were killed, as her tattooing did not produced a free flow of blood since it was done only on chin and upper lip. Tattooing marked with the free flow of red liquid enacts the moment when Mataora’s tattooed body left the realms of the lower world and the gates closed behind him and the realm became inaccessible to physical bodies. Free flow of the red liquid reopens the gates.

40 41

Best, Maori Religion, I: 233. Blood as an offering opened different ceremonies (op. cit., I: 223-224).

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Figure 3. Correspondences between male and female face moko

So from the time of Mataora’s return the human body remains isolated from the realm of the spirits: tattooing is the only way to connect this body with that realm and at the same time give the body existence and its individual a sense of self. The ritual of tattooing enacts all this myth in its

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procedure, as it is described in a Maori manuscript, (I am citing only the parts which are of interest here): “the first tattooing is an opening of the way, a cutting of the skin, of the flesh of the body to divide it…” The opening of the way connotes the opening of the closed door, as from this time on the body is recognizable by the spirit world and can be protected by it. When the wounds are healed the remaining pigment leaves the traces of the act defining this body as a living one in the realm of the upper world, inscribing on it the marks of its existence, giving it an autonomy of substance, transforming it into an open archive for the community. The enactment of the myth of origin places this body at the threshold between the two worlds: pain and blood legitimize its existence. Through Ta Moko, men and women acquire the secret knowledge of the celestial patterns of whakairo that Mataora brought with him. Carving for men and weaving for women are known to them, and they have the right to carve and weave these patterns adding their personal aesthetics to them. In fact they are expected to add this personal understanding in conceiving new forms of the patterns. In modern times carvers reproduce these forms in different materials. The only thing remaining is a rather stylized explanation of every pattern and a certain ritual in acquiring one of these artifacts. We may summarize all the above in these series of binary oppositions: Upper world Threshold /Closed Gates Lower world realm of humans realm of the spirits visible invisible male – female male – female wood carving – net making moko – weaving [physical] body [spirit] ‘body’ presence of bodies absence of bodies tattooed – untattooed ‘tattooed’ – ‘untattooed’ ‘visible’ – ‘invisible’ ‘visible’ – ‘invisible’

Tattooed body Enactment of the myth of origin the first cutting = an opening of the way = free flow of the red liquid

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Threshold/Open Gates world

upper mother ‘left’

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everlasting lower father ‘right’

topography of female face moko ‘centered’ between the eyes top lip area lips chin area topography of male face moko ‘divided’ Upper part left mother

lower part right father

We observe first of all that the female face moko is centered, ‘vertical’, whilst the male face moko is dual. The verticality is expressed/manifested in rituals and is associated with the myths of origin. The mythical order is seen, visualized as a vertical order, because in rituals it is implied that the boundary between the known and the unknown, the visible and the invisible is transcended and as time stands still the (cognitive) normal order is temporarily suspended. We also observe a reversal in the position of the binary opposition male-female as it appears in the “mythical” level of the enactment of the myth of origin and in the male face moko. This is a common feature in symbolic systems: by switching symbolic levels (and codes), what is mythical (invisible) becomes substantiated by its imprint on the body (visible), which in turn becomes a living metaphor. What the reversal effectuates is the negation of the reversed;42 the body imprint ‘reveals’ the difference between the two worlds and the difference between men and women in hierarchical social position and status. Mataora’s wife is a native of the lower world (invisible) and occupies the right side in the myth of origin (everlasting) whilst Mataora is a native of the upper world (visible). Women, being descendants of Mataora’s wife of the lower world, do not need to bear the signs of their ‘double’ existence. They are directly linked with this world, whilst men are descendants of 42

Jacobson-Widding, Body and Power.

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both worlds. This position has to be reversed in the male body because only by this reversal can that which is invisible be transformed into something visible, through (and by) its negation. The tattooed body stands on the threshold between the realm of humans and the realm of the spirits, enabling its owner to be recognized by the human as well as by the spirit world. The body acquires visibility for both worlds and it bears imprinted on it the indices of the collective as well as the marks of the individual; it therefore becomes legible for both worlds, thus enabling its bearer to exist, in this life and in the afterlife, in the everyday and in the everlasting.

Conclusions In this concise study of certain aspects of the Maori tattooed body of Aotearoa (New Zealand), the art of ‘carving’ the skin has been presented as linked to the myth of Mataora, the myth of origin of this custom and ritual. Lack of space prevents me from discussing wood-carving; but as we have seen above, the carving on the skin gives the right to carve on wood for men and to weave (or embroider) for women. The Maori individual, having been carved (tattooed) on his skin, has the right to carve the wood himself and imprint on it, in his own personal way and using the specific designs whose signification is known and recognized by everybody, his relation with the ancestors, the gods and the sacred animals, all these things that he has to listen to and therefore recognize as his own personal calling and his purpose in life.43 Women as well are authorized to weave these patterns and produce very personal and individual artifacts. Every artifact produced was destined for personal use. These objects were not destined for any sort of commerce but were expected to be given freely as a recompense for services or a token of friendship. That is why they were personal objects. A house or a canoe carved by its owner depicted his

43

I would like to mention at this point Alan F. Hanson, in Hanson and Hanson, Counterpoint in Maori Culture, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983) who has discovered a distinctive form of symmetry not only in Maori wood carving but also in Maori architecture, myth, poetry and love songs, all of which he relates to ideas regarding unity and separation that underlie most components of Maori culture. I strongly believe that Hanson is correct and that the Maori conception of life and its surroundings expressed in their art goes far deeper than the overt use of symbols and forms in religion and ritual, providing a vast optical field of signs linked to a large stratum of significations, a sensory mode through which Maoris apprehend their culture.

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position, his wealth, his history, as well as carrying the protection of the gods.44 Skin and wood are two surfaces that can be carved. Both surfaces are visible to everyone but at the same time are invisible to many since they contain elements that only the invisible can see and that can be comprehended only by the person who knows what he sees. Carving imprints are made on that part of the body which serves as an ‘interruptor’ between the inner self and the world surrounding the individual: the skin constitutes a threshold between what is invisible and what is visible – visible not only to the members of the group but also to all others outside the group. This individual relation between the in-world and the out-world constitutes the sense of “being” of the subject.45 In the life of a Maori the procedure of “carving” constitutes the “moment” during which they are linked with the everlasting of their group, because the imprinting on their body of those denotative elements of their being identifies them as a member of the group, renders them another living archive, hence a living and walking text of individual and collective history. The Ta Moko moment makes the invisible visible, inscribes the subject in the group, and in the group’s memory that which cannot and must not be forgotten is recalled or re-read. We can legitimately interpret the myth of Mataora and its enactment during the moko ritual in the sense that the “carving” reproduces on and links the body to primordial moments. When the subject moves this carved body around, visible to all in the everyday, and as he or she encounters other members of the group, moments of connectedness and memory are invoked, as different texts and different combinations of the imprints of collective history are produced. When two or more individuals meet in the everyday, when two or more bodies meet in the everyday, then, in a kind of eternal choreography, the play of collective identity and history is reproduced in the everlasting. In these interactional and expressive dimensions of bodies in movement, these bodies constitute connecting links rather than dividing boundaries between the members, both visible and invisible, of the group. 46 44

In Maori language there is a clear distinction in the use of the related terms: there are terms denoting spaces and material, and at the same time other terms connoting the same things. They have kept intact both descriptive and allegorical terms for the same thing, just to make the life of an anthropologist miserable. 45 Drew Leder, The Absent Body, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. 46 Michael Jackson in his study of the Kuranko and the Songhay in West Africa focuses on these dimensions but he limits his remarks to relations between human beings. It is interesting to mention that as Jackson’ thinking vacillates between

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What Ta Moko conveys to the individual, when the collective is transformed into an individual but “external” seeming/becoming on his skin, the individual has to reciprocate through and by the carving of wood, rendering his personal and internal being collective and external. Women as well, though they do not carve the wood, reciprocate through and by their weaving patterns. Whakairo (carving) wood, as well as ornamenting weaving, becomes through the enactment of ta moko an art applied on different materials and marking for ever the relation between visible and invisible, when the everlasting can and must be revealed to and by the ‘people’, when and if they are ‘people’.

Bibliography Best, Elsdon, Maori Religion and Mythology: Being an Account of the Cosmogony, Anthropogeny, Religious Beliefs and Rites, Magic and Folklore of the Maori Folk of New Zealand. II Volumes. New Zealand: Te Papa Press, 2006 (1924). Davidson, Janet M. and D. C. Starzecka, Maori Art and Culture. N. Zealand: David Bateman, 1996. Durkheim, Émile. Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse. Paris: PUF, 1998. Geertz, Clifford. Available Light. Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000. —. The Interpretation of Cultures. NY: Basic Books Classics, 1973. Gell, Alfred. Wrapping in Images: Tattooing in Polynesia. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Hanson, Alan F. and Louise Hanson. Counterpoint in Maori Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983. Higmore, Ben. “Introduction to Part One.” In The Everyday Life Reader. Edited by Ben Highmore, 37-38. London: Routledge, 2002. Jacobson-Widding, Anita. “Body and Power: Symbolic Demarcations of Separate Identity.” In Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural. A Symposium, edited by A. Jacobson-Widding, 371-387. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis and New York: Humanities Press, 1983. existentialism and reflexivity, he examines these matters on a horizontal level disregarding the verticality of the transcendental. In this way he is able to view the body as an existential entity inscribed in its social context; see Michael Jackson, “Knowledge of the body”, Man 18 (1983), 327-345, and Paths towards a clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1989).

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—. “Subjective Body, Objective Space. An Introduction.” In Body and Space. Symbolic Models of Unity and Division in African Cosmology and Experience, edited by A. Jacobson-Widding, 15-48. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala studies in Cultural Anthropology 16, 1991. Jackson, Michael. “Knowledge of the body.” Man 18 (1983): 327-345. —. Paths towards a clearing. Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry. Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1989. King, Michael. Moko: Maori Tattooing in the 20th Century. Wellington: Alister Taylor, 1972. —. The Penguin History of New Zealand. Penguin Books, 2003. Kotarba, Joseph A. “Existential Sociology.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer, Vol. III: 15191524. USA, UK, Australia: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Le Breton, David. “Corps et individualism.” Diogène, 131(1985) : 27-50. —. Anthropologie du corps et modernité. Paris : PUF, Collection « sociologie d’aujourd’hui », 1990. —. Sociologie du corps. Paris : P.U.F.: « Que sais-je? », 1992. —. Signes d’identité. Tatouages, piercings et autres marques corporelles. Paris : Métailié, 2002. Leder, Drew. The Absent Body. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Paris: L’Arche, 1947. —. Critique de la vie quotidienne, II. Fondements d’une sociologie de la quotidienneté. Paris: L’Arche,1961. —. Critique de la vie quotidienne, III. De la modernité au modernisme (Pour une métaphilosophie du quotidien). Paris: L’Arche,1981. —. La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne. Paris: Gallimard, 1968. Levi Strauss, David. “Modern Primitives.” in Modern primitives: an Investigation of Contemporary Adornment and Ritual. Edited by V. Vale and A. Juno, 159-178. San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1989. Lewis, David and Werner Forman. The Maori: Heirs of Tane. London: Orbis, 1982. Maisonneuve, J. Les conduites rituels. Paris : P.U.F.: « Que sais-je? », 1999. Moon, Paul. This Horrid Practice. The Myth and Reality of Traditional Maori Cannibalism. Penguin Books, 2008. Moutsopoulos, N. K. The Tattoo. A diachronic investigation of the phenomenon. Thessaloniki: Elliniki Epitropi Spoudon Notioanatolikis Europis /Kentron Spoudon Notioanatolikis Europis (in Greek), 1996.

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Nicholas, J. L. Narrative of a Voyage to New Zealand performed in the years 1814 and 1815 in company with the Rev. Samuel Marsden, principal Chaplain of New South Wales. II Vol. London: James Black, 1817. Ortner, Sherry B. “On Key Symbols.” American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 75, 5(Oct. 1973): 1338-1346. Riesman, Paul. First find your child a good mother: Parenthood and the raising of children in two African communities. Unpublished draft manuscript, published after the author’s death as: First find your Child a Good Mother: the Construction of Self in two African Communities. USA: Rutgers University Press, 1992. Riria, Ko Te and David Simmons. Moko Rangatira – Maori Tattoo. New Zealand: Reed Publishing, 2000. Robley, Horatio Gordon. Moko or Maori tattooing. N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003 (1896). Schaffer, Adele. “Visits to the Underworld in Maori Mythology”. Te Hao Hou, The Maori Magazine, 51 (June 1965): 43-46. Simmons, R. D. Ta Moko. The Art of Maori Tattoo. New Zealand: Reed Publishing, 2007 (1986). Turner, Victor W. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period.” Rites de Passage. Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society, 1964: 420. Van Gennep, Arnold, 1960. The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge; Univ. of Chicago Press (first published in French in 1909 as Les rites de passage).

TRIVIAL OBJECTS, ECONOMY AND ‘ATTAINABLE LUXURY’ DIMITRIS CHARITATOS AND ANASTASIA CHRISTODOULOU

Introduction Aims of the paper This paper aims to be a presentation of an ongoing enquiry which is based on the current global economic crisis. It is not a systematic semiotic analysis but rather a ‘semiotic gaze’ on a cultural and political context under creation, in which the main participants are the global economy, trivial objects, and attainable luxury. The analysis deals with the immaterial value created in the objects, with how this value is used and circulated in the marketplace and, finally, with how it interacts with the circulation of capital and the flow of money and ‘values’.

The economic context Attenuation of national paternalistic capitalism, enhancement of transport and telecommunications, and the dominant liberal tendency for a drastic abolition of toll taxes has contributed to a high globalization of commerce. It is a rather trivial observation that the aforementioned factors have contributed to the massive import of material goods from laborintensive countries (e.g. China and Vietnam) to western countries (central and peripheral, Greece included). In the short term, these imports created big profits for both parts, the former having the opportunity to develop the tertiary sector of their economy, leading to their consuming cheaper products and to their rising prosperity. For an outline of these factors and impacts, see (Friedman 2005, 160 - 168). Nevertheless, ‘tertiary sector’ countries have often lost competence in their primary and secondary sectors. Capital-intensive countries possess

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broader networks and penetration into the global market, whereas peripheral western countries (such as Greece and Portugal) rely on the distribution of their industrial goods to national or local networks. The effects were very intense: the secondary sector of the peripheral Western countries was severely hit. Industries fled to the cheap labor of neighboring countries, entire branches of industrial production were almost annihilated (textiles, electronics), unemployment grew, and recession in various areas of activity became obvious. The tertiary sector was inevitably influenced; industry and manufacturing were giving work to a great variety of enterprises and entrepreneurs in the tertiary sector, and they consequently entered unemployment, following the spiral of recession. Lowi (2001) attempts a general theoretical approach to the new millennium’s globalized commerce.

The dialectical context Greece and other peripheral countries were lacking worldwide brands and hi-tech products. Both these categories have the advantage of a high marginal utility, since they do not exactly compete with the waves of ‘cheap products’1. Many high-end western countries have sectors of activity not much influenced by such cheap products, because of the two aforementioned factors. Yet, whereas high technology can be more easily quantified and compared by rather measurable means, brand can be considered only by reference to the dialectic context which creates it. Brand techniques, which are so developed in western countries, are not merely a vain game of the companies, but a strategic plan which brings profit to their tills. By branding a product, the company does not only create a unique identity for it, nor does it only add immaterial surplus value to it, but it also differentiates the product in a dialectical-abstract manner. Although branding is often based on the material features of the object and its supposed advantages, it often creates imaginary qualities for such objects, qualities which exist merely because consumers recognize them. Greece, like other countries, lacked this globalized branding. Its products were placed mostly on the material and less on the dialectical level. The aforementioned sprawl of communications further boosted the ٝ

Referring to marginal utility in this case is rather general and schematic, in order to give the concept of a rising potential demand. That does not mean we fully adopt a utilitarian theory, agreeing thus with some arguments by Douglas and Isherwood (1979, xx – xxv).

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typifying and streamlining of commodities through various practices such as franchising.

1. The intensification of dialectical production The waves of imported, low cost products in the peripheral Western countries left limited margins of economic reaction. With high technology being very expensive and difficult of access, and with low labor costs threatening both social status and consumption, thousands of medium and small companies along with freelancers and wannabe entrepreneurs gradually moved the field of their focus on the dialectic level. Nevertheless, the creation of a worldwide brand was impossible for most of these agents, at least, at a first stage. Neither was the creation of low-cost brands (such as IKEA or H&M) attainable, given that such actions demanded strong networks between production and distribution, which peripheral countries did not have. The solution was elsewhere: given that products of high marginal utility (which command higher prices) are characterized by limited quantities and strong demand, producers could move in this direction. Limited production was already a fact, quality could be controlled, and therefore, strong demand should follow. Narotzky (2000) analyzes similar cases in Spain. Based on the aforementioned, one can detect a strong tendency towards the creation of ‘attainable luxury’ products. These are objects or services that have a higher price, a strong dialectic emphasis on their brand and a focus on exclusivity and quality. In the last decade, new labels of wine (and other Protected Designation of Origin products), ‘design’ furniture and gourmet dishes entered the Greek market. Small producers found a way out of the mass by stressing the traditional values of their products (feta cheese or olive oil), by promoting design as a surplus value (Neoset etc.), or by reinventing identity by hybrid names (Artisti Italiani, Achile Saridis, both Greek companies). Foster (2005) gives examples of reinvention of quality in existing products and their consequent surplus value added. These objects, which are often accompanied by and promoted through multimodal texts, create typologies and categories. Thus, the “Spitiko” olive oil (homemade in Greek) creates an object with a low immaterial surplus value, which along with similar others create the category of ‘traditional’ or ‘virgin’ olive oils. Added to other categories of food and beverage, these oils form the context of a great surplus of ‘Mediterranean’ or ‘traditional’ cuisine. Van der Veen (2003) shows various examples of the creation of luxury and surplus value in food.

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Once formed, the surplus category (e.g. Mediterranean cuisine) tempts producers to enter directly to it, by adopting its main characteristics or stereotypes. Waves of recipes with ‘tahini’ (sesame paste) invaded the lifestyle magazines in a reinvention of tradition in gastronomy. Innumerable ‘design’ objects enter the market, although ‘design’ object stylistically means nothing2. See this function on figure 1. Figure 1 The Immaterial value and the creation of surplus value categories

The constant creation of categories and their speculation by the producers, with the creation of stereotyped objects, gives birth to an entropic chain between the major and the minor in a two-way path of mutual formation. The minor, the plethora of objects and their typologies (e.g. design objects) forms the major, the ‘design’ trend, which in its turn provokes the creation of many more ‘design’ objects; and so completing the circle, forming the mutuality.

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One may also observe the contrary movement, in the creation of attainably luxurious objects from ‘high class’ luxury ones. Many companies involved in the production of luxury goods move some of their products to broader categories, oriented to a wider public. Tungate (2009, 213 -220) gives many examples of attainably luxurious objects produced from high luxurious ones.

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Why is the chain entropic? Because, we think, it is more disorderly on the side of separate objects and forms, and less fluid on the side of major trends and tendencies; and this justifies the use of a metaphor from physics, the entropic chain, as an image.

2. The trivialization and the inflation of the immaterial value The creation of broad categories and contexts, loaded with immaterial value, provoke the proliferation of objects of attainable luxury. These are objects which, though similar in material features, have a strong individual or collective dialectical-immaterial element which adds value; and which therefore increases their marginal utility. Many of these objects are trivial, quotidian products, which through a semio-dialectical investment have become a double parallel set of categories: on the one track their functionality as normal objects, and on the other track the attainable luxury. The broad pursuit, by different and highly varying agents, which belong to different sectors, to create attainably luxurious objects out of trivial objects, significantly changes quotidian life. Very soon, a whole range of services invents new ‘luxurious’ products. Bakeries make a whole range of different breads, which are sold at double the price of the ordinary; magazines donate ‘collection’ gadgets (which are reproduced in thousands of items); and famous brands in tailoring produce as their mainstream products an attainable series of garments. One could expect, as is indeed the case, that this high offer of attainable luxury leads to the phenomena of trivialization and inflation. The attainably luxurious soon becomes common and that is when the dialectic production should use new differences of form or text to raise the utility of the new typologies to be created. There is, thus, a constant trivialization and degradation of the immaterial value. Balsamic vinegar entered the Greek market as an imported product and was sold in special delicatessen shops. Soon, imports became bigger and competition made prices slightly lower. While Greek companies (TOP etc) started to produce their own balsamic vinegar, this product entered the gourmet menu-lists, then the medium class restaurants and then it became so much trivialized that it become almost obligatory in the ‘kitchen-shows’ of Greek TV (Love Bites etc). Inflation is not only connected to price and use, therefore, with these more material aspects of the social sphere and the market, but also with

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the dialectics that describe the products. Mainstream blocks of flats, often in very low strata areas, were called by their developers “luxury constructions” often because of the materials used, which similarly belonged to the aforementioned categories of ‘attainable luxury’. When this became too common, “super-luxurious” apartments appeared, often consisting of the same type of constructions in the same old areas. The same was the case with ‘living’ yoghurts and virgin and extra virgin olive oils3.

The role of the peripheral countries We observed, at a first stage, that the phenomenon of the ‘attainable luxury’ and its inflation is based on the peripheral Western countries. Nevertheless, this is also the case with the capital-intensive western countries and the labor-intensive countries as well. ‘Attainable luxury’ brands are born lately in most of the countries. However, it is the high pressure of the countries of capital or labor intensity that provokes the tendency towards attainable luxury in the peripheral western countries, almost as an obligatory solution for a whole range of sectors. Producers seem to take advantage of some of the disadvantages which economic pressure has led them to. So, reduction in production and limited penetration of markets are reversed dialectically, and used to connote characteristics usually attributed to luxurious products4.

3. Immaterial capital and attainable luxury in the economic circle Attainable luxury, a special aspect of immaterial capital, causes the price in the marketplace to rise, and therefore makes for greater gains for the enterprises that sell them. In a competitive market, the acquisition of such products may result in the broader and faster movement of other commodities into the category of inferior objects.

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See: (Charitatos 2008, 165-170) In this analysis there is an underlying risk, which has been noted by Lagopoulos and Boklund (1992). They point out the difficulty of reconciling Marxism and Semiotics, in their case the semiotics of space (32-33). The same problem is always present in this paper, in dealing with the attempt to reconcile semiotics and the Marxist concept of fetishism of the commodity which is implicit throughout this text. ٝ

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An increase of income may provoke a bigger increase in spending on attainable luxury goods. There is, however, another aspect of luxury, which is not so broadly described by mainstream economics; income remains stable but the consumption of luxury goods rises, due to the reordering of consumption priorities. It is, in this case, an amalgam of personal choices and social pressures on the individual, which leads to a ‘static’ creation of luxury goods within a stable economic condition. The economic view on luxury gives rise to an exact but retrospective definition of the term. It judges the nature of the commodity through its demand. Thus, a disproportionate increase in demand re-classifies a product into the category of luxurious commodities. This is not a wrong practice given that it gives the opportunity for a quantification of the phenomenon. Nevertheless, it inevitably judges the event only when it has already been manifested. In other words, when the luxury products fulfill the economic definition of their kind, the whole dialectic procedure has already reached half the way. In figure 2 we show the different concept we propose, which supposes a shift of the factors rather than a shift of the supply-demand curves (P-price, Q-quantity, D-demand, S-supply). Figure 2 The dialectical shift of the balance of supply-and-demand

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Economists are not unaware of this issue; most of them see a twofold nature of the commodity: the material and the immaterial. They also approach the issue from both sides: either the material through diagrams of demand and offer, or by immaterial approaches such as those connected to branding. Brekke and Howarth (2000) provide a critique of economic approaches which ignore social factors. At this point one question may come in mind; what is the influence of dialectic and semiotic factors on the economic circle? If the amount of money in circulation remains unchanged, a change in the immaterial value of the object would provoke a redistribution of currency flows in the marketplace. Yet just as dialectic values of the object can change the flow of money, dialectics of the marketplace can change the size of these flows and create currency capitalizations. In other words, the abstraction of money permits the unlimited credit; money is a matter of faith, so it can be borrowed from the future or from faith in it. Browning and Crossley (2000) offer alternative insights on elasticity and the distribution of capital. In this manner great, borrowed ‘dialectical’ amounts of money can enter the economic circle to buy imaginary values and capitalizations. Money has the strong semiotic feature of standing for something else. Either standing merely for the amount of work on a commodity or the ambition of people to possess it, money is an object (or often a concept) which represents the interrelationship of objects in a network of commodities. Given its abstract function, money can be produced in the dialectic sphere to connote work and ambitions concentrated on the objects, be the objects material or not. Money can, therefore, be produced in unlimited quantities, if there is somebody who will recognize its connotative function and to whom it will be useful as a currency. The proliferation of money in the marketplace may create the phenomenon of inflation. When imaginary qualities, such as luxury, can be bought, inflation phenomena are moderated by becoming invested in immaterial commodities. This may create a perpetual circle of an immaterial exchange in the marketplace. In other words, immaterial values of objects and services and immaterial entities of money cause a circle of disinflation that may aid in the prevention of deflation.

4. Conclusions Economic pressure on the peripheral western countries and some sectors of activity in the western countries has caused, as a reaction, a big stream towards attainable luxury. Small and medium producers attempt to

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reverse the disadvantages of the crisis and dialectically convert them into advantages. Mainstream luxurious objects enter the marketplace and cause a redistribution of spending priorities. This massive creation of new luxurious objects creates a new material environment, which influences the quotidian life by constantly introducing distinguishing elements and trends5. The proliferation of mainstream luxurious commodities in a certain category of activities or objects causes the phenomena of inflation and the down-grading of those commodities to the status of simple mainstream objects. The high connotative ability of money to stand for something else leads to an increasing loop between the creation of imaginary money and the formation of new categories of luxury goods, which moderates the phenomenon of inflation. The classic economic approach to luxury is partly retrospective, since it defines the phenomenon at the point when it is already manifested. The tendency towards attainable luxury seems to be not only an option but also one of the few alternatives for small and medium entrepreneurs under pressure. Their massive adherence to rising trends in luxury goods creates broad categories of objects with immaterial values. The broadening of these categories influences the cultural context and the way everyday life is considered.

Bibliography Brekke, Kiell and Richard, Howarth. 2000. The social contingency of wants. Land Economics 76: 493-503. Browning, Martin and Thomas, Crossley. 2000. Luxuries are easier to postpone: A proof. The Journal of Political Economy, 108: 1022-1026. Charitatos, Dimitrios. 2008. Design as a non-quantitative economic parameter; the new fetishism of the object. International Conference on Applied Economics. T.E.I. of West Macedonia 15 – 17 May 2008. Christodoulou, Anastasia. 2003 Semiotic analysis and culture in foreign language. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press. (in Greek) Douglas, Mary and Baron, Isherwood. 1979. The world of goods. New York: Routledge. Foster, Robert. 2005. Commodity future: Labor love and work, Anthropology Today 21: 8-12.

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For the creation of mainstreams and broad categories of minor immaterial entities and opinions see: (Christodoulou, 2003).

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Friedman, Jonathan. 2005. Globalization, Dis-intergration, Reorganization: The transformations of violence. In The anthropology of development and Globalization. Edited by Parker Shipton. Oxford: Blackwell publishing. Lagopoulos, Phaidon and Boklund, Karin. 1992. Meaning and Geography: The social conception of the Region in Northern Greece. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lowi, Theodore. 2001. Our Millennium: Political Science Confronts the Global Corporate Economy. Revue internationale de science politique, 22, 131-150. Narotzky, Susana. 2000. The cultural basis of a regional economy: The Vega Baja de Segure in Spain. Ethnology, 39: 1-14. Tungate, Mark. 2009. Luxury world: The past, present and future of luxury brands. MPG Books, Cornwall. Van der Veen, Marijke. 2003. When is food a luxury? World archeology. 74: 405-427.

EVERYDAY FANTASY KARIN BOKLUND-LAGOPOULOU

The activity of reading has not formed a very significant part of scholarly interest in the everyday. Walter Benjamin makes a passing reference to the invention of printing as the first form of the “technological reproducibility” of the Work of Art, and the possibility opened up by the growth of the popular press for a new participation of the reading audience in the production of writing.1 Most writing on popular literature, however, seems to assume that everyday reading refers to the products of the “culture industry” as defined by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer: industrialised products of “mass deception”, designed to feed the masses an easily digested form of pleasure which constantly reinforces the status quo.2 And from a certain point of view, this is of course true. In fact, one could easily argue that everyday literature is by its very nature escapist – we read it because we want to escape, at least momentarily, from a supposedly boring and banal everyday reality. The literature that we read for everyday entertainment is not usually a literature of the everyday. In popular literature – romances, mysteries, thrillers – the plot is made up of events that are (fortunately or unfortunately) very unlikely to happen to any of us. These books are about exceptional people: the heroes are more heroic and the villains are more 1

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” in vol. 3 of Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 102, 114. Benjamin’s essay was originally published in 1936. One wonders what he would have made of the internet. 2 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972); Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1991). Cf. also Henri Lefebvre’s comment that there are social and cultural structures whose purpose is to “close the horizons” of everyday life so that it will appear impossible to change it – Henri Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne (Paris: L’Arche, 1961), 35.

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villainous than the people that we normally encounter in reality. Indeed, among the most popular genres of contemporary popular literature are science fiction and fantasy, genres that deliberately situate their narratives in non-existent, non-realistic worlds. In this paper I will be concerned with fantasy literature. I want to explore the appeal of this kind of literature: why it is that I personally like it, and also why I am vaguely ashamed of admitting that in public. I want to argue that perhaps the answer to those questions can be found in the relationship between fantasy literature and the everyday. One could, perhaps, make a case for fantasy on the basis of a modified version of the argument of Janice Radway. In Reading the Romance, Radway argues that the very act of reading romances is conceived by her women readers as an act of resistance against patriarchal ideology – an assertion of their right to an activity and an interest of their own, carved out of their daily round of responsibilities to children, husband and household.3 I would not want to suggest that reading fantasy literature is in itself an act of resistance to patriarchal ideology, for reasons that will become clear below. But a case can be made that it is a form of utopian literature (a point that Radway also makes, quoting Fredric Jameson).4 The literary representation of a fantasy world can be an ideological protest against conditions in our own society: many of the books by Ursula Leguin incorporate quite clearly this kind of indirect social criticism. It is not, in fact, entirely accurate to say that fantasy literature is wholly imaginary. It is conventionally realistic in style, and the imaginary universe which it presents includes elements borrowed from real societies. Science fiction projects certain characteristics of our own society into the future; fantasy literature often borrows elements from societies of the past. There are several possible models, but among the most popular patterns is the “medieval” one: an imaginary society that includes elements from the historical medieval cultures of Europe (and occasionally from farther East). These elements may be both historical and literary: the contemporary fantasy writer uses not only actual historical phenomena (such as noble kings, brave knights, barbarian enemies), but also elements of medieval literature and legend (dragons, elves, magic objects, heroes with superhuman powers, and so on).

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Janice A. Radway, “Conclusion” to Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (London and New York: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 4 Radway, Reading the Romance, 214-215.

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It is not difficult to see why the Middle Ages provide a popular model for fantasy. Medieval history is to a certain extent familiar to us: it is part of the national history that we were taught in school, and while most of us have probably happily forgotten all the historical details, we still have a large store of vaguely “medieval” images and associations that a writer can use as a background to his or her fantasy universe. The presence of such a background is important, because it provides a context of connotations that the writer can rely upon. As Wolfgang Iser has pointed out, no good writer gives the reader a complete description of every detail in every scene of his or her plot.5 There are always gaps that the reader has to fill in, and much of the pleasure of reading derives from the need to fill in those gaps by using our imagination.6 The reader is not passive: semiotically, reading is always a matter of active interpretation, of making sense out of a text.7 Iser argues that part of the pleasure of reading derives from having one’s anticipations frustrated by unexpected plot developments, and Roland Barthes seems to believe that the pleasure of reading derives entirely from having our expectations frustrated, from the writer refusing to follow literary convention in what Barthes calls a text that is scriptible (which is usually translated into English as ‘writerly’), rather than lisible, ‘readerly’ (a better translation would be ‘readable’).8 But there are limits to how much frustration a reader will put up with, especially when reading for pleasure. Umberto Eco (1972) has pointed out that much of our reading pleasure in fact derives from having our expectations fulfilled, from recognizing familiar patterns of plot and character that we have encountered before.9 It is certainly true that a large part of the pleasure of reading popular literature comes from encountering something reliably familiar, something that we already know and want to encounter again – which is why we often choose to read books by an author that we already

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Wolfgang Iser, “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History 3 (1972). 6 This is one of the advantages of written literature over cinema, which has to make explicit much that a novel can leave to the reader’s imagination. 7 This is also the position taken by Umberto Eco, who speaks of the “semiotic labour” of interpretation – Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976). 151-156. 8 Roland Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970). 9 Umberto Eco, “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics 2 (1972). Eco relates this to a need to escape from the overwhelming quantity of new information which is omnipresent in contemporary society – i.e., in a certain sense, from the everyday.

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know, about a hero or heroine that we are already familiar with. Not even literary critics want to have their expectations frustrated all the time. So a writer of popular literature has to strike a balance between the familiar and the unexpected, between what he or she explicitly provides for the reader, and what the reader’s imagination can supply. The text must give the reader enough information so that his or her imagination can work in the right direction, providing an appropriate context for the specific events that the text will introduce further on (though, as Stuart Hall has pointed out in another context, there is no guarantee that the reader will obediently interpret the text the way the writer intended10). It is thus useful for a writer to be able to draw on a setting which is familiar to the reader. Reader and writer then share a large field of connotations, meanings that need not be explicitly stated but can nonetheless be used to add semantic depth and fullness to the story. In fantasy literature, where the writer wants to create a deliberately non-realistic universe and thus cannot rely only on the reader’s knowledge of the real world to “fill in the gaps”, as Iser puts it, that sense of semantic depth can be difficult to achieve, and the ability of an author to provide semantic depth, to “bring alive” the imaginary world, is a significant factor in the success of this kind of literature. It is certainly a significant factor in the huge popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy The Lord of the Rings, one of the most popular works of literary fantasy inspired by the Middle Ages, and probably the most successful both commercially and artistically. I believe a large share of its success is due to the fact that Tolkien was himself a medievalist, professor of English philology at the University of Oxford. His work incorporates a vast amount of elements taken from European medieval history, literature and legend. What happens when an author “borrows” an element from the past to re-cycle it in a contemporary work of fiction? These elements already have a meaning in their original context. This meaning will be re-semantised when such elements are inserted into a new context. But they also bring with them some of the meaning that they had in their original context, especially if the connotations of this meaning serve to enrich the new context. In his construction of the history and legends of Middle Earth, Tolkien borrows freely from his very wide-ranging knowledge of medieval literature, and many of the elements that he borrows bring with them 10

Stuart Hall, “Encoding, Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979 (London: Hutchinson and Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980).

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nothing more than a vague echo of his sources. The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit are taken from Old Norse literature, but Tolkien’s dwarves have no relation to the Old Norse stories where these names originally occur. The name Middle Earth itself derives from Old Norse mythology, in which the universe is imagined as a huge ash tree, Yggdrasil, bearing on its branches the world of the gods, Asgard, the world of the giants, Niflheim, and the world of men, which is in the middle and thus is called Miðgard. The term continues to be used in medieval English, where “Middle Earth” is a poetic way to refer to the created world. Tolkien seems to have taken the term in its Middle English meaning, because there is no sign of any cosmic ash tree in his Middle Earth. But Tolkien’s borrowings are not always so simple. More often, the borrowed element pulls with it into the new text some of the meaning that it had in its original context, enriching and deepening the fantasy universe with these connotations. This is a tool that Tolkien handles to perfection. It means that his Middle Earth, without becoming an allegory (something that Tolkien himself emphatically denied), nonetheless acquires extremely rich symbolic overtones, and that is largely what makes it so attractive to the reader, including this particular reader. One example of this kind of echo effect is the symbolism of ancient swords. One of Tolkien’s favourite medieval texts was the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. In Beowulf, at a crucial point of the plot, the hero enters an underwater cave in order to kill a monster. In his first attack, his sword shatters. He then discovers another ancient sword in the cave, picks it up and with this old sword succeeds in killing the monster (Beowulf, ll. 15571569). In a poem as old as Beowulf (which in its written form dates from the 10th century, but which uses material from an oral tradition that is probably several centuries older), old swords are considered good. A sword was forged by twisting together iron rods, and then repeatedly heating, striking and tempering the metal. This process refines the structure and incorporates carbon into the surface of the metal, turning the iron to steel. A sword that had been successfully forged, so that there was no flaw in the steel surface, would survive many battles without breaking and was thus a reliable weapon. In the days of Beowulf, an old sword meant a good sword, a sword that had proved itself in many battles. Since nobody knew why a particular sword was especially strong, a certain mystique attaches to an old weapon, and to the smith who forged it. This mystique was re-semantised already in later medieval texts, where we encounter magical swords. In the Morte D’Arthur, the re-telling of the

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Arthurian legend by Sir Thomas Malory at the end of the 15th century, there is a magical sword that Arthur pulls from an anvil to prove that he is the legitimate king of Britain. The mystique of the ancient sword is thus used to confer legitimacy on the heir of the kingdom, something that Tolkien uses to good effect in the case of the sword of Elendil. Indeed, as Verlyn Flieger in particular has noted,11the whole narrative structure of The Lord of the Rings repeats structures and motifs that have been used in myths and folktales time out of mind, and that appeal to the modern reader for the same reasons that they appealed to the audience of ancient storytellers: they are about the struggle of good and evil, about heroism against great odds. In a sensitive reading informed by a solid knowledge of medieval literature, Flieger points out a number of aspects of the epic/romantic hero that Tolkien borrows from medieval legends to form the character of Aragorn: his immortal ancestry, his being raised in obscurity, his association with a mythical weapon, his role as healer and restorer of the wasteland, even his role as romantic lover who goes through a superhuman ordeal in order to win his lady. She also identifies the second narrative structure that Tolkien uses, parallel to the epic/romantic narrative, namely the fairytale narrative of the extraordinary deeds of an ordinary person, or in this case an ordinary hobbit, Frodo. Here too, as Flieger points out, Tolkien draws on medieval motifs, although he is careful to disguise them through his realistic style. So far, our analysis of The Lord of the Rings would seem to provide more than adequate support for Jameson’s comments about the utopian moment inherent in popular literature. For surely there is a strongly utopian strand in Tolkien’s world. It is true that we are rarely called upon in the real world to engage in heroic struggles against monstrous evil, but both heroic struggles and monstrous evils do occur in the real world. Depending on our various political positions, we may identify real evil in different ways – as capitalism or communism, anarchy or dictatorship – but we can scarcely object to a story that encourages us to struggle against it. Tolkien himself carefully avoided identifying the evil in Middle Earth with any particular real evil of the 20th century, and The Lord of the Rings – thankfully – cannot be read as a political allegory. However, some of the motifs and narrative structures that he uses have strong ideological

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Verlyn Flieger, “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero,” in Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

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implications in their original context, and much of that ideology still attaches to them in their new setting. And this is more problematic. For readers who are unfamiliar with the history of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, let me explain briefly that long ago, the lands of Middle Earth were divided into two kingdoms. The first rulers of these kingdoms came from a superior race of men who escaped from the ruins of Numenor, a great island in the middle of the western ocean which was destroyed and sank beneath the waves. Those who escaped from the catastrophe of Numenor came to Middle Earth, and since they were more civilised than the local inhabitants, they became rulers. Two brothers, Isildur and Anarion, the sons of Elendil, the leader of the Numenoreans who arrived in Middle Earth, established two kingdoms, the north kingdom of Anor and the south kingdom of Gondor. The north kingdom eventually was destroyed and only a few descendants of the Numenoreans remained in the north. The south kingdom, Gondor, still exists at the beginning of Tolkien’s trilogy, but the “line of kings”, the royal family, has failed and for many centuries there has been no king in Gondor. One of the central elements of the plot of The Lord of the Rings is the appearance of a royal heir, Aragorn, a direct descendant of the royal family of the north kingdom, who is thus also the legitimate heir to the throne of the south kingdom. The restoration of order at the end of the story is closely connected to the “return of the king” and the re-establishment of a united kingdom. It is clear that for the island of Numenor and its destruction Tolkien is drawing on Plato’s myth of Atlantis. But the men of Numenor, and the great and glorious kingdoms that they established in Middle Earth, also recall something else. The Numenoreans are a race of superior men, not because they have supernatural powers but because they are bearers of a great civilization. Their kingdoms, in addition to their superior culture, are characterised by great constructions in stone: cities, towers, fortifications, bridges and roads. They have great armies and defend the peoples who live under their administration. They make laws, establish governments, and keep records. In other words, the Numenorean kingdoms are strikingly similar to the ancient Roman Empire, the Western Empire as it was remembered in medieval Europe, and the Eastern Empire, as it still existed. Aragorn is the last descendant of the kings of this race. He claims the kingship by virtue of his royal blood, though he has also done quite a lot to deserve it. Noble blood is an essential element throughout Tolkien’s story. The ideology of noble blood is a powerful tradition. Not only in the Middle Ages, but for centuries both before and afterwards, noble blood is not a metaphor but is understood quite literally. In medieval theory,

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nobility is not just a matter of social status, but is a moral quality which is inherited, passed biologically from father to son.12 This concept of hereditary nobility as inherited moral virtue is very much operative in The Lord of the Rings, not only in the character of Aragorn, but in all the rulers of all the kingdoms of Middle Earth. In fact, with the exception of the hobbits, we rarely see or hear of anyone in the story who is not of noble birth. And even the Shire, the land of the hobbits, has a kind of landed gentry of great families that seems to be modelled on something like the Scottish clans. Now this, as an ideology, is totally foreign to the modern world, both to our political theories and to our everyday experience. We do not believe that moral virtue is inherited. We do not believe in a hereditary monarchy or aristocracy. We are – or at least we suppose ourselves to be – an egalitarian and democratic society. So why is Tolkien’s aristocratic fantasy so attractive to us? I should perhaps start by admitting that it is not, in fact, attractive to everyone. Ever since the books were first published, there have been readers who find them boring, or even repulsive. Nevertheless, the huge commercial success of The Lord of the Rings testifies to the fact that a very great number of people do find it attractive. So the question remains, what is so attractive about a society based on hereditary nobility? One possible answer would be, quite simply, that Tolkien’s readers are politically conservative. This would fit in very well with the theory of popular literature as reinforcing the political status quo. Tolkien himself was undoubtedly conservative – born in the late 19th century, a devout catholic, profoundly attached to the traditional rural society in which he spent his childhood, and unhappy in Birmingham, the industrial city where he and his brother went to school after the death of their parents.13 However, it seems unlikely that all of his readers are equally politically conservative – especially considering the success of the story among a whole generation of free-loving, pot-smoking hippies in the 1960s. Another, more plausible answer might be constructed on the basis of a Lacanian-Freudian psychoanalytical perspective. In this interpretation, Tolkien’s Middle Earth represents the lost paradise of infancy, the promise 12 The mother also has some share in this process, though it is not as important as that of the father. This is one point where Tolkien seems to have deliberately modified the medieval theory. The royal blood of Aragorn will be strengthened by his union with Arwen, who is of elven descent; thus both man and woman will contribute equally to the renewed royal family line. 13 See Daniel Grotta, The Biography of J. R. R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth (Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1976), 24-27.

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of total fulfilment that we all lost – indeed apparently never had – when we were inducted into the social order. There is probably something to this. It goes a long way towards explaining why heroic myth and romance remain such powerful forms of entertainment, in a society which is anything but heroic. However, such a paternalistic world view would not, I think, be acceptable to many readers unless the author disguises it in some way, so that we are made to feel less foolish – less infantile – when we enjoy it. One of the mechanisms for doing this is by skilful, sophisticated writing, writing that creates an illusion of realism for the reader. Apart from the imaginary world that it constructs, fantasy literature follows the conventions of the realistic novel, and here the quality of the writing, the sheer professional craftsmanship of the writer, plays a crucial role in our willingness to suspend disbelief. And Tolkien is a skilful and sophisticated writer. His plots are worked out in minute geographical and chronological detail, his characters are realistically portrayed and provided with recognizably human life histories and psychologically plausible motivations, and they speak in a language – or rather several languages – full of echoes from the long tradition of English literature, from Beowulf to Shakespeare to the King James Bible.14 But there is another possible reason why readers are willing to accept the paternalistic ideology of his story. I think the ideology of The Lord of the Rings becomes acceptable to us partly because of the manner in which Tolkien portrays the society and the exercise of power in his story. What Tolkien depicts is a feudal society. The actual machinery of government is almost entirely absent. Relations between leaders, even between nations, are governed by concepts like friendship, honour and loyalty. Decisions are taken in common, in consultation with allies who apparently run their own affairs with little or no interference. As already mentioned, Aragorn’s claim to the throne is based on royal descent and on years of proving himself worthy of that heritage; but ultimately he becomes king by something like popular acclamation. Tolkien has medieval models for all these forms of politics. Medieval kingship was partly elective before it became purely hereditary, and the medieval aristocracy always imagined that the king made his decisions in consultation with his nobility and relied upon them to govern the country for him.

14

One of the first critics to comment admiringly on Tolkien’s use of language was W. H. Auden; see W.H. Auden, “The Quest Hero” in Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

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Even so, these paternalistic authority figures are kept at a comfortable distance from the part of Middle Earth that most directly resembles our own world, namely the land of the hobbits, the Shire. The Shire seems to have virtually no local government at all. It is definitely a class society,15 where every hobbit knows his / her place, but no one seems to literally exercise any power. It is also a completely rural, pre-industrial society, something Tolkien was very definite about: hobbits do not like machinery.16 The attraction of this society is largely nostalgic. It is indeed a kind of utopia, but a reactionary utopia, an image of English rural life before the War, to some extent before the First World War. Useful in this context is the concept introduced by Raymond Williams of residual ideological formations.17 A residual ideology is one that corresponds to a form of society that is already past, or that survives as a pocket of old-fashioned social relations within a larger and more contemporary social formation. Residual ideologies are often very attractive, precisely because we have a nostalgic attachment to those older forms of social life, which we often idealise in retrospect. Desire for an ideal, ordered world is one factor, though not the only one, in our making of meaning. The ideology of The Lord of the Rings is definitely residual. Its appeal is largely due to the attraction of a form of social life that no longer exists, and that is now sufficiently distant from us so that we do not have any direct experience of its less attractive aspects. All the heroic, warlike action of The Lord of the Rings ultimately takes place in order to preserve the un-heroic, peaceful everyday life of this traditional, rural society. And that, I submit, is one of the most significant elements in its attraction for us. The ultimate heroes of the story are not the Numenoreans and the Elves, not the kings and the nobles, but the hobbits, the characters that we identify with most closely, and whose lives (when they are not caught up in the adventures of the outside world) approach most closely to our own. Hobbits are obstinately ordinary. In the middle of the most heroic or tragic circumstances, they insist on their ordinariness, on their everyday concerns with eating, sleeping, smoking their pipeweed. They will “sit on the edge of ruin”, says Gandalf, and philosophise about the minute details of their everyday lives while the world comes crashing down around 15

Samwise is Frodo’s servant and throughout the whole book addresses him as ‘Master’ or ‘Mr Frodo’. 16 See J. R. R. Tolkien, “Prologue”, The Lord of the Rings, Silver Anniversary edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981). 17 Raymond Williams, “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980).

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them.18 Hobbits are extraordinarily resilient, and their resilience is precisely the resilience of the everyday, the resistance of the everyday to the romantic and heroic.19 The hobbits are our way into the fantasy world of Middle Earth. Much popular literature seems to work like this, rooting the central characters in an everyday reality that we can recognise, making them mediate between the everyday world and the extraordinary world of adventure. They are also our way out at the end of the story. The restoration of order, the “happily ever after” is their – and also our – return to the everyday. Thus, the restoration of order, a profoundly traditional part of literature ancient and modern, is not necessarily – or not only – a way of supporting the status quo.20 It is also a connection to the everyday reality of the readers’ lives. Lia Yoka in her study on paintings of women reading21 speaks of reading as “a necessary everyday alienation”, but she traces the iconography of that everyday act of reading back to the iconography of epiphany, of contact with the divine. Popular literature, our everyday reading, provides mythologies for everyday consumption. To the extent that it opens up a window onto something more serious and profound than our everyday lives, it is an alienation from the everyday. But it is also an epiphany.22 Myth, in order to work, has to resonate in the everyday. The literature of fantasy is a response to the experience of our everyday lives and has its roots deep in that experience, both in its sense of what is real and true, and in its need for contact with something that will give a larger meaning to the everyday. In this it is no different from “high” art, which 18

Tolkien, The Two Towers, vol. 2 of The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 163. 19 I am using the term in a sense related to, though not identical with, Michel de Certeau’s concept of the resistance of the everyday; see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984). 20 That traditional narratives end with a final restoration of order is a commonplace of narratology; cf. Vladimir Propp, Morphologie du conte (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965), Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Sémantique structural (Paris: Larousse, 1966), 192-221. 21 Lia Yoka, «Allegories of the Everyday in 19th Century Paintings of Reading Women», The Everyday, International Conference of the Hellenic Semiotic Society, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, October 2010, unpublished. 22 This argument is related to Tolkien’s own position in his essay “On Fairy Stories”; cf. also R.J. Reilly, “Tolkien and the Fairy Story” in Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, ed. Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004).

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functions in exactly the same way. Because, in fact, all of us give meaning to the everyday – not only (pace Lefebvre) to exceptional moments of authenticity, but to everything we see, do, experience. For a semiotician, the need to interpret – the absolute imperative to make sense – is an essential part of what it means to be human, and therefore something which we all do, all the time. This need to make sense is, I think, also partly accomplished by the objects that we surround ourselves with. Objects do not serve only to project an identity for ourselves, to ourselves and to others. The odd little objects that we collect, our little private fetishes, also function as intimate signs to ourselves of our own personal histories, relationships, mythologies. The objects that we surround ourselves with, that we use or touch or look at, literally in the course of every day, function as momentary windows into an “other” reality, whether a narrative constructed by someone else, as are the books and films and television shows that form part of our everyday lives, or the one we construct for ourselves out of the layers of our own past. The Surrealists attempted to create an artistic effect out of the juxtaposition of everyday objects – Lautréamont’s fortuitous encounter of the sewing machine and the umbrella on the dissecting table. I would argue that this kind of “collage and montage” is something that we all do, every day. Our everyday is a collage of small, necessary epiphanies. It is not an undifferentiated round of dull routines. It contains its own semiotic depths and utopian moments, even though they may not coalesce into a revolution.

Bibliography Primary sources Beowulf, edited by Fr. Klaeber. 3rd edition, Boston: D.C. Heath, 1950. Malory, Sir Thomas. Works, edited by Eugene Vinaver. 2nd edition. Oxford, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1971. Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. Silver anniversary edition. 3 volumes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981. Originally published 1965.

Secondary sources Adorno, Theodor W. “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” In The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 98-106. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

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Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120-167. New York, NY: Herder and Herder, 1972. Originally published 1944. Auden, W.H. “The Quest Hero.” In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 31-51. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1970. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.” In Walter Benjamin Selected Writings, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 3, 101-133. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 2002. Originally published 1936. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1984. Eco, Umberto. “The Myth of Superman.” Diacritics 2 (1972): 14-22. —. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1976. Flieger, Verlyn. “Frodo and Aragorn: The Concept of the Hero.” In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 122-145. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. Sémantique structurale. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Grotta, Daniel. The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth. Philadelphia, PA: Running Press, 1976. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding." In Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-1979, 128-138. London: Hutchinson and Centre of Contemporary Cultural Studies, University of Birmingham, 1980. Iser, Wolfgang. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History 3 (1972): 279-299. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Paris: L’Arche, 1961. Propp, Vladimir. Morphologie du conte. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965. Originally published 1928. Reilly, R.J. “Tolkien and the Fairy Story”. In Understanding The Lord of the Rings: The Best of Tolkien Criticism, edited by Rose A. Zimbardo and Neil D. Isaacs, 93-105. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004. Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays.

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Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” In Problems in Materialism and Culture, 31-49. London: Verso, 1980.

CHAPTER 3: STYLE VERSUS CONSTRAINT IN THE LANGUAGES OF THE EVERYDAY

THE CLAY OF THE EARTH: EVERYDAY OBJECTS, FUNCTIONS AND THOUGHTS IN THE POETIC CREATION OF THE GENERATION OF THE 1880S GEORGIA PATERIDOU

As early as the 1870s, the poetic “Voice of my heart” by Dimitrios Kambouroglou sets the tone of a new kind of expression distanced from the romantic ideal; the time is ripening for the emergence of a lower voice, the use of satirical undertones, and the stability of familiarity between two agents: the poet-creator and the reader-recipient. Theses changes, first announced by the last exponents of the First Athenian School, anticipated the appearance of the “New Athenian School” (or “School of the 1880s”). The “New Athenian School” as it name designates, is formed primarily as a fresh response to the demands of poetry. It opposes the poetry that dominated the literary field from the 1830s, and had reached its peak within the establishment of the Ralleios and Voutsinaios poetic competitions in the period 1850-1870. The thematic proliferation of sentimentality, morbid incidents and improbable events, coupled with the negative psychology of characters whose sufferings from love were neverending, and the use of a pompous, formal, and dry language took this subgenre of romanticism to its limits. Achilleas Paraschos became emblematically the figure of that period of hyperbole which was to end, and it is significant that the new generation took him as a point of reference; first allowing for a certain admiration towards his work and his impressive persona, but, finally, settling for a scornful attitude rejecting his poetry, and all the ideals that it represented.1 1

There are many studies of Greek Romanticism and in particular the Old Athenian School. Indicatively, I mention: K.Th. Dimaras, ǼȜȜȘȞȚțȩȢ ȡȦȝĮȞIJȚıȝȩȢ, Athens, Ermis, 1985, P. Moullas, «ȁȠȖȠIJİȤȞȓĮ 1830-1880», ȇȒȟİȚȢ țĮȚ ıȣȞȑȤİȚİȢ. ȂİȜȑIJİȢ ȖȚĮ IJȠȞ 19Ƞ ĮȚȫȞĮ, Athens, Sokolis, 1993, p. 15- 82, A. Politis, ȇȠȝĮȞIJȚțȐ ȤȡȩȞȚĮ.

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The “New Athenian School” will distinguish itself not only in terms of the language used, adopting to a large extent the demotic, but also by other characteristics that will gain prominence: by counterbalancing the regulation of sentimentality with a spirit of familiarity, by exploring new and varied techniques, and by projecting a new sense of the world; in other words, by gradually forming a new aesthetic.2 This aesthetic brought to the fore the creative process that focused on mundane everyday objects, functions and thoughts, approaching such things with a different outlook. It must be stressed that this type of poetry corresponded also to a newly found optimism in Greek Society. At the outset of the 1880s, Greece was rife with enthusiasm deriving from its achievements in the military, political and economic spheres. Even though the dream of irredentism was not abandoned, due to the fact that it was far from accomplished, other necessities took priority: one such priority can be characterized as a tendency towards “settling down” that took place both on the national as well as on the private level. As far as the nation was concerned, it was time to deal with inward expansion and address urbanization, financial development, and the demands of modernization. At the same time, a new class was coming to terms with its emerging status: the bourgeoisie was discovering and developing all the elements that define it: moderation in all its dealings, a break from the past, an inquisitive stance towards scientific and technological developments, and the pleasures of a certain lifestyle. The ever-freer exchange of ideas and information was more common, as was an emphasis on financial affairs, the endorsement of certain cultural events, the development of a social profile akin to the salon, the casual flirtation between members of the two sexes, and the reading of popular fiction. In

ǿįİȠȜȠȖȓİȢ țĮȚ ȞȠȠIJȡȠʌȓİȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ IJȠȣ 1830-1880, Athens, E.M.N.E. – Mnemon, 1993, ȅ ȡȠȝĮȞIJȚıȝȩȢ ıIJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ (12 țĮȚ 13 ȃȠİȝȕȡȓȠȣ 1999). ǼʌȚıIJȘȝȠȞȚțȩ ıȣȝʌȩıȚȠ, ǼIJĮȚȡİȓĮ ȈʌȠȣįȫȞ ȃİȠİȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ȆȠȜȚIJȚıȝȠȪ țĮȚ īİȞȚțȒȢ ȆĮȚįİȓĮȢ, ȈȤȠȜȒ ȂȦȡĮǸIJȘ, ǹthens, 2001. For the relationship between Palamas and Paraschos, see A. Andreiomenos (ed.), ȀȦıIJȒ ȆĮȜĮȝȐ. ȆȠȚȒȝĮIJĮ ıIJȠȞ ‘ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐ’ țĮȚ ıIJȠ ‘ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ’, Athens, Kostis Palamas Foundation, 2004. In his study Andreiomenos traces Palamas’s attitude towards Paraschos, making reference to the to the group’s initial enthusiasm (p. 13), as well as the altered view adopted later on (p.17) as Palamas’s poetic plan was taking shape. 2 See M. Avgeris, M. Papaioannou, V. Rotas, Th. Stavrou (eds.), ǾİȜȜȘȞȚțȒ ʌȠȓȘıȘ ĮȞșȠȜȠȖȘȝȑȞȘ, Athens, Kipseli, 1959, vol. ǻ, p. 28

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short a new routine was creeping in and encompassing all aspects of daily life.3 The laws of a new market, and the world of publishing, demanded new types of material and cultivated new tastes. A flourishing press promoted specific trends, and helped the bourgeoisie imagine itself as an emerging community. Knowledge, as a result, was disseminated to a great extent through this medium to a large audience. This knowledge was not the metaphysical kind favored by the Romantics; rather, it was more specific, empirical, more approachable to everyone, and compact. Furthermore, the press also promoted the benefits of a simple life led by the many. In this respect, it was discovered that everyday life was filled with simple pleasures that might not be potent enough to stir great passions, but were nonetheless quite capable of bringing a sense of contentment. Love also was no longer a tragic itinerary with an undefined ending; rather it was seen as more tangible, more playful, something that could take the form of a look, a touch, or even a promise. People and artists alike approached life with far less seriousness. One has only to check out the columns of the most prominent journals of the period to attest to this trend, which developed almost into the period’s motto. There was no space for melodrama in daily or weekly publications. The reader required a new ‘companion’, one that would provide fresh news in a condensed space and in a simple way. The text absorbed the abstract lyricism, while observation, easy writing, and complacency became the method of the period.4 The major factors which contributed towards the formation of a new and distinct poetic current in the 1880s are the demoticist tradition (the preference for the language of the people, as well as the priority given to the strength that the notion of the people represented symbolically), the ‘ethnographic’ outlook which expresses the importance given to topography and memory, the selection of the local over the national or foreign, a certain attitude towards the past which can be summed up as a desire to establish new traditions, the emergence of folklore, and in general, a distance from Romantic ideals. In the social and cultural field these elements are inscribed in the context of realism. Vlassis Gavrielidis, 3

See ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȠȣ İȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ȑșȞȠȣȢ. ȃİȫIJİȡȠȢ ǼȜȜȘȞȚıȝȩȢ 1881-1913, Athens, Ekdotiki Athinon, 1977, vol. ǿǻ. 4 While poetry remained the most prominent cultural expression, hosting the new trends and the new meanings of the everyday, other genres like the short story eventually gained in popularity in order to promote the etiquette of folk culture, explore the past and investigate authentic Greek culture.

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a militant journalist from Constantinople, founded the journal ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐȢ in 1878 together with Kleanthis Triantafyllos, and later on ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ (1880) that was renamed ǹțȡȩʌȠȜȚȢ in 1883, and started circulating as a daily publication. He took over the political planning of the newspaper and he insisted on publishing interviews with local or international intellectuals, promoting the trend that the newspaper should be an expression of the social, political and economic sphere of the period without major attachments to political parties.5 All the major poets and novelists of the period (Palamas, Papadiamandis, Souris, Nirvanas) were collaborating, following the ideological framework set by the founder (support of the demotic language, equality of the sexes, and ideological freedom). A spirit of enthusiasm and decisiveness, characteristic of his publications was shared with his collaborators. It is important also to mention that ǹțȡȩʌȠȜȚȢ had been very innovative with regards to its technological equipment, something that is indicative of the importance that the press had gained at the period.6 As the press expanded, and in the process hosted new cultural productions that demanded clarity, brevity, and specificity, we witness the growth of a more objective outlook together with a more optimistic attitude overall. This tendency is expressed through new thematic schemes in the poetic field; comprising subjects that involve to a large extent family life, the materiality of existence (that is, wealth as well as the harsh realities of poverty), human behavior that privileges earthly pleasures as opposed to the transcendental, nature in its real state, personal history, personal objects, and idiosyncratic literary preferences the significance of which were a function of an individual’s reading habits. Reacting against high-seriousness, the poet in question is playful, and can find interest in the humble and the familiar, in what was previously considered unworthy, and as a consequence affirms feelings of serenity, calmness, openness, and the carefree. This poet draws attention to the constants in human behavior, and works to show the similarities that unite people from all walks of life; also, and perhaps most importantly, stressing that love may be initiated from the most unobtrusive gesture.7 The world of the reader is built as the world of everyone and everything, anticipating in a prophetic way Raymond Williams’ view on 5

See L. Droulia, Y. Koutsopanou (eds.), ǼȖțȣțȜȠʌĮȓįİȚĮ IJȠȣ İȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ȉȪʌȠȣ 1784-1974, Athens, Institouto Neoellinikon Erevnon, vol.1, p. 407. 6 Op.cit. For the contribution of ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐȢ in the cultural field, see E. PolitouMarmarinou, «Ǿ İijȘȝİȡȓįĮ ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐȢ 1878-1889 țĮȚ Ș ıȣȝȕȠȜȒ IJȘȢ ıIJȘȞ ĮȞĮȞȑȦıȘ IJȘȢ ȞİȠİȜȜȘȞȚțȒȢ ȜȠȖȠIJİȤȞȓĮȢ», Parnassos, vol. KA’ (1979) 235-257. 7 ǿıIJȠȡȓĮ IJȠȣ İȜȜȘȞȚțȠȪ ȑșȞȠȣȢ, op.cit., p. 414-416.

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“culture as ordinary”.8 The reader is everyone, anyone. S/he is the foundation in the deployment of cultural stabilities and intricacies. Overall, the act of reading - and in that respect glancing (over the page) becomes the regulating framework. Every type of improvisation, innovation or analysis is organized around it (the page). The text becomes the place of meeting of different cultural languages, and in certain cases, the place of inhibiting new cultural strands. The text is enforced through a generation that paid attention to the laws of production, and transformed itself into the very mechanism of this productive process. 9 Let us look at how this scheme is reflected in the poetry of the New Athenian School. A poem by Kostis Palamas addressed to his friend Nikos Kambas, with whom he shared a room when they were both studying law in Athens, is describing this carefree triviality, and the first attempts at approaching poetry. Written during the time when Palamas was beginning to challenge the poetic establishment of the period and contest the authority of Achilleas Paraschos, the poem, entitled «ȃȓțȦ ȀĮȝʌȐ: ĮȞĮȤȦȡȫȞ İȟ ǹșȘȞȫȞ», was published in the satirical newspapar ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ in 1880. It evokes a familiar scene, turning it into the stuff of poetry: a small room, a little table, and a shared desire for the creation of “a little song”: “ ’Ȉ’ ĮȣIJȒ IJȘȞ țĮȝĮȡȠȪȜĮ ȝĮȢ ʌȠȣ ȜİȢ ʌȦȢ ıțȜĮȕȦȝȑȞĮ/ǼʌȓIJȘįİȢ ȝĮȢ ȑȡȡȚȟİ ȝȚĮ ȝȠȓȡĮ ijȚȜȚțȒ,/ ȆȩıĮ IJȡĮȖȠȪįȚĮ 8

I refer to Raymond Williams’ article from 1958 with the title “Culture is ordinary”, where he explains that this premise must be the starting point for the understanding of cultural mechanisms. The emphasis must be placed on examining the modes of change, the shaping of minds within the passing of time in the ordinariness of existence. The article is included in the book Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. R. Gable, London, Verso, 1989. I quote a significant extract from this article that helps the development of my discussion: “Culture is ordinary: that is the first fact. Every human society has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of a society is the finding of common meanings and directions, and its growth is an active debate and amendment under the pressures of experience, contact and discovery, writing themselves into the land […] a culture has two aspects: the known meanings and directions, which its members are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are offered and tasted. These are the ordinary processes of human societies and human minds and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is always both traditional and creative; that it is both the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings” (4). 9 See Michel de Certeau, ǼʌȚȞȠȫȞIJĮȢ IJȘȞ țĮșȘȝİȡȚȞȒ ʌȡĮțIJȚțȒ: Ǿ ʌȠȜȪIJȡȠʌȘ IJȑȤȞȘ IJȠȣ ʌȡȐIJIJİȚȞ, introd. L. Giard, trans. Ȁ. Kapsabeli, Athens, Smili, 2010, p. 70-73.

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İȖȡȐȥĮȝİ ȝİ ȝȚĮ țĮȡįȚȐ, ȝȚĮ ʌȑȞȞĮ,/ ’Ȉ IJȠ IJȡĮʌİȗȐțȚ ȝĮȢ İțİȓ.» The two aspiring poets start shaping their future and they also recognize the need for financial security, as the new Muse demands. Creativity can flourish in the most unexpected environments and situations. However, it is also enhanced by an affluent lifestyle, when that is possible. The last two verses from the last stanza are particularly evocative. The poetic voice (of Palamas) urges his friend, who is ready to depart from Athens to strive for financial security: “- ȋȡȒȝĮIJĮ, ijȓȜİ, ȤȡȒȝĮIJĮ! ǵIJĮȞ ȕĮıIJȐ IJȠ ȓıȠ /ȆȠȣȖȖȓ ȖİȝȐIJȠ, IJȡĮȖȠȣįİȓ ț’ Ș ȂȠȪıĮ ʌİȚȩ ȖȜȣțȐ!».10 Financial capital is the new seduction, and it will enhance the creative capacity bringing about new possibilities. Nikos Kambas will eventually dedicate himself to the legal profession, taking his friend’s suggestions literally and leaving behind only one collection of poetry, ȅȚ ȈIJȓȤȠȚ (1880). Kambas answers this poem with a four-verse stanza keeping a similar subtitle «ǹȞĮȤȦȡȫȞ İȟ ǼȜȜȐįȠȢ»: «ĭİȪȖȦ… ĮȤ! ȉȚ ʌȩȞȠȢ! ȈĮȞ ȖȣȡȓıȦ ʌȐȜȚ / ǹȜȜĮȝȑȞĮ șĮȪȡȦ ȩıĮ ȑȤȦ ‘įȘ./ ȂȩȞ’ İıȑȞĮ, ijȦȢ ȝȠȣ, ĮȢ ȝȘ ‘ȕȡȦ ȝİȖȐȜȘ,/ ȉȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ ȝȩȞȠ ĮȢ ȝȘ ȕȡȦ ʌĮȚįȓ.» (1880).11 Drosinis on the other hand gives a glimpse of a bourgeois lifestyle by dedicating a poem to a girl who loves to sleep «Ǿ ȊʌȞĮȡȠȪ». Her life revolves around activities which are appropriate for her class, but she soon gets bored with everything and turns to sleep.12 If one examines a large sample of the poetry of the period, he/she will become aware that poetry at that time was made up of little songs, love could be satisfied with little kisses, nature appeared in its calm, unthreatening form, and everything was open to satirical criticism. This is the privileging of the “everyday” in the poetic creation of this group, with as starting point the date 1880. As mentioned already, Kambas with his collection ȅȚ ȈIJȓȤȠȚ, Kokkos with īȑȜȦIJİȢ (1880), and Drosinis with ǿıIJȠȓ ǹȡȐȤȞȘȢ (1880) seal the tendency of the period with their creation.13 They recognize Kostis Palamas as their leader, even though the latter published his first collection, ȉĮ IJȡĮȖȠȪįȚĮ IJȘȢ ʌĮIJȡȓįȠȢ ȝȠȣ, as late as 1886. They 10

K. G. Kasinis (ed.), ǹȞșȠȜȠȖȓĮ ȀȦıIJȒ ȆĮȜĮȝȐ, Athens, Patakis, 32006, p. 22. N.G. Kampas, ȆȠȚȒȝĮIJĮ țĮȚ ȆİȗȐ, ed. G. Andreiomenos, Athens, Kostas and Eleni Ouranis Foundation, 2002, p. 184. 12 G. Drosinis, DZʌĮȞIJĮ, ed. G. Papakostas, Athens, Association for the Dissemination of Useful Books, 1995, vol. A, p. 69-71. 13 For a thorough presentation of this group of poets, and in particular for the poetics of Palamas see E. Politou-Marmarinou, ȅ ȀȦıIJȒȢ ȆĮȜĮȝȐȢ țȚ Ƞ ȖĮȜȜȚțȩȢ ȆĮȡȞĮııȚıȝȩȢ: ıȣȖțȡȚIJȚțȒ ijȚȜȠȜȠȖȚțȒ ȝİȜȑIJȘ, Athens, University of Athens, 1976. Marmarinou discusses the first appearance of these poets, and their relationship in pages 140-146. 11

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offer scenes of everyday life, real instances which would have been ignored by the Romantics, and in most cases moderation and a prosaic tone are the basic elements of their creation. 14 The poetic creation involves the activity of observation and of noting whatever seems to catch the attention of the observer without a specific plan or preconceived ideas and thoughts. Objectivity, of course, is transgressed when the emphasis shifts towards the desire to satirize something or to play with a reader’s expectation, and in those cases one can almost imagine a winking of the eye addressed to readers. The poetic subject always observes and comments, sometimes with tenderness, sometimes playfully, at other times with cynicism. The poems of this group are for the most part short. Often composed of a handful of words, they are, from a formal point of view, quite striking. The form is not selected at random; rather, it is used in conjunction with content. Drosinis, for example, experiments with the sonnet in the poem «ȆȡȦIJĮʌȡȚȜȚȐ» from his first collection, which if carefully examined, it becomes apparent that it is not a real sonnet, but a fake one; perhaps, as the title suggests, «ȆȡȦIJĮʌȡȚȜȚȐ» (April’s fool day) is a day of jokes and of mocking the truth. On the other hand, the poem «ȊʌȞĮȡȠȪ» announces itself as a silhouette. This thematic marker demands attention, for it is a term borrowed from art and pressed into poetic service. The poem is an outline, a sketched-out portrait of a slumber-prone young woman. The poem quite literally – that is to say, in words – paints her picture; certainly the result is a sketch and not a detailed and elaborate presentation. As far as the formal definition is concerned, and the way of approaching poetry, this trend belongs to the Parnassian movement, which in any case this group of poets attempted to emulate from its French example. Drosinis chose to introduce his first poetic collection with a poem by François Coppée, one of the poets of this artistic trend. He named this self-referential gesture as an alternative suggestion, “instead of a prologue”. He borrowed from the French Parnassian poet in order to lend voice to his own poetic program, and explain his methodology, his

14

An anthology of the poetic generation of the 1880s and an introductory note can be found on-line in the programme commissioned by the Portal for The Greek language: http://www.greek-language.gr/greekLang/literature/anthologies/ new/page_025.html, ed. G. Pateridou. Satire is also another element that this group connects with the everyday and it, too, grounds the world of the poem to a more tangible reality. In this category, one can place most of the poems by Georgios Souris and Dimitrios Kokkos.

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inspiration, the objectives of his work, directing also the readers to the way his poetry should be read: J’écris ces vers, ainsi qu’on fait des cigarettes, Pour moi, pour le plaisir; et ce sont des fleurettes Que peut-être il valait bien mieux ne pas cueillir; Car cette impression qui m’a fait tressaillir, Ce tableau d’un instant rencontré sur ma route, Ont-ils un charme enfin pour celui qui m’écoute? Je ne le connais pas. Pour se plaire à ceci, Est-il comme moi-même un rêveur endurci? Ne peut-il se fâcher qu’on lui prête ce rôle? — Fi donc ! lecteur, tu lis par-dessus mon épaule.15

Drosinis’s poems, too, like those of Coppée are the result of a momentary interest: “un instant rencontré sur ma route”, even a repetitive gesture like smoking a cigarette. The poet does not look for and does not oblige the Muse, but he simply observes. Certainly, all these are indications of the influence of realism in culture, which as mentioned already is expressed in the poetic field through the Parnassian movement. One could remember what Flaubert has explained in relation to his own work and find analogies with this approach: “My aim would be to write the mediocre in a perfect manner”; that is, to endorse simple elements, everyday themes, but not to abandon the intricacies of form.16 These are not new findings. Critics have defined the characteristics of the Parnassian movement and explored this definition in order to understand the poetic generation of the 1880s. There is, however, an uneasiness among some critics, since for the most part the Parnassians advocated the autonomy of art and often selected their subject matter from Classical Greece. We find ourselves at an impasse: how can an elevated 15

It is the 39th poem of the section “Promenades et Intérieurs” from the 1872 collection with the significant title Les Humbles. I am quoting from the electronic source: http://www.florilege.free.fr/recueil/coppee-promenades_et_interieurs.html#39. However, Drosinis copying the poem (or his editor) in two instances has altered it: in verse three we read: “Que peut-être il valait bien mieux ne pis, cueillir”, and in verse nine, “Ne peut-il so fâcher qu’on lui prête ce role”. In the last case, it seems more plausible to have a typing mistake (so fâcher instead of the correct se fâcher). In the first, perhaps an archaic form of French has been normalised in later publications. 16 P. Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. S. Emanouel, Stanford, Polity Press, 21996, p. 106.

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celebration of the everlasting relevance of Antiquity be reconciled with an investigation of everyday simple objects, with a more humble and repetitive reality? Rather than present a comprehensive theory about the aesthetic values of this movement, I would like to offer some thoughts regarding the poetic creation of this group, and in that way address its impact in the Greek literary context. The different themes this group explores, along with the way these themes are examined, manifest a desire to establish a certain type of tradition: a tradition that unites the new approaches to major and minor issues around the sphere of simplicity and authenticity. The turn toward simplicity results from a realistic methodology and operates in counterdistinction to the glorification of Ancient Greece. As such, authenticity derives from giving expression to the “soul” of the people, as a notion coming from deep within the line of tradition. In this respect, we see a certain similarity with the proclamations made by folk science. Attention shifts gradually away from major accomplishments, and the admiration of ancient culture is not abolished but is far from constantly present. The focus is directed toward the common and insignificant, elements, that is, held to be essential for gluing together the new national community through shared characteristics. The poets in this group are not involved in inventing or engineering a culture; what they promote is a picture of a people, their thoughts, their weaknesses, their idleness. In terms of the unity of the group, Palamas seems to be the more problematic in that he never really abandons the more widely nationalistic aspirations, the ones that were intended to express continuity with the more grandiose and influential aspects of cultural inheritance. Quite characteristically, Drosinis has answered Palamas’s recognition of their camaraderie by taking his distance, playfully acknowledging their often distinct aspirations. He has dedicated a poem that speaks to his issue: “ǼıȪ IJȠ ? ȡĮȓȠ μİȢ ıIJĮ μİȖȐȜĮ ȗȒIJȘıİȢ/ țȚ İȖȫ ıIJĮ IJĮʌİȚȞȐ țȚ’ ĮʌȠȡȚμȑȞĮ,/ țĮȚ įȠȪȜİȥİȢ IJȠ μʌȡȠȪȞIJȗȠ țĮȚ IJȠ μȐȡμĮȡȠ/ țȚ’ ȐijȘıİȢ IJȠȞ ʌȘȜȩ IJȘȢ ȖȘȢ ı’ İμȑȞĮ”.17 It can be argued that his conclusions are not entirely accurate, given that Palamas’s dualism is well known, as is his tendency to combine many different, often contradictory trends that made his poetic expression so rich and multidimensional.

17

L.Politis, ȆȠȚȘIJȚțȒ ǹȞșȠȜȠȖȓĮ, ǺȚȕȜȓȠ DzțIJȠ, ȅ ȆĮȜĮμȐȢ țĮȚ ȠȚ ıȪȖȤȡȠȞȠȓ IJȠȣ, Athens, Galaxias, 1968, p. 28-29. “Bronze” and “Marble” representing synecdochically the aspirations of a ‘higher’ culture, as opposed to the humble clay of the earth.

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Eric Hobsbawm has explained how towards the end of the nineteenth century a number of traditions flourished throughout Europe. Whether politically or aesthetically oriented, these often contradictory and antagonistic traditions at once quickened the pace as well as deepened the extent of social and cultural transformations. In the shifting context of the period, social groups and social elements were faced with the challenge of inventing new approaches to the questions of coherence and identity.18 In the Greek context, the cultural tradition of the everyday does not entirely displace the expansive nationalistic tendencies; but as explained already, it turns society’s attention, even if only for a short while, towards the smaller scale of the private sphere. It marks the role of the present in the organizing of the past. Through the present it promotes discreetly elements which reflect the Greek voice, the voice of the ordinary and of common traits. It is almost a type of poetry suitable to a bohemian artist; a flirtatious rhyme-making not aiming at anything more than the depiction of the moment and the release of energy. However, one could wonder whether the invention of the everyday, practiced as a distinct genre of poetic value, was indeed a new framework to understand in parallel the state of Greek society at that time; or whether it was simply an aesthetic of convenience. The overlapping of objectives from the simple to the more ambitious, more overtly in the poetry of Palamas and less so in others, indicated that the literary voices of the period had not abandoned the broader nationalistic expressions and inquiries towards a wholesome depiction of the Greek identity.19 Nevertheless, it is clear that this new awareness of poetry’s limitations brought about a newly desired autonomy of cultural creation. The oscillation between the two will be present for many years in the field of Greek literature, in particular in the poetic creations of Palamas, who has invented himself as a new national figure, following the example of Solomos with language, with themes of national orientation and with the reworking of many European trends.20 18 Eric Hobsbawm, “ȂĮȗȚțȒ ʌĮȡĮȖȦȖȒ ʌĮȡĮįȩıİȦȞ: ǼȣȡȫʌȘ 1870-1914” in E. Hobsbawm- T. Ranger (eds.) Ǿ İʌȚȞȩȘıȘ IJȘȢ ʌĮȡȐįȠıȘȢ, trans. Th. Athanasiou, Athens, Themeli, 2004, p. 297. 19 After all, a strong belief of irredentism was present in both ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐȢ and ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ, which hosted the poetic expressions of the period, despite their very radical social stance. 20 For a discussion of Palamas’s ideological oscillations see the critical analysis of K.Th. Dimaras in ȀȦıIJȒȢ ȆĮȜĮȝȐȢ: Ǿ ʌoȡİȓĮ IJȠȣ ʌȡȠȢ IJȘȞ IJȑȤȞȘ, Athens, Nefeli, 3 1989. E. Garantoudis discusses the different aspects of interpretation through the emphasis on form as well as the reception of his poetics by contemporary poets in ȅ ȆĮȜĮȝȐȢ Įʌȩ IJȘ ıȘȝİȡȚȞȒ ıțȠʌȚȐ: ȩȥİȚȢ IJȘȢ ʌȠȓȘıȒȢ IJȠȣ țĮȚ IJȘȢ ıȪȖȤȡȠȞȘȢ

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The ambivalent strategy of the new poetic orientation is apparent in Palamas’s poem «ǼȚȢ IJȠ ȞȘıȓ IJȘȢ ȀȜİȓıȠȕĮȢ» (1882), where, on the one hand country, fire, kilt (‘ijȠȣıIJĮȞȑȜĮ’), and loud sounds of trombones (‘IJȡȠȝʌȩȞȚĮ’) call the poetic subject and his companions to battle and to the never-ending irredentist project, even if only as a distant vision, while on the other hand a beautiful calm evening and the pleasure of company salute the privileges of conformity. Whether this ambivalence hides also an anxiety about the poetic subject is another matter; it could be said that resistance to conformity manifests a fear of losing the poetic vision (or of betraying the lasting poetic strand for something new and untested). Certainly, this poem does not provide the answer. It simply makes visible the contrasting signs of two different worlds: the world of action and the world of stability. As was usually the case, Palamas’s aim would be throughout the years to find a path between the two, either combining or rejecting both for another way, in order to develop his personal mark: ‘Ȉ IJȠ İțțȜȘıȐțȚ ʌȫijĮȖİ IJȘȞ ǹȡĮʌȚȐ ȀȐșİ ȖȚȠȡIJȒ șࣃ ĮȞȐijIJȠȣȝİ țĮȚ ȝȚĮ ȜĮȝʌȐįĮ? ĬĮ ȝ’ İȡȦIJȐȢ ȖȚĮ įȩȟĮȚȢ ʌȠȣ įȚĮȕȒțĮȞ ʌȚĮ, ȀĮȚ ıIJȓȤȠȣȢ șĮ ȠȞİȚȡİȪȠȣȝĮȚ ȖȚĮ IJȘȞ ǼȜȜȐįĮ. ǹȜȜȐ țĮșȫȢ ș’ ĮȡȤȓȗȦ ȞĮ ʌĮȡĮȜĮȜȫ: ȆĮIJȡȓȢ… ȤĮȝȩȢ… ijȦIJȚȐ.. IJȡȠȝʌȩȞȚĮ.. ijȠȣıIJĮȞȑȜĮ… ĬĮ ȝȠȣ țȡȣijĮʌĮȞIJȐȢ, ȥĮȡȩʌȠȣȜȠ IJȡİȜȜȩ: ǹȖȐʌȘ.. ĮıIJȡȠijİȖȖȚȐ.. įȡȠıȚȐ.. ȖĮȜȒȞȘ.. ȑȜĮ.. ȀĮȜȐ ȝȠȣ ȜİȢ? țȚ’ Ș įȩȟĮ İȓȞİ ijIJİȡȦIJȒ, Ǿ ȞȚȩIJȘ IJȦȞ İșȞȫȞ! ȃȐȝȠȣȞ ‘Ȣ İțİȚȐ IJĮ ȤȡȩȞȚĮ, ȆĮȜȜȘțĮȡȚȐȢ ĮȘIJȩȢ!.. ȂĮ IJȐȤĮ țȚ’ ȠȚ ĮȘIJȠȓ ǻİ șĮ ȗȘȜİȪȠȣȞİ IJĮ ȒıȣȤĮ IJȡȣȖȩȞȚĮ; Ȉİ ȝȚĮ ʌİȜȜȐįĮ, Ȧ ĮįİȡijȠȪȜĮ ȝȠȣ ȤȡȣıȒ ȉȠ ȕȡȐįȣ șĮ ijȦȜȚȐȗȠȣȝİ ĮʌȠıIJĮȝȑȞȠȚ.. ȂĮȢ ‘ȤȫȡȚıĮȞ… ĮȜȜȐ ‘Ȣ IJȠ ȟĮțȠȣıIJȩ ȞȘıȓ ȀĮȜȠțĮȚȡȐțȚ ĮșȐȞĮIJȠ ȝĮȢ ʌİȡȚȝȑȞİȚ!21

ʌȡȩıȜȘȥȒȢ IJȘȢ, Athens, Kastaniotis, 2005. For Palamas’s position in relation to the genealogy of poetic leaders, see A. Voyatzoglou, Ǿ ȖȑȞİıȘ IJȦȞ ʌĮIJȑȡȦȞ: ȅ ȈȚțİȜȚĮȞȩȢ ȦȢ įȚȐįȠȤȠȢ IJȦȞ İșȞȚțȫȞ ʌȠȚȘIJȫȞ, Athens, Kastaniotis, 2005. 21 I gave some extracts from the first publication in ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ (23 May 1882) 7. The poem has been altered in later publications as can be attested in the version that Kasinis’s anthology presents (see note 10), p. 14.

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The heroic struggles will be dampened by the desire to lead a more peaceful life in a corner of earth (in this case in Missolonghi which is a place of memory for the Greeks, for ever associated with the heroic exit of the besieged in 1826;22 it is also the poet’s birthplace, associated with the first years of his life), where private happiness will matter more in the symbolic balance of life than national pride. The strong images alternate between two poles, the life of action and achievement, and the life of peaceful existence - with the second gaining prominence and closing the poem with an exhortation to follow its path. The symbolism is altered (‘ĮıIJȡȠijİȖȖȚȐ’, ‘įȡȠıȚȐ’ ‘ȖĮȜȒȞȘ’ ‘ȑȜĮ’ ‘țĮȜȠțĮȚȡȐțȚ’) in order to appeal to the new spirit of the time, to define the new tradition. This imagery helps the poet create a world more approachable and in that respect more meaningful for everyone. In return, the poet is not standing on the margins of society, he is part of this environment, he is shaped by it, as he also shapes it. In conclusion, we can deduce from the above, that the significant contribution of this generation is the inclusion into favoured cultural expression of the non-heroic, the less important, the everyday existence. Furthermore, the verses of this group often resemble a type of reporting, with intense colouring from current events. Palamas explained how they created their work in newspaper offices, influenced by journalistic trends and improvising according to the mood of the moment, following to a large extent the satirical outlines established by the directorial line of ȇĮȝʌĮȖȐȢ and ȂȘ ȋȐȞİıĮȚ and the material demands of the journal (the spaces, the lines, the shape of texts).23 Poetry became an exercise as opposed to contemplation, a starting point as opposed to reverie, the first step, the first framework of the new nation in search of its path to modernity. The artistic autonomy gained by this poetry in the cultural field, however, was destined to be short-lived, as national preoccupations soon regained prominence in all aspects of cultural expression.

22

Kleisova is famous for the March 25th 1826 victorious battle against the enemy of Kioutachis and his collaborator Ebrahim. The Greek fighters fought heroically and caused major damage to the Turkish-Egyptian army, but the victory was shortlived, and did not manage to prevent the fate that awaited Missolonghi. 22 See A. Andreiomenos, op.cit. (note 1) 29.

WRITING UNDER DAILY CONSTRAINT(S): THE CASE OF ADMINISTRATIVE WRITING HELENE CAMPAIGNOLLE

"The more there are constraints (organized, codified ones), the less ownership" (Lefebvre, 1968: 166)1.

Figure 1: « un employé doit être un homme qui écrit, assis dans un bureau » in Physiologie de l'employé, H. de Balzac, vignette de Trimoulet (1841), Castor astral, coll. « Les Inattendus », 1994, p. 19.

The study of bureaucratic characteristics – a major artifact in our society since 19th century – has gained a significant place in philosophy, sociology and language science (semiotics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis) over the second half of the 20th century. However, if we look closely at the field, the description of concrete production practices specific to this system of work remains relatively minor in existing studies2. This might be explained by the difficulty of combining both a 1

All quotations from the French are translated by us. Except for historically grounded studies such as G. Thuiller and D. Gardey’s, see bibliography. 2

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linguistic and a social approach while studying writing conditions: those are best shown in images (see for exemple a representation in the novel Physiologie de l’employé, in 1841, fig. 1). Several components frequently remain beyond analysis or they are analyzed separatly: stylistic and formal characterization of the texts produced in these organizations in relation to the so-called “functional” use of this language; the link of these levels of analysis to the parameters that constrain daily producers, among which is the bureaucratic space (the office and its arrangement) and its impact on the characteristics of the writing produced. In this contribution, we will focus on bureaucratic writing through the study of relationships between its functions, forms and its production space (office and documents)3.

Administrative language/“functional language type” First of all, the question of the existence of an “administrative language” or “administrative style” does not come naturally, especially when one looks at the definitions of style presented in literary and linguistic studies. For example, in the Dictionary of linguistics, T. Todorov explicitly discards the opportunity to speak of style when referring to administrative language and prefers the expression functional type: "it is unnecessary to use the term style to describe a functional type of language such as administrative or journalistic style" (1972: 383). But what is a “functional type of language"? And can administrative language really be defined by its function? If yes, what function should that be? Is there only one function or several? If we can easily imagine that the language used by any institution must be connected "functionally to the goals of the organization" (Merton, 1965: 441), it will be justified to speak of a functional type only if we can determine precisely the functions that the administrative language meets. It therefore appears necessary first to understand and explain what is a functional type of language.

3

For this study of administrative writing, I will use the analysis of E. Landowski (semiotics), H. Boyer (sociolinguistics), D. Maingueneau (discourse analysis). I will also follow insights of The Critique of everyday life (Vol. 2) and Introduction to the daily lives by H. Lefebvre and The Invention of Everyday by M. de Certeau.

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What is a "functional type"? The table below represents a briefly summarized form of the evolution of language functions schemes published during the 20th century. These three major milestones located between 1920/1930 and 1980 are Bühler’s tripartite function’s scheme (representational/Darstelling, expressive/Ausdruck, appellative/Apell), Jakobson’s six functions (referential, expressive, poetic, conative, phatic, metalinguistic), and the extended scheme proposed by Kerbrat-Orecchioni. Bühler (1934 : 109)

Jakobson (1958/1963 : 220)

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Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1980 : 19)

The evolution of linguistic communication schemes over the period calls for at least four preliminary observations: -

4

The number of functions listed globally increases through the century. Bühler’s ternary scheme adds to the traditional linguistic "representational function" the "expressive" and "appellative" functions (1934); the scheme is briefly simplified into a binary one by Horkheimer: "Writing can mean either that one presents the findings, describes facts, thereby controlling - or that one expresses oneself" (Horkheimer, 1949: 36). But during the 1960’s, quaternary schemes appear: K. Popper (1967) adds to Bühler’s the "argumentative function": "Bühler was the first to discuss the decisive difference between the lower functions (language) [expressive and appellative] and the descriptive function (or representational). I discovered later [...] the decisive distinction between the descriptive function and argumentative function" (Popper (1967) 1991: 199 n24). In French semiotics, a quaternary

The quote refers in fact to Karl R. Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1963/2002: 397) where Popper also reminds that “Karl Bühler appears to have been the first to propose, in 1918, the doctrine of the three functions of language: (1) the expressive or symptomatic function; (2) the stimulative or signal function; (3) the descriptive function.”

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variation is proposed by E. Landowski’s (1974a: 548) with four components: sender (fr. Destinateur), referent (fr. Référent), subject-message (fr. Objet-message), recipient (fr. Destinataire). The linguist Claude Hagège (1985) also differentiates four functions: cognitive, interactional, expressive, and, more unexpectedly, “recreational” [fr. “ludique”]. Well-known sixfunction schemes become more general during the sixties, with the spreading of the jakobsonian model (1963), including KerbratOrecchioni’s slightly rethought one (1980, 2001). A more recent literary manual offers a 6 +1 scheme by adding a "symbolic function consisting of reporting, more implicitly than explicitly, to realities beyond its direct referent: institutions, moral, philosophical, religious, social, myths "(Milly, 1992: 21). We will come back to this function later.

5

-

Also, the weight of certain language components or functions slowly shifts from one to another in the schemes proposed over the period: the original scheme proposed by Bühler was initially part of a general "objective of limiting the focus on the representational function of language"5. From the 1960’s, especially after the conferences conducted by Austin in 1955 (How to do things with words, published in 1962), new schemes of communication reveal unprecedented attention paid to action functions (conative, interactional, pragmatic, etc.). Besides Popper’s argumentative function (1963/1967) already quoted, see for example Deleuze (1975) who criticized the "informative" myth and emphasized the necessary study of "functions that reflect power relations, diverse power centers" (1975: 43). Bourdieu used to remind that "communication exchanges, especially linguistic ones, are also where symbolic power relationships update the power relations existing between speakers or their respective groups [...]" (1982: 59).

-

The evolution of language communication schemes over the last century, through geographical and linguistic zones and disciplinary areas, implies variations in terminology sometimes associated with

"What follows now meets our objective of limiting the focus to the representational function of language, without us contesting its dominant role [...]" (Bühler (1934) 2009: 112). See also the remarks of J. Bouveresse (Bühler, 2009: 18) and J. Friedrich on the usual tendency of seing Bühler as "the father of pragmatics" (ibid. Introduction, p. 35).

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semantic shifts6: for instance, if Bühler speaks of representational function (Darstellung), Popper rather refers to a “descriptive” function; Jakobson speaks about a referential function that connects with the "context which represents the world" whereas, in the eighties, enunciative linguistics will rather use the expression transactional function which is centered on the "transmission of information"; and lastly, the french language of work research group (GDR Language et travail) refers to cognitive function and relates it to the "discourse that ensures the transmission of knowledge". These slightly different designations cover similar realities but are not exactly the same. In the same way, the appellative function (Bühler) covers similar slides in use: renamed conative function in Jakobson’s work, referred to by Popper as “stimulative or signal function” (see above note 5), it will become interactional in French enunciative linguistics, understood as a "focus on establishing and maintaining social relationships" (Charaudeau, 2002: 266), renamed social function in the subfield of linguistics linked to Language et travail (Boutet, 2002: 267). -

6

Finally, these language schemes have frequently allowed their authors to develop "functional types" or "kinds of text" characterized by the predominance of one or more functions. For example, according to Bühler (1934), “in scientific language [...], the function of "representation" of language dominates, while in the "type of language" exercised by the lyric poet, the “expressive function” dominates". Bühler also recalls that "it is only a question of dominance, in which one of the three fundamental relationships marked by the sounds of language is alternately in the foreground." (Bühler, op. cit.: 113-114). Jakobson (1963) reuses in the same way the communication scheme in order "to define six functions of language, according to the major orientation of the message toward one or other of the six components" and so doing, he gives us "a useful grid [...] for the typology of discourse and texts" (quoted in Boyer, 1996: 52). In E. Landowski’s analysis, each function proposed in the quaternary communication scheme corresponds to a class of speech: legal speech, statistical representation, certified report, scientific discourse (1974a: 548). These different patterns of linguistic communication have then enabled their authors to

Variations of terminology and problems of translation from German to English of Buhler initial model are exposed in Tsutomo Akamutsu “Bülher’s three functions” in XXXI “Structural Linguistics in the 20th century”, 2001: 1770.

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establish different types of functional language dominance associated with functions. Let us note here as a first conclusion that the influence of these types of scheme has significantly decreased since the 1980’s. The criticism made by Jacques Francis in 1982 ("Has the jakobsonian communication language diagram become an epistemological obstacle?") appears as a symptom of a turning point: the author emphasizes the dependency of the jakobsonian scheme on information theories and its tendency to reduce communication language toward a "technological and instrumental" interpretation (1982: 159). This fall of the paradigm seems to be confirmed in later French university works: Henri Boyer in Sociolinguistic elements cites, only for the record, "the “canonical” scheme popularized by R. Jakobson" (1996: 52) while the Dictionary of discourse analysis (P. Charaudeau, D. Maingueneau) notes that "the problem of language functions has lost its force" (2003: 266). Having briefly described the historical context for the emergence of the concept of functional style and highlighted noticeable changes in language communication schemes, we now can examine the dominant functions of administrative language and try to find or define its potential functional type. Is administrative style a “functional type”? In appearance, the administrative language overvalues the representational (informational) function. However, as emphasized by E. Landowski, "obviously, the official language does not only aim at informing the public" (1974: 363). The interactional function of administrative writing derives from the establishment of communication, either between the administration and the citizen, or between the actors of administration: it identifies exchange partners, functions and positions. But, as states the linguist C. Hagège, "when used by those who intend to induce behaviors, language becomes merely an instrument of power" (1985: 349). Therefore, interactional function is linked to a power effect and action over others. This factitive function – which does not exist as a specific function in Jakobson’s essays – commands the recipient to do something (to implement a program, to follow instructions, to pay a fee, etc.). J. Boutet speaks of instrumental or praxeological function as characteristic of "speech in a professional situation": "The discourse in professional situations is characterized by a close relationship with action, which is not the case for all communication situations. The praxeological dimension is central: we talk acting, to act or to make other people act. The representational dimension is often less

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important, which clearly distinguishes speech conversations at work, for example." (op. cit.). However, the symbolic function of writing systems, which is not always well perceived by producers or receivers, cannot be neglected. E. Landowski aims indirectly at this aspect when stating the "political dimension of administrative discourse: the message it sends is not only a message to the world but also, and perhaps more importantly, a message on the very authority that emits it." (Landowski, 1974: 375). This rapid analysis of administrative writing clearly highlights the plurality of its functions; at the same time, it seems to undermine the assumption of a dominant function, which would allow us to speak of a functional type. Indeed, what would be a functional style based on so many functions? The "functionalist" hypothesis meets its aporia in the plurality that characterizes the object of study: "Functionalism is [...] a problem in itself in all cases of multiple functions. [...] The nature generally adopts the method of specialization, where the plurality of functions results in a plurality of organs, each adapted to a specialized and proper purpose. But could men invent forms which integrate multiple purposes?" (Souriau, 1990, art. function). Yet, this poly-functionality helps to get out of simplistic visions of administrative language. It also points to one of the analyses proposed by the sociologist Henri Lefebvre in his Critique of everyday life (II) about "urban monuments": some of them, he says, are "supra-functional or cross-functional" because they have "so different functions that no functionality characterizes them and exhausts their social function" (1961: 309). The multiplicity of functions that can be attributed to administrative language meets this trans-functionality, even though this does not exclude, so far, the attempt to differentiate functions or even to prioritize them. Without going into the evaluative perspective of Popper separating "inferior functions (to express one’s self, to call someone) from higher ones (to describe, to argue)” (1967/1991: 198) or that of Merton (1949) differentiating manifest functions from latent functions (cited in Boudon, Dict., 1993: 104), we can try to differentiate primary functions from secondary ones. For example, we may consider that the symbolic function of administrative writing (to assert the authority of the Administration), although not explicit, is at least as important as its referential function (to say something). We can therefore speak of a "functional type" based on a set of several major functions that we will try to prioritize. The confrontation between "literary text" and "administrative text" may help us to go further in reflection. Compared to literary language, referential and interactional functions seem more important in administrative language. In contrast, expressive and phatic functions fade

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in favor of institutional expression. What about the functions that, according to Jakobson and formalist perspective, predominate in literary language? As Tchougounnikov recalls, "Jakobson considers poetic and metalinguistic functions as the basic functions of language." (2003: 8398). Jean Bessiere also emphasizes poetic and metalinguistic functions which "distinguish by their reflexivity" and define the base of literary writing in modern perspective: in the literary text, "attention to the structure of the statement and emphasis on signs and their value, leave aside the instrumental function of language to become the privileged object of the exchange" (Bessiere, 1993). However, the Administrative text also bears extreme attention to "the structure of the statement," but this poetical/ rhetorical value does not come from its reflexive nature, but from its desire to control linked to the interactional and praxeological function. This leads us to propose two types of language schemes, opposed by a different set of associated functions – those marked in brackets appear secondary: Differentiated functions Administrative Writing Literary writing Interactional / praxeological (centered Poetic (centered on the on the destination) message) Symbolic (centered on the fictitious Metalinguistic (code-centric) [Expressive (centered on the speaker, institution / state) sender)] [Referential (centered on the context)] This comparative analysis of administrative writing as a polyfunctional type of language based on two or three major functions leads us to emphasize the basic characteristics of an artifact that has become an everyday and structuring component of our modern society. It also encourages us to make a comparison with literary writing. However, our analysis did not address the issue of the formal specificity of administrative language. We can easily imagine that if the object called administrative language is determined by different functions, these functions should be related to formal characteristics. We can then return to the first assumption of administrative style linking it, this time, to a set of plural functions.

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From function(s) to formal marks The problem with the eviction of the notion of style for "administrative texts" in the Dictionary of language sciences is substantially reduced if one values the "traditional and contradictory aspects of the category of style" as does Jean Gayon: "Sometimes the style is a system of rules applied in the production of a work, sometimes it is defined by the transgression of the rule, the singularity of a production, its individuating function. It should therefore create no surprise to find, across the centuries, a new manifestation of the double etymology of the word: stylos, a Greek word means the column of a monument and figuratively connotes the idea of a system of rules applied to the production of a work; stilus, a Latin term, evokes a tool for writing materials, and connotes the singular expression." (Gayon, 1998: 181)

In the semiological field, Fulvio Vaglio similarly determines two possible uses of the word style : "In the case of verbal language and literature, the term "style" refers to the use of idiosyncratic language by a particular author, the field of rhetoric and stylistics are therefore not considered here to coincide. But in the case of graphic and visual communication (as well as in the musical and body language) the term "style" is used in a less subjective and individual way, and is rather considered as a set of rules culturally hyper-codified, which mark the use of specific resources in the language in question." (Vaglio, 2008: 141)

This double use of the concept of "style" highlights two possible sides of language: on one hand, a singularizing component (subjective and personal), on the other, a collective component (more general and codified). This perspective allows both to overcome the conflicting definitions of the word style – who are many – and to approach more accurately the formal concept of administrative writing. The distinction scription / writing, proposed by Boyer (1984, 1993) after Peytard (1970)7 7

"In a number of publications, I have advanced proposals about what J. Peytard called the "scriptural order" (PEYTARD, 1970), at a key moment in the development of structuralist thinking in the field of linguistics. These proposals postulated an autonomous approach to writing and tended to consider this specific language order (for too long a victim of oral hegemony in structuralism) as invested by social, cultural, pragmatic issues and governed by two key principles: the principle of scription and the principle of writing, principles that highlight a two-way dynamic" (Boyer, 1993 : 382).

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emphasizes this idea: "scription, that is to say, codification, standard ready-to-write, highly normalized" as opposed to the "refusal of scription, an effort to create, a work of "staging", in short, the emergence of writing. Two figures embody this "scriptural" order: the figure of the "scrivener" and the one of the "author"” (Boyer, 1993). This distinction recalls the one made by Roland Barthes in "Writers and Writing-people/ Ecrivains et écrivants" (1960). The idea of a collective, institutionalized and standardized language (Boyer, 1984), a system of rules (Gayon, 1998), or a combination of culturally hyper-codified rules (Vaglio, 2008) confirms our differential approach of administrative language opposed to literary language as it has been conceived in formalist and Jakobson thinking. Stylos System of collective rules Scription/ Scrivener (fr. Ecrivant)

Stilus Uniqueness of the individual writing Writing/ Writer

We can then ask ourselves what allows the mutual passage of stilus to stylos, writing to scription, "singularity of writing" to a "system of rules". To understand this, one must try to link the stylistic marks of administrative writing to the functional components of this language, as Lévi-Strauss implicitly proposed when saying: "to understand a style, it is important to overcome the limitations of stylistic analysis. One must be able to answer of what use is a fact of marked style and describe it in terms of stylistic characteristics" (cited in Zolkiewski, 1971). The construction of everyday language in the administrative context is based on formal procedures that reverse the logic of poetic language in the jakobsonian sense: to create a known effect, a sense of "routine", in contrast to the mechanism of "singling out" or of "defamiliarization", which the formalists elected as the cardinal foundation of "literariness". In what follows, we will attempt to establish a quick inventory of items linking each specific functions of administrative writing to their relevant stylistic facts. Referential function, closed context and limited lexicon: if any "language has (the power) to reinvent the world by ordering it according to linguistic categories" (Hagège, 1985: 149), the administrative language – in particular the public type – maximizes this possibility by enclosing context within a restricted cotext. Apparently, the main reference is a world order which is presented as a true, explicit and rational version (showing this manifest referential function, the institution in its documents

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rules that "any administrative letter has an object"), but this verbalized version of the “world” appears in a rarified and controlled text. The administrative “dictionary” indeed works on a small number of words prefixed by use. E. Landowski notes the existence of a lexicon related to law registry (1974: 367), G. Thuillier speaks of "administrative dialect that changes over time" (Thuillier, Monnier, 2010: 48). Legal expressions and specific uses of grammar are still recurrent in contemporary administrative correspondence, for example, the expression "officially recorded" or many topical and formal expressions like: "as a result of our conversation", "we agreed", "to mutualise", "take attachment", etc. Although – as Bourdieu reminds us – any text depends for its understanding, to some extent, on its context and on the "market" where it is used, the language of administration and its derived statements are particularly incomprehensible, and ineffective, outside context where they are applied. Thus, administrative language is nothing in itself: its identification process and its semantic effectiveness proceed from a regular publication, referenced and numbered, stored in official places (the Gazette, the newsletter, the official journal) – what one can call the macrotext of state publication. Moreover, a circular generally refers to previous ones: this principle of production, which extends also to the correspondence, sets the text as belonging to a superior architecture. This rule, if generalized and pushed to its extreme limit, leads to self-referentiality, folding in on themselves the mechanisms of production, and the language becomes the incarnation of the bafflegap, (fr. “langue de bois”) a "style which provides control of everything, hiding the real in words" (Hagège, 1985, ibid.), usually characterized by generalization, referential indeterminacy and tautology (Boyer, 1988). Control over the Poetic function & the role of tradition: poetic function in administrative writing is also controlled in order to reduce both reflexivity and linguistic difference and increase the ratio of congruence with the institutional norm. One can always return to Henri Lefebvre's analysis of everyday life: "Nothing escapes and must escape the regime of organized everyday [...]. Ownership as a concept and practice almost disappears (except an indefeasible residue)". (1968: 295). In terms of writing, this is shown primarily by devoted formulae and phraseology, that is to say the use of "frozen expressions, simple or compound, characteristic of a language or a type of discourse" (Fiala, 1987, cited in Charaudeau, 2002: 432). Those formulae, in a bureaucratic universe, characterize the "beautiful style". Ymbert, author of Administrative Morals in 1825, cites that "long sentence [...] immutable and devoted" which closes any circular

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of his time: "I have no doubt, sir, that you shall do everything that depends on you to ensure, as much as depends on you, carrying out the provisions of this letter and that you will find the opportunity to provide further evidence of your zeal and dedication" (Thuillier, 1967: 137). Huysmans, in the late 19th cent., notes in administrative correspondence, "customary phraseology" like "the spirit, if not the text, of the law", "without underestimating the importance of considerations that you invoke in support of this thesis ..." (1888 in 2007: 224). Courteline refers to the use, in the Directorate of Religious Affairs, of phrases "bristling with harsh platitudes" (Messieurs les ronds de cuir, 1891: 424). If the motivation of literary language is to practice stylistic difference and multiplicity of meaning, administrative prose tries to stick as closely as possible to the stereotype of jargon and recognizable formula, and lowering the meaning at the level of monovalency. At macro-syntactic level, textual genres used in bureaucratic writing are also transmitted through the tradition and controlled by routine and sometimes explicit professional constraints. E. Landowski highlighted this area of relative plasticity in which is situated the production of administrative writing : "If we put aside legal acts themselves, the administration performs speech acts that, at first glance, are subject to norms both less stringent than those defined by the "legal standard" and more stringent than those under the "standard language" (Landowski, 1974). If the term norm seems excessive, ritual is thus more appropriate. The notion of ritual, as recalls Oger (2005), is situated "at the heart of the definition of the genre" and can be defined as "ritual text for certain forms of the utterance (Beacco, 1992)". The ritual takes indeed a major role in the production of administrative genres: "usually, one learns to speak, write, according to the custom of each institution, body or service" (Thuillier, op. cit., 2010: 48). Various correspondence, administrative notes, official circulars, official speeches join the category of "instituted genres" as defined by D. Maingueneau: "These types are less subject to variation: their participants adhere strictly to the constraints that define them (business mail, forms, notarial acts, exchanges between aircraft and control towers ...). They are characterized by formulas and patterns on which pre compositional exercises strong control, where participants are virtually interchangeable. It is impossible to speak of "author" for such verbal practices. [...] Parameters which are indeed the result of the stabilization of constraints linked to a verbal activity that has been repeatedly practiced in a social determined situation". (Maingueneau, 2006: 18-19)

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The administrative style appears a daily communication under control obeying implicit norms and based on imitation of earlier models. This process keeps the tradition, enhances the homogeneity of practices and is used to create consistent and recognizable texts. It is, therefore, effective. As states Claude Hagège: "Language is a good policy. [...] The unity of the language concerns authority. The variation is inconvenient to it: vary speech [...] and you end varying the modes of thinking" (Hagège, 1985: 270). The unity of administrative language is then a textual data that turns into a political and symbolic good. Interactional functions & routine schemes: When Bourdieu speaks of "official rhetoric" (1994: 131 and 123), he mentions stylistic effects which impose on the recipient: symbolic parameters are the founders of the effectiveness of texts produced by state government since the 19th century. To clarify this notion of efficiency, we may mention thematic structure, communicative distance and visual and typographical criteria of the document. The statement is usually subject to a monovalent theme with slogans involving the "make-do" of the recipient: authorization, implementation, process, device, path, route, schedule, etc. The topic is also the subject of a perceptible and measurable restatement. But the imperative nature of administrative texts appears less in fact related to thematic choices than to pragmatic control of the distances between partners. The sheet of paper embodies, in its way, the positions of the partners through a combination of division of the page into blocks, lines, separators and by other typographical markings and features. The relationship between "sender" and "receiver" is therefore doubly constrained: on the one hand, by enunciation of a formalism based on use and on the other hand, via a visual organization of the page, by a vector of formalization. It is never a matter of speaking from person to person, but always that of a supposedly "impersonal" or "neutral" representation of people involved through their social function. It is the statutory distance (Mr. Prefect, etc.) which supports the general system of bureaucratic organization. "In business letters, [...] protocols spread everywhere, greetings for letters varied infinitely, running through a range that required fingering of office pianists. Here, addressing the top of hierarchies, this assurance of "the highest consideration"; then the consideration fell by several notches, and became, for people not having the rank of minister, "the most distinguished, the very distinguished, the distinguished, the perfect" to achieve without consideration epithet, in a form of consideration that

156 Writing Under Daily Constraint(s): The Case of Administrative Writing denied itself because it was simply the height of contempt." (Huysmans, 1888: 210)

This process of detachment and hierarchy which governs the internal written communications of administrations is transposed and refracted almost systematically, by various means, in the case of external communication between the Administration and the administered: "the government [...] measures distance that must exist between the citizen and the director, whose authority would be compromised by too much modesty in language". It is necessary that "the tone of the document allows the reader to identify its official nature" (Catherine R., 1968: 21 cited in Landowski, 1974: 373). From Interactional to Symbolic function/ making the institution exist: the last and probably latent dominant function determines certain formal characteristics of administrative writing and is linked to the interactional function: it concerns the neutralization of the personal, subjective and transient instance of the editor in favor of highlighting a superior subject: the Administration. Impersonal administrative language blocks, on the surface, any functional characteristics related to the expression of a subject. "The official figures must constantly work to sacrifice, if not their particular point of view to the standpoint of society, at least to legitimate their point of view, in a universal way, including through the use of an Official rhetoric" (Bourdieu, 1994: 131). Neutralization of any "emotional" point of view meets a general ideological and epistemic justification: ideally, it should provide access to Weberian universality, and build "the famous official neutrality" (Boyer) or what the hoi polloi call, less positively, "bureaucratic indifference" (Marchand, 2009: 126). The analyses of H. Boyer, D. Maingueneau, E. Landowski jointly emphasize these "choices of language in order to construct texts removed of all traces of individual enunciation (Boyer, 1993: 391) by methods such as the use of the passive voice with deletion of the grammatical "agent" or the use of "impersonal phrases": "it should be noted", "it is worth noting that ..." (Boyer, 1988: 94). Authors also emphasize the correlation between deleting a "subject of enunciation" and the construction of "a kind of Administrative Subject": "The Administration" (ibid.). "It is therefore, for the State, not a question of producing neutral statements without writing assignable origin, but of using all the linguistic effects likely [...] to make the speech of a recognizable subject "(Landowski, 1974: 373). D. Maingueneau also states that "the speaker, beyond the empirical being who physically produces the text, is a collective entity (officials), themselves representatives of an

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abstract Addresser associated with values (the Administration), each member of which is expected to take power when he speaks" (2006: 2021). This sociolinguistic artifact that allows the building of the ethos of a recognizable collective macro-actor – the Institution – has historical roots in Europe (the development of republican sovereignty in the 19th century) and epistemic justification (the design of an objective and transcendent figure of speech that might be related to positivist philosophy). All these elements allow us to put into perspective functional and stylistic analysis highlighting the specificity of administrative language since the 19th century: the daily artifact is based on formal detectable choices associated with functions that can be analyzed and historically situated in their uses. But it does not provide light on the process of transition from writing to scription, from stilus to stylos, at the levels of hardware and the concrete act of writing, what we will call the system of organized everydayness. We must therefore underline some of the daily mechanisms of administrative writing, through its invisible and yet heavy constraints.

Writing at the office: daily practice & constraints A strict congruency exists between the division of space, the division of labor and the control over the movements of the producers, and texts produced by the organization as is shown with humor by Poulbot (see fig. 2, illustration of an employee for Messieurs les Ronds de cuir by Courteline): “Which one of the two – of the employee or the office – was the natural fruit of the other, its inescapable secretion; that is what was impossible to say”, underlines the narrator in the same page. Yet, in previous analyses of administrative language (Landowski, 1974; Boyer, 1988; Maingueneau, 2006), linguistic components clearly dominate over those practical parameters that refer to the systemic context of production. It is yet important to recall the constraints and rules which affect both production and editor as well as the link with the visual architecture/layout of these texts which define administrative documents, as much as their functionality or would be efficiency. Text architecture/ layout & control. Administrative documents transform the page into a grid, according to principles of production shown in a document signed by Huysmans in a letter from a central administration of the State in 1879: the sections making the document are arranged geometrically in space: the address above, signature below, the editor left.

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Figure 2: « Légèrement, il souleva son fond de culotte » in Messieurs les Rondsde-Cuir, Courteline (1893), édition illustrée par Poulbot, Calmann-Levy éditeurs, 1908, p. 24.

Relevant graphic units (the header of paper logo, the stamp) define language partners and also, the document reference - each document being classifiable. Margins and frames are used to indicate the source: on the one hand, the editor is located on the left column, on the other hand, whoever is taking responsibility signs the document. This visuographic space of the page (Anis, 1988) based on a functionalized division, indicating the sender, recipient and subject, metaphorically transposes the office space and assigns each actor a fixed place. White spaces highlight the institution’s identity (logo, header, date, signature), and reinforce the distances between partners of enunciation, stressing clarity of the argument by underlining the connections between the parts of what is said. The construction of the page layout is therefore the result of a seminormalization which imposes an apparently functional triangle (sender message - receiver) and implicitly leads each actor in the text string to keep to certain visual standards. The apparent reason for these rules is to ensure and show objectivity and rationality; the latent effect is, first, daily

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coercion over the editor, binding him or her under the weight of norms and, second, the effect of imposing recognition on the receiver. This calculated scheme of lines and distances undeniably confirms the daily construction of stylos as defined by J. Gayon: a "system of rules." Semiographic components. A second level of daily constraint bears on internal modes of expression at the time of writing, and changes the use of punctuation and typographical standards into "a hypostasis of writing that borders on religiosity" (Fraenkel, 2001: 132). Codification of punctuation and the establishment of the state are two concurrent phenomena in the 16th century, as if one (the codification of punctuation) was one of the elements making possible the other (the assertion of power, the constitution of textuo-symbolic State). There are in fact regular echoes of this parameter in the testimonial or fictional literature which has shown the process of production of working documents. At the beginning of the 19th century an internal memo to the Minister of the Interior recalls "that he wants all that is presented to his signature [to be] without spelling and punctuation errors. Office managers should carefully consider their work before enclose it in the portfolio" (in Thuillier, 1967). Such fetishist practices of sub-bureau chiefs find echoes in the middle of the 20th century, as is the case with "Superior Miqueut" in the ironic novel by Boris Vian, Vercoquin and plankton: "In sum, he continued, I repeat, we must be very careful. And now I want to talk about another issue that is almost as important as commas, is that semicolons ..." (1947: 67-69). Contemporary documents within the administration (for example, document that determine the use of uppercase or lowercase letters between ministerial departments) illustrate the less comic permanence of these practices which are accompanied by a daily violence exerted on editors as they imply numerous rewritings. Monitoring punctuation is one of the daily symptoms of control over the producer of administrative writing. Daily practical constraints on production: movements, schedules, relationships between producers, all these elements also characterize daily ritual practices based on a system of production which leads everydayness to fall under its constraints. In other words, everyday space is itself a constraint on organized producers, making possible the show of homogeneity which endorses the existence of the institution. Movements in places are managed by the buildings themselves, in which the circulation is itself the object of ritual: schedules are subject to checks, and relations between people are based on hierarchy. Literary fiction and testimony keep track of convergent echoes of this quasi “total institution”

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(Goffman, 1988) that is bureaucracy. "The stylistic gap" analyzed by Michel de Certeau in the "practice of spaces" of the urban walker shows opposite choices to the pre-discounted or even predetermined repetitive routes experienced by producers in the bureaucratic institution (see, Perec, 1947). Only a few limited "deviations" are tempted, as shown for example by Lahrier, a boheme employee portrayed by Courteline in 1893, and figured again by Poulbot (fig. 3) when he just "spanned the window" of his office. It is this kind of employee who will escape out of space by practicing a “delinquent” rhetoric, who will refuse time constraints, produce inconsistent texts, etc…

Figure 3: « Son parc c’était celui… » in Messieurs les Ronds-de-Cuir, Courteline (1893), édition illustrée par Poulbot, Calmann-Levy éditeurs, 1908, p. 60.

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It is not the lack of stylistic criteria – if one considers that style rests on minimal specific forms analyzable as such – nor, as public organizations would like to pretend, its informational function that characterizes administrative language. Rather, it is a staging calculated message and the ritual procedures of upstream production which support in the end the symbolic function of this type of text. At each level of the production of writing, daily controlled procedures aim at the major function of writing, which is to keep the administration as a legitimate Authority in the perception of its producers and recipients, and its associated function: to make them act in the good "common sense". The analysis of daily bureaucratic writing has led us also to take notice of the production constraints that shape in practice the making of statements. These rules and standards tend to transform the “individual freedom” of the writer into routine, constraint, standard, distance, division. This study has also shed light on some of the characteristics of the historical ideology located in the background of modern literary practice: “figure of the author", “freedom of writing" “search for originality", "stylistic gap". In that vein, it would be interesting to understand the differential interplay between these two social types of writing, when one type deconstructs the other, especially when the stylistico-functional type bureaucratic writing arises in the 19th century: by example, a literary language diverting into an administrative form, or when a poet such as Corbière deconstructs standards of punctuation in writing from a police station. Following Pêcheux’s proposal "to provide a polemical space of ways of reading" (1981: 37), one could then try to provide a “polemical space of ways of writing”: for example, administrative writing symbolically facing, since the 19th century, literary writing – two genres therefore defined by their political difference in the use of the forms of language.

Bibliography Literary works 1825 – M. Ymbert, Mœurs administratives. Pour faire suite aux observations sur les moeurs et les usages français au commencemente du XIX siècle, Paris, Ladvocat, 1825. 1841 – Balzac, Physiologie de l'employé, édition par A.-M. Baron, vignettes de M. Trimolet, Le Castor Astral, 1994. 1882 – Huysmans, A vau l’eau, Mille et une nuits, n° 299, 2000. 1888 – Huysmans, « La retraite de M. Bougran » in Huysmans, Nouvelles, éd. D. Grojnowski, GF, 2007.

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1891 – Courteline, Messieurs les ronds de cuir in Théâtre, contes, romans et nouvelles, Laffont, Bouquins, 1990. 1947 – Vian, Boris, Vercoquin et le plancton, Folio, Gallimard. 1947 – Perec, Georges, L’art et la manière d’aborder son chef de service pour lui demander une augmentation. Hachette littératures, (1968), 2008. 2009 – Marchand, François, L’imposteur, Le Cherche Midi.

Dictionaries Dictionnaire de Sociologie, ss dir. R. Boudon, P. Besnard, R. Cherkaoui, B-P. Lecuyer, Larousse, 1993. Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours, ss dir. Patrick Charaudeau, Dominique Maingueneau, Seuil, 2002. Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage, Ducrot, Oswald, Todorov, Tzvetan, Essais, Seuil, 1972. Le Robert. Dictionnaire historique de la langue française, A. Rey, 2000. Vocabulaire d’esthétique, André Souriau, Puf, 1990.

Critical works Akamutsu, T. “The development of functionalism from the Prague school to the present” in History of the Language Sciences / Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaften / Histoire des sciences du langage: Sylvain Auroux et al (Eds), Volume 2: 2001. p. 1768-1790. Anis, J. et Puech, C., L’écriture, théories et description, Editions universitaires, De Boeck, 1988. Austin, J. L. Quand dire c’est faire, Seuil, 1962. Barthes, R., « Ecrivains et écrivants » (1960) in Essais critiques, Editions du Seuil, 1964. Bessière, J., « Littérature minimale et vraisemblable. Petit état de la théorie littéraire contemporaine » in Mélanges offerts à Jean Peytard, I et II / textes réunis par Jacques Bourquin. – Belles lettres, 1993. Bourdieu, P. Langage et pouvoir symbolique, Points Essais, préface de John B. Thompson, Editions Fayard (1991), 1994. —. Raisons pratiques, Sur la théorie de l’action, Points Essais, 1994. Boutet, J. « Fonctions du langage (au travail) » in Dictionnaire d’analyse du discours, ss dir. P. Charaudeau, D. Maingueneau, Seuil, 2002. Boyer, H. « Quelques considérations socio-pragmatiques sur l’écrit institutionnel » in Mélanges offerts à Jean Peytard, Annales Littéraires

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de l'Université de Besançon, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 1993, p. 383399. —. Eléments de sociolinguistique, Paris Dunod, 1991. —. "Une approche diachronique du discours étatique. Sur deux rapports de l'Administration pénitentiaire" (Lengas 13, 1983, p. 47-65) in L’écrit comme enjeu, principe de scription et principe d’écriture dans la communication sociale, Paris, Didier-CREDIF, 1988. —. "Pratique, pouvoir, culture", chapitre 4, Anthropologie de l'écriture (Dir. Robert Lafont), 1984, p. 133-161. Bühler, K. Théorie du langage, édité par D. Samain et J. Friedrich, Banc d’essais, Agone, (1934) 2009. Campaignolle, H. « Un travail sous contrôle : représentations de l’employé de bureau du XIXe au XXe s. » in « Le travail sans fin » n° spécial de Raison publique, n°15, automne 2011. —. « Un genre ordinaire : écrire sur la bureaucratie de Balzac à Huysmans » in « L’art de l’ordinaire », dir. M. Braud, Méthode ! Revue de littératures, n°21, 2012. Certeau de, M., L’invention du quotidien, 1. Arts de faire (Paris, UGE, 1980, collection « 10/18 ») Paris, Gallimard, coll. « Folio-Essais », 1990. Deleuze, G. Kafka, éditions de Minuit, coll. critique, 1975. Fraenkel, B., « La résistible ascension de l’écrit au travail » in Langage et travail, communication cognition, action, coordonné par Annie Borzek, Béatrice Fraenkel, CNRS éditions, 2001. Gardey, D. La dactylographe et l’expéditionnaire. Histoire des employés de bureau (1890-1930), Paris, Belin, 2000. Gayon, J., « De l’usage de la notion de style en histoire des sciences » in La rhétorique, les enjeux et ses résurgences, ss dir. J. Gayon, J.-Cl. Gens, et J. Poirier, 1998. Goffman, E., Les moments et leurs hommes, textes recueillis et présentés par Yves Winkin, Seuil, Minuit, 1988. Hagège, C., L’homme de paroles. Contribution linguistique aux sciences humaines, Folio essais, Fayard, 1985. Horkheimer, M., Notes critiques 1949-1952, traduit de l’allemand par S. Cornille et P. Ivernel, Bibliothèque Payot, 2009. Jabès, E. « Sur la question du Livre » in Jacques Derrida, L’Arc n° 54. 1973 Jacques, F. « Le schéma jakobsonien de la communication est-il devenu un obstacle épistémologique ? » in Langages, Connaissance et Pratique. Colloque franco-britannique (Lille III, Mai 1981), dir. N.

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Mouloud et J.-M. Vienne, Langages, connaissances et pratique. Lille, P.U.L., 1982, p.157-185. Jakobson, R. « Linguistique et poétique » (1960) in Essais de linguistique générale, Minuit, Paris 1963, p. 209-248. Landowski E. 1974a : « Formes et pratiques de la représentation dans le VIe plan », in L. Nizard, éd. Planification et société, Grenoble, PU Grenoble. —. 1974 b : « Le langage administratif », in J. Sallois, éd. L’administration, Paris, Hachette, 1974. Lefebvre, H. Critique de la vie quotidienne, II, Fondements d'une sociologie de la quotidienneté, L’Arche, 1961. —. La Vie quotidienne dans le monde moderne, Gallimard, 1968. Kerbrat-Orrechioni, C., L’énonciation. De la subjectivité dans le langage. Colin. (1980) 1993. Maingueneau, D. 2006- "Discours administratif et violence. La rafle du Vél d’hiv", in Violence d’Etat et paroles libératrices, P. BudillonPuma et F. Olivier (éds.), Paris, Indigo, 2006, p. 17-26. —. 1995- « Interprétation des textes littéraires et des textes juridiques" in Interprétation et Droit, P. Amselek éd., Bruxelles, Bruylant et Presses Universitaires d'Aix-Marseille, 1995, p. 61-72. Merton, Robert K., « Structure bureaucratique et personnalité » (1965, in Levy, Psychologie sociale) in Benabou, C. et Abravanel, H., Le comportement des individus et des groupes dans l’organisation, Chicoutimi, Gaëtan Morin, 1986. Milly, J., Poétique des textes, Nathan Université, 1992. Oger, C., « L’analyse du discours institutionnel entre formations discursives et problématiques socio-anthropologiques », Université Paris 14 et CEDITEC, Langage et société, n° 114, 2005/4. Peytard, J., « Oral et scriptural : deux ordres de situations et de descriptions linguistiques », Langue française, n°6 ; 1970. Pêcheux, M. « Lire l’archive aujourd’hui » in Archives et documents de la Société d’Histoire et d’Epistémologie des Sciences du Langage, 2, 1982. Popper, K. La Connaissance objective (1979), traduit de l’anglais par Jean-Jacques Rosat, Paris, Aubier/ Flammarion, 1991/1998. Rastier, Fr. « Rhétorique et interprétation des figures » in Figures de la figure, Sémiotique et rhétorique générale, ss. la dir. De Semir Badir et Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Pulim, 2008. Thuillier, G. et Monnier, F., Histoire de la bureaucratie, Essai, Economica, 2010.

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Thuillier, G. Témoins de l'administration. De Saint-Just à Marx, dans l'Administration nouvelle, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1967. —. Bureaucratie et bureaucrates en France au XIXe siècle, Genève, Droz, 1980. Tchougounnikov, S., « Le formalisme russe entre pensée organique allemande et premier structuralisme », Protée, 31, n°2, 2003, p. 83-98 Vaglio, F. « La retraite de la rhétorique, degré zéro, mécanismes rhétoriques et production du sens dans le langage visuel » in Figures de la figure, Sémiotique et rhétorique générale, ss. la dir. De Semir Badir et Jean-Marie Klinkenberg, Pulim, 2008. Zolkiewski, S. in « Sociologie de la culture et sémiotique » in Essays in semiotics, edited by Julia Kristeva, Josette Rey-Debove, Donna Jean Umiker, Mouton, La Hague, 1971.

SUBTITLES: A DOMINANT TEXT TYPE IN EVERYDAY LIFE ANTHI WIEDENMAYER

In October 1927 the first talking film The Jazz Singer is released in the USA and features Al Johnson suddenly turning to the audience to articulate the very first, quite promising and utterly true words: "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!". In January 1929 this phrase was made into the first interlingual subtitles in French. It was not until the 1990s though that Translation Studies began to deal with audiovisual translation, which includes both subtitling and dubbing. Among the first major studies in the field were those by Luyken et. al. (1991), Ivarsson (1992) and Gottlieb (1994). Mason uses the term ‘screen translation’ (1989), Delabastita ‘film and TV translation’ (1989), Gambier and Gottlieb ‘(multi) media translation’ (2001). Díaz Cintas also refers to ‘traducción subordinada’ (constrained translation) to point out the constraints to which subtitling is subject. This time gap is to a great extent due to the attitude of traditional translation theorists towards multi-medial texts such as songs, stage-plays, film-scripts and opera libretti, as the discussion on translation “revolved around the question of the faithful ‘scholarly’ translation on the one hand, and the ‘actable’ or ‘performable’ stage text on the other” (Snell-Hornby, 2006, p. 86). Subtitling, in particular, however, had to overcome even more prejudice, which could probably be summarized in the next three factors: Subtitling involves the translation of oral texts, and the mainstream view among scholars, even today, is that oral language is inferior to written language. Subtitling is inevitably associated with the cinema and television, the latter of which, especially, has – and probably rightfully so – quite a bad reputation and is certainly not comparable to the world of literature. In addition to these facts, subtitling is a common practice in small ‘minor’ language countries, while the original film material usually comes from large ‘major’ language countries. Therefore, it does not form part of the everyday practice of audiovisual translation in countries like

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Germany, the U.K. or France, which, nonetheless, set the tone in the main field of scientific research in Translation Studies – among other disciplines. In the case of a country like Greece, where almost everything is imported – from the bulk of machinery to literature and film – a quantitative comparison between the production and reception of translation in the form of subtitles on the one hand, and literature on the other is extremely challenging. This article aims to demonstrate that interlingual subtitles represent a text type with a remarkably high number of recipients, which can thus be regarded as a dominant text type in our daily lives. Furthermore, it examines the features of this text type and the significance they might have in the shaping of language. Two major surveys carried out in 2004 and 2007 will serve as the basis for the comparison of figures regarding the recipients of subtitles on the one hand, and translated literary texts, on the other. The first, “II. Greek Study of Reading Habits and Cultural Practices”, was issued by the Greek National Book Centre (EKEVI) in 2004 and investigated the reading habits of the Greek population. It examined the media, including television, books, newspapers, magazines and comics, but referred neither to internet-uploaded texts nor to subtitles. The second major study was carried out in 2007 by the Institute of Audio-Visual Media and concerns the use of the media and the TV viewing habits of the Greeks. For interpretation of the results of these two studies in relation to each other, we will compare the reading of subtitles mainly with the reading of (literary) books, as they together make up a large part of the texts translated into Greek. In 2008, 43.1% of the 9,758 new titles published by Greek publishers were translations, and among fiction titles, in particular, there were 415 Greek-authored books and 460 translations. Greece has one of the highest percentages of translated books in comparison with other European countries, as the EU average is 38%. In 2004, according to the EKEVI study into the overall reading habits and attitudes of the Greeks, those who never read a book that year made up 43.8% of the total population, while, of the others, 22.2% only read professional and practical books, 25.4% read 1-9 books and 8.6% read over 10 books each year. On the other hand, the Institute of Audiovisual Media discovers in 2007 that 74% of the population watch television for an average of 3 hours and 20 minutes daily, 33% watch videos and DVDs once or twice a week and 10% videos and DVDs 3 to 4 times a week; 10% of the population watch foreign films on television daily and 13% at weekends, while 6% watch foreign documentaries daily and 7% at weekends.

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Converting these percentages into absolute numbers and given the fact that Greece has roughly 10 million inhabitants, the "passionate" readers, namely those who read over 10 books a year, do not exceed 860,000 people, while foreign films on television are daily watched by at least one million Greek men and women. In addition to this figure, one should also take into account the number of cinema-goers – 1,900,000 people once a month – and, of course, the number of those who watch foreign documentaries and television series. According to data available for 1996, English-language film productions were 74.4% and those in Greek only 4.5%, while a total of 23,159 foreign films were broadcast in Greece between 1925 and 2005 (Koliodimos, 2005). It should also be noted that viewers who wish to watch a foreign TV series can download it free of charge from various websites and watch it with the aid of apparently amateur subtitles, produced by passionate fan groups who direct remarkable creative energies toward a hobby that others actually practice as a profession. Indicative of this current trend is the fact that in 2009 the American TV series "Heroes" and "Lost" were downloaded from the internet 6.58 million times and 6.31 million times, respectively (Pavlidou, 2010). It is obvious that these figures are far beyond comparison with corresponding ones for the number of recipients of other types of translation. As for the genre of the films and TV programs that are subtitled, dubbed or voiced-over, there is a wide variety: feature films, television films, documentaries, TV series, news broadcasts, live broadcasts, educational programs, children's programs. The majority of foreign films and television programs in Greece are subtitled, as is common in most European countries with a population of less than 25 million. The reason for the choice of subtitling over dubbing is purely financial. The cost of dubbing of a film is 6.5 to 16.5 times as high as for subtitles, according to the German subtitling and translation company Titelbild (Döring, 2006, p. 23, footnote 19), or even 10 times as high, according to Gottlieb (2004, p. 89). In the meantime, however, certain attitudes have developed with regard to the reception of foreign films - it would be inconceivable for a Greek audience to listen, for example, to Gerard Depardieu, speaking Greek. In recent years, however, a new trend has emerged, mainly on Sky TV channel, which has been operating in Greece since 2007. According to this trend, TV series, such as Inspector Rex, are dubbed, whereas news broadcasts and interviews are voiced-over. If this trend persists, the target audience itself is bound to change, as well as the aesthetics of reception

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and reception habits among Greek viewers. In investigating a textual genre that is intended for such a wide audience, it is worth examining its features. Subtitles are the translated dialogues and, occasionally, the non-verbal elements (gestures, mimicry, facial expressions, prosodic elements, irony, humor, etc.) of a film or a TV program, especially if they are comprehensible only in the source culture. They may also include the translation of verses, when the song is relevant to the plot of the film. Displays (text recorded by the camera, such as newspaper headlines, letters, posters, etc.) and captions (top-titles, information about the film) can also be subtitled. (These cannot be regarded as proper subtitles, but even the choice to translate them or not has a direct influence on the understanding and the reception of the film.) Given that oral speech and nonverbal elements are thus translated into written language, subtitling is an intersemiotic translation (Jakobson, 1959) or, to cite Gottlieb: the nature of subtitles is diagonal (1994). Subtitles themselves have a supporting role and can exist only in conjunction with other semiotic elements of the film (image and sound: music, noises), which will accordingly change the translation strategy of the subtitler (Gottlieb, 1997, p. 86). As subtitles are a semiotic item that exists along with the other semiotic systems or elements of a film, they are directly dependent on these other elements. Therefore, if we look at the dialogue as a text, then we can view the film as a hypertext - a term borrowed from Interpreting Studies and Pöchhacker (1994, p. 44). The hypertext determines the linguistic, cultural and aesthetic context in which the subtitler works. In order for the subtitler to take the appropriate decisions for his or her translation on a micro level and to choose the best translation strategy or method on a macro level, the subtitler (like the translator or the interpreter) will focus his or her attention on the addressee and the desired function of the text in the target language (Skopos theory, Reiss & Vermeer, 1984). He or she therefore has to keep in mind: who will probably watch the movie, where it is to be presented, and what genre it belongs to (western, action film, art house film etc.). A film, though, is a work of art like literature and, according to the text typology for translators put forward by Reiss (1993) and based on Bühler’s organon model, the subtitles of a fiction film are a kind of expressive text, just like literature, which implies that the primary task of a translator is the reproduction of the aesthetics of the film and the film maker. At the same time, however, due to the immediate effect they must have on their addressees, subtitles are operational texts, when translation strategies usually display a domesticating tendency. The striking point,

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however, is that this domesticating strategy necessarily has a foreignizing effect as the subtitles and the target language are generated parallel to the source-language text, with the result that the viewer is incessantly confronted with this double reception. Thus the translation cannot be transparent in the sense of Mounin (1995, p. 103) or Venutti (1995, p. 1). Snell-Hornby sees in these texts, “hardly investigated until well into the 1980s”, a specific challenge for translation, and adopts a new category of text for subtitling and surtitling, namely, the multimedial text (2006, p. 85). The fact that this is a text type which coexists with the original text and the hypertext, and which can only fulfill its function in close dependence on them, changes the way in which the addressee receives the translation. The viewer can – or thinks that he/she can – evaluate, in some cases, the accuracy or adequacy of the translation, something that can happen only in this type of translation. Furthermore, the audience can receive some of the subtitles’ statements only if they can also decode other semiotic elements of the film: facial expression, pragmatic elements in visual form, and gestures. In the case of Greece, 90% of Greeks state that they speak English (i.e. hold an A2 to B1–level certificate) (Karamitroglou, 2000), and according to a 2009 Eurobarometer survey, 44% of Greeks speak English as a second language. And they certainly have strong opinions as to how the translation they come across could be better or even correct, although their criticism of translations resides in literal equivalence and they would seldom take into account functional correspondence. Probably every viewer watching subtitled films can assert that linguistic mistakes are frequent in films subtitled for the TV. This fact though is indicative of the working conditions a subtitler is likely to encounter, the lack of editors and especially the fact that this job, in sharp contrast to its high demands, is one of the lowest-paid professional activities in the field of translation. Errors in films released at the cinema are rarer, as grand-scale productions invest more money both in subtitling and dubbing. A telling example of this is the difference in quality between dubbed TV soap-operas and dubbed large-scale film productions for children. The work of the subtitler, however, is also characterized by constraints of a technical nature relating to the number of characters per line as well as the duration and the time of their appearance (which vary across different media sources – television, cinema, DVD or video). The number of characters might be different according to the language or the medium, e.g. 34-36 characters per line for the Greek alphabet, 14-16 for the Chinese, up to 43 characters in some film festivals, and, in general, more characters can be allowed at the cinema than on TV, as the larger screen

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facilitates reading speed (Diaz-Cintas & Remael, 2007, p. 85). Generally, subtitles remain on the screen for 5-6 seconds, but within this time, the actor is likely to speak twice or three times as long as what may appear in the subtitles. For this reason, “subtitling tends to condense the original dialog by 20-40%” (Gottlieb, 2004, p. 87). From a linguistic perspective, subtitles use a simplified language. The elements that give the oral speech its vividness and consistency are particles, interjections, prosodic elements, dialectal, sociolectal and idiolectal elements, which are omitted or simplified due to either spatial and temporal constraints or to the well-known obstacles in all types of translation pertaining to dialects, idiolects or sociolects. Also, familiar words such as "yes", "no", "ok" as well as names have to be omitted, according to the Code of Good Subtitling Practice (Ivarsson and Carroll, 1998). Being an intersemiotic translation from oral to written speech, subtitles paradoxically follow the language conventions pertaining to written language, while reproducing an oral text. Swear-words or taboo words are omitted or translated in a milder way, as their power is much stronger in writing than when heard. Diaz-Cintas & Remael refer to the critical role of taboo words in Almodóvar's films, where women often use a macho language normally associated with men as a deliberate tactic manifesting their emancipation. “In La flor de mi secreto, the protagonist’s use of expletives and taboo words is therefore crucial both from a narrative and a thematic viewpoint. […] Subtitlers must therefore first identify and evaluate the impact and the emotional value of a given word or expression in the source culture, and then translate it into a target culture equivalent that is deemed appropriate in the context.” (2007, p. 196). The same narrative importance has the use of the courtesy plural form and its gradual abandonment at the end of the German film Four Minutes (by Chris Kraus), as a linguistic manifestation of the development of the relationship between the two women. And although the Greek language also has at its disposal the means for such a differentiation, the Greek subtitles use the singular form from beginning to end of the film, probably because the subtitler or the distributor found it inconceivable for the old music teacher of the prison to use the courtesy plural to address her student, the violent young murderer. This cultural difference, however, might be exactly what someone who chooses to watch this film is looking for. And above all else, subtitling is a type of translation, in which the expert, namely the one who takes the translation decisions, is not only the translator/subtitler, but also the technician who processes the subtitles, or

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even the director or the producer himself/herself, or the distributor or the television channel. Subtitling is subject to considerably more influences in comparison to other types of translation, notably financial and commercial or even juridical factors, and therefore can be manipulated to a much higher degree. It is also exposed to social, ideological and political norms, and to social and individual values and beliefs regarding right and wrong (Karamitroglou, 2000, p. 64). And norms tend by nature to inertia, stagnation and conservatism. As regards the norms which apply to subtitling, subtitles of the same series or films are remarkably different depending on the medium for which they have been produced: the television or the internet. Hobbyist subtitlers are much more daring when translating speech normally expected to be censored. And finally, in the case of the subtitled film material itself, whether it is broadcast or downloaded, it consists in its overwhelming majority of English-language films, especially American action films. According to the polysystem theory (Even-Zohar, 1978), namely, the different groups of semiotic systems that exist in a cultural sphere, subtitles are part of at least three different polysystems: polysystem films, polysystem translations and polysystem readings. ǿt is of interest, therefore, to examine their significance in these three groups. From a cinematic standpoint, they certainly effect a cut in the narrative and thus both subtitling and dubbing influence the reception aesthetics of the target language. In three-dimensional films, this effect becomes almost haptic: they can even influence the movement of the eyes, because they remain static somewhere between the various layers of the film, as a relic of another era. The current preoccupation of film researchers with subtitling, in academia as well as amongst publishers of film studies, shows an emerging interest in the polysystem of the world of film. In the last decade, Translation Studies have extensively examined subtitling and it seems that both teachers’ and students’ interest in this widespread, everyday text can only increase further. This has a special significance for the discipline, as it leads to the collection of additional data and contributions from minor languages, as is already shown in the work of Portuguese, Finnish, Danish, Swedish etc. researchers, which appears to be highly enriching for the field of Translation Studies. Since 2008 the Lilliput Prize for the best film subtitling and dubbing has been awarded at the Frankfurt Book Fair, a fact with a great symbolic importance, as it shows that the world of literature begins to recognize the value of audiovisual translation. Twenty years ago, audiovisual translators were not even admitted to the Swedish Writers Union, because they did not meet the criterion of having translated two books, according to

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Ivarsson (1992). Due to their expansion and their daily presence in our lives, subtitles dominate the way we read and receive culture and language, a fact that can also be observed in other modern media, such as e-mails, SMS messages, chat room conversations or Facebook updates. In the Code of Good Subtitling Practice, the European Association for Studies in Screen Translation remarks that, “The language should be grammatically correct since subtitles serve as a model for literacy” (Ivarsson and Carroll, 1998). Researchers from other subtitling countries provide similar results: Alves Veiga from Portugal notes that in these countries subtitles have the highest number of recipients compared with any other type of translation (2006, p. 166). Gottlieb concludes that in Denmark subtitles can be considered one of the dominant text types: they can be read by children of 6-7 years and they even provide for many children the reason why they want to learn to read at all. He also points out, with reference to similar studies in Belgium and Denmark, the political and ideological implications of the use of English related to the mere fact that the films are not dubbed but presented in the original (2004, p.p. 84, 88). As we have already noted, in Greece subtitles have the highest number of recipients compared with other types of translation and can be rightfully considered a dominant written text type in the everyday life of the country. This realization could probably help us to develop a greater awareness as to the role of these texts and audiovisual translation in general. If we consider, however, that the main feature of subtitles as a text type is its simplified and manipulative language, which functions in no other way than intersemiotically, and that subtitles are subject to technical constraints and concern mainly American action films, bearing in mind at the same time that these texts shape the reading habits of the Greeks today, then we might as well conclude once again that translation is not just a reflection of the original, but also a reflection of the social and ideological norms and trends of its time and its society.

Bibliography Alves Veiga, Maria José. Subtitling reading practices. In Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines, edited by João Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa and Teresa Seruya, 161-168. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2006. Díaz Cintas, Jorge and Aline Remael. Audiovisual Translation: Subtitling. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2007. Delabastita, Dirk. "Translation and Mass Communication: Film and TV

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Translation as Evidence of Cultural Dynamics." Babel 35:4 (1989): 193-218. Döring, Sigrun. Kulturspezifika im Film: Probleme ihrer Translation. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2006. Even-Zohar, Itamar. "The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem." In Papers in Historical Poetics. 21-28. Tel Aviv: Porter Institute, 1978. Gambier, Yves and Henrik Gottlieb, eds. (Multi)Media Translation. Concepts, Practices and Research (selected papers from the Multimedia & Translation seminar, Misano, September 1997 and the second Languages and the Media conference, Berlin, October 1998). Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamin's, 2001. Gottlieb, Henrik. Subtitling: Diagonal Translation. Perspectives: Studies in Translatology. MTP: Copenhagen, 101-121, 1994. —. Subtitles, Translation & Idioms. PhD Thesis. University of Copenhagen, 1997. —. “Language-political implications of subtitling.” In Topics in audiovisual translation, edited by Pilar Orero, 83-100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Ivarsson, Jan. Subtitling for the media. Stockholm: TransEdit, 1992. Ivarsson, Jan and Mary Carroll. Subtitling. Simrishamn: TransEdit, 1998. Karamitroglou, Fotios. Towards a Methodology for the Investigation of Norms in Audiovisual Translation: The Choice between Subtitling and Revoicing in Greece. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Koliodimos, Dimitris. 80 years of foreign cinema in Greece. Athens: Oxy, 2005. Luyken, Georg-Michael et al. Overcoming language barriers in television, dubbing and subtitling for the European audience. Manchester: European Institute for the Media, 1991. Mason, Ian. “Speaker meaning and reader meaning: preserving coherence in screen translating”. In Babel: the Cultural and Linguistic Barriers Between Nations, edited by Rainer Kölmel and Jerry Payne, 13-24. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1989. Mounin, Georges. Les belles infidels. Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1955. Pavlidou, Dora. “Why Greeks don’t watch foreign series in the newspaper,” To Vima, November 8, 2010. Accessed: 30.12.2011. http://www.tovima.gr/culture/article/?aid=348040 Reiß, Katharina. Texttyp und Übersetzungsmethode – Der operative Text. Heidelberg: Julius Groos, 1993. Reiß, Katharina & Vermeer, Hans-Josef. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1984.

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Snell-Hornby, Mary. The Turns of Translation Studies. New paradigms or shifting points? Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translatorǯs Invisibility: A History of Translation. London-New York: Routledge, 1995. Greek National Book Centre (EKEVI) 2004. Accessed: 30.12.2011 http://www.ekebi.gr/frontoffice/portal.asp?cpage=node&cnode=424 Institute of Audio-Visual Media 2007. Accessed: 30.12.2011 http://www.publicissue.gr/128/iom-media-2007/

STILLING THE FLOW OF SIGNS: EVERYDAY CREATIVE ACTIONS AND THE DISCONTINUITIES OF MUSEUM AND GALLERY DISPLAY CHRIS DORSETT AND SACHIYO GODA

Figure 1. Julian Rosefeldt: Asylum: Walk-through: Level 3. BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Video. 2004.

Disorienting Exhibits The online archive of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead (UK) includes a video ‘walk-through’ of Julian Rosefeldt’s installation piece Asylum (archive.balticmill.com, 2004). The darkened gallery and the archivist’s hand-held camera ensure a low-grade experience in comparison with the dazzling nine-screen cinematic artwork that visitors to the BALTIC actually encountered. Whilst this short video has none of the production values of Rosefeldt’s film-making, it is surprising how well the impromptu recording captures the moment when one of the projections cuts out in order to rewind. Amidst the nine flickering screens, one image suddenly disappears in the cavernous space. At this point hesitation prompts a level of disorientation more familiar in cinemas than

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galleries. When a film ends and the lights go up to reveal the environment in which you have been sitting, there is a momentary puncturing of one’s spectatorial engagement. Viewing Asylum involved a similar jolt into bewilderment. Once one screen had gone blank others rapidly followed suit leaving absolutely ‘nothing’ to respond to until your interpretive faculties were able to engage with the gallery interior. This did not happen immediately. Having introduced this disorienting experience we will not linger on the undoubted quality of Asylum. The nine projected scenes that Rosefeldt peopled with immigrant Asian flower sellers, cooks and prostitutes are only relevant to our topic as the disappearing content of an exhibit. It is the blankness that interests us, the blankness that detaches the exhibition visitor from his or her capacity to be an exhibition spectator. Previous work on this momentary rupturing of semiosis informs our discussion: for example, at the 1984 British Art Show a sculpture regularly fell apart in front of its viewers (see Dorsett, 2008 and Dorsett, 2011). Poised before the collapsed sculpture, the ability to adjust one’s interpretive faculties from the whole object to its constituent parts was frustrated. The separate parts had lost their adaptation to the spectator, an experience that was like being given a cup of coffee when you expect tea. For a moment the taste is not one thing or the other, neither coffee nor tea. When an expectation is unfulfilled in this way we often cannot interpret the experience at all. After a few seconds I was able to rationalize this coffee-for-tea experience (I do not know what else to call it) as a regression to the working conditions of the studio. The separate parts had lost their adaptation to the spectator. Like any serendipitous arrangement of materials on a studio floor, the horizontal disposition made it much harder to understand how, of all the sculptures these bits might become, a small rounded piece of wood and a little dish of hammered metal could come together quite as exquisitely as they had. The collapsed exhibit had restored the improvisatory moment in which a sculptor does not know what it will take for the parts to become a whole. (Dorsett, 2011, n. p.) In this paper we propose that a sudden stilling of the flow of interpretations offers, from the point of view of the exhibition visitor, an interesting example of the penetration of everyday studio life into the process of making meanings in exhibitions. By this we mean that the coffee-for-tea experience allows the exhibition viewer to catch a glimpse of the artist’s unsettling improvisatory moments that, on a day-to-day basis, inspire and devastate in equal measure.

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Disrupting Indexicality Let us take another example of a broken exhibit. Marcel Duchamp’s (1887–1968) famous Large Glass or Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even depicts a sequence of fantastical mechanical actions inscribed across the surface of two large sheets of plate glass. This artwork was constructed to stand in the middle of an exhibition space so that its diagrammatic images of grinding wheels, sieves, levers and pistons – apparently the parts of some mad agricultural machine – are traced out against the surrounding interior of the gallery. This floating image of mechanico-sexual reproduction is pitted against the concept of pictorial representation. Duchamp worked on the Large Glass between 1915 and 1923 during a period in which he was, like many of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century, challenging the retinal basis of visual art. Here we draw your attention to a proposed subtitle for the artwork found in the artist’s famous Green Box notebook – ‘delay in glass’, a phrase that seems to insist that ‘the thing in question’ is anything but a picture (Duchamp, 1960, n. p.). And so the Large Glass was meant to draw our attention to its own thingly postponement of interpretive engagement, a deferment that is like the delay in meaningfulness that holds apart Man Friday’s walk along the beach from Robinson Crusoe’s interpretation of his footprints in the sand. In other words we are talking about the kind of semiotic relationship that Charles Sanders Peirce called an indexical sign (see Short, 2004). Duchamp seems to emphasize the material index of artistic production by leaving the Large Glass in an attic for several months so that a layer of dust formed across the surface of the artwork. His notebook records: ‘this dust will be a kind of colour’ (Duchamp, 1960, n. p.). The influential critic Rosalind Krauss (1977) thought that this use of dust resembled the indexical nature of photographic processes such as Man Ray’s famous photograms (images made by ‘placing objects on light-sensitive paper, exposing the ensemble to light, and then developing the result’) (Krauss, 1977, p. 203). Here Krauss linked Peircian semiotics to the intellectual life of artists, opening up a debate about intention and interpretation that has continued to unfold for the past three decades. Unfortunately, the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even was badly damaged in an accident. Whilst being returned from an exhibition in 1926, the glass was smashed into a thousand pieces. Out of sight of the exhibition viewer, Duchamp painstakingly put the Large Glass back together again so that it could remain the central component of the collection of his work in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Here we can add

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further definition to our discussion of moments that disrupt the exhibition experience: the repaired surface of this artwork does not inhibit the making of meanings; rather, the fractured glass joins the layer of dust as just one more thingly postponement of artistic action – a physical trace that can be interpreted, despite its accidental origins, as an index of the artist’s ‘work’. This is different from the blank screens in Rosefeldt’s Asylum or the coffee-for-tea moment at the British Art Show where the exhibition visitor is caught in the momentary emptiness of asignification. The stilling of signs transforms the extra-ordinary act of viewing artworks into an approximation of the ordinary routines of making them. Here we take the view that the hotly debated opposition between creative production and aesthetic consumption – the sort of discussion that has attracted the critical attention of writers such as Jacques Rancière (2009) – is more directly experienced when we fail to see an object in an exhibition as an index of an object in a studio. Paradoxically, at the moment of asignification, a gallery is like a studio in that the exhibition visitor is situated in the same ‘nervous present’ that Brian O’Doherty (the artisttheoretician to whom the world owes the term ‘white cube’) attributes to the pressure of unborn ideas within creative practice. (O’Doherty, 2007, p. 18) At the very least, to focus on the experience of interpretive blankness is a way of, as English idiom has it, ‘taking a breather’ from the debate about the relationship between creative agency and creative reception. As a result we can talk about parallel states of mind that have, as this paper discusses, descriptive relevance when it comes to our routine engagement with the materiality of artworks. On an everyday basis, in both the gallery and the studio, the stilling of signs is part of the ebb and flow of our attentiveness.

Figure 2. Studio and gallery facilities at Northumbria University.

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Audience-free Practices When discussing the everydayness of artworks, let us not forget the art school, arguably the most interesting example of the artistic everyday. Here we look past the culture of ‘renown’ that spotlights a handful of artists who, in any given year, happen to achieve a high-profile career. Famous names are no more than schematic markers for the generations of art school graduates who embed themselves in contemporary life as a broad constituency of creative workers applying, day after day, art school routines to the aesthetics of everyday life. Many continue to make art in a mode of practice that could be called ‘audience-free’. We have borrowed this term from the harpsichordist Christopher Hogwood who, in 2008, initiated a series of clavichord recordings that explored the 18th century preference for private musical study. He cites living-memory accounts of Johann Sebastian Bach’s passion for endlessly revising compositions on his clavichord, an instrument with such a small sound that it seems to have been invented for a musician’s quiet contemplation of their own musicmaking. Hogwood reminds us that ‘until the early years of the nineteenth century much keyboard music was not concert material, but conceived for “audience-free” performance’. (Hogwood, 2008, n. p.) With the development of doctoral research programmes in art schools, the audience-free routine of studio work has taken on new levels of interest that are difficult to view from the indexical perspective of an exhibition viewer. Disorienting moments such as the coffee-for-tea experience are, perhaps, the closest one can get. For the broader art school constituency, the opportunity to undertake studio-based PhDs opens a door onto an arena of research that does not easily translate into the interpretative process of making meanings with artworks on display. As a result, in this paper, it is our intention to examine the distinctiveness of the audience-free world of artist-researchers by reporting on a studentsupervisor dialogue that developed between us, the authors, during the practical stage of a doctoral project entitled ‘An Investigation into the Japanese Notion of Ma: Practicing ma through the process of making sculpture’. (Goda, 2010) The term ‘ma’ belongs to a Japanese aesthetic tradition in which there is an emphasis on rhythmic instability, on the failure to meet expectations within the continuity of experience. Discontinuous ma-like encounters can be seen as tiny coffee-for-tea moments puncturing the flow of everyday experience. Let us offer an example. The traditional garden ‘deer-scarer’ known as a shishiodoshi generates a startling percussive sound as its pivoted length of bamboo strikes a rock after discharging the trickling

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stream of water that has built up to tipping point in the hollow stem. Visitors to temple gardens in Japan will be familiar with the a-rhythmic clattering of these devices. The expectant pause created by the unpredictability of this repetitive sound is an example of ma. In the Japanese language the term can refer to any sudden interruption, poignant interval or meaningfully discontinuous experience. Ma is an affect of rhythm or timing in poetry, drama, music or, even, everyday conversation. It is also a response to accentuated spatial dispositions in paintings, sculptures, and architectural environments (i.e. meaningful ‘voids’ in a pictorial composition). As a result ma is difficult to pin down, even for the Japanese; because it is an entirely relational concept, the word is only intelligible within the most subjective engagements with temporal and spatial discontinuities. From a Western perspective the key characteristic of ma is the unification it brings to the diversity of aesthetic responses. Ma is a term that arises frequently, in a negative sense, in our everyday interactions with others, for example: When I was listening to a story…a serious story from a close friend, I yawned carelessly. And she looked as if she blamed me. That is an example of the kind of moment in which I feel ‘bad-ma’. (Goda, 2010, p. 10)

These are the words of the actor Kotomi Takahata describing a moment of awkwardness in order to illustrate bad-ma. Kotomi might equally have described a heightened instance of silent interpersonal contact in the embarrassingly cramped spaces of a commuter train in Tokyo. Bad-ma is often simultaneously temporal and spatial. This suggestive and expressive term, perhaps because it recognizes that a moment of disorientating discomfort sends out shock waves that are coextensive in time and space, is an interesting way of exploring the unstable rhythms that allow the uncontrollability of creative action to fill out studio work with spatiotemporal awkwardness. As a result, this paper will apply the concept of bad-ma to the authors’ studio routines as artist-researchers, routines that involve the technique of ‘distressing’, a process derived from the practices of skilled artisans who enhance their products with simulated marks of age or use.

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Figure 3. Sachiyo Goda: ‘What is ma? Experiment 5’. Work in progress. Distressed polythene. 2009.

Figure 4. Chris Dorsett: ‘Quiet Varnish Series (Lira da braccio by Giovanni Maria of Brescia)’. Work in progress. Photographic print and graphite. 2010.

Everyday Distress In her recent book Everyday Aesthetics (2007), the design historian Yuriko Saito often refers to the poetic role of scratches, stains and faded colours in the Japanese aesthetic tradition. Like Michel de Certeau’s famously worn tools at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, wear and tear offers us access to a tension between present and past conditions, to the physical facts that prove that the material environment has been manipulated by everyday use. (Saito, 2007, p. 182; de Certeau, 1984, p.

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21) However, this indexical aspect of the ‘distressed’ surfaces of objects does not provoke bad-ma unless the scratches or stains have effectively unfabricated – that is, spoilt – the completeness of fabrication. Thus our interest in the ‘distressing’ technique is focused on the undoing of both material and semiotic coherence. In this sense the indexicality of wear and tear, whilst certainly necessary to historical appreciations of material culture, is not sufficient for artists to establish a form of research that is genuinely, to use the key concept, ‘practice-led’. If we are talking about undertaking research through rather than about creative practice (the central proposition of the practice-led approach), then bad-ma may help us apply conventional research methods to unconventional studio research practices. When we describe these practices as ‘distressing’, our technical term retains its specialized meaning but, simultaneously, resonates with the sense of personal adversity more usually associated with actual distress. This is a good way to evoke the methodological bad-ma that occurs in relation to, on the one hand, breaking down the surfaces of polythene sheets with a heated clothes iron (Figure 3) or, on the other, covering over facsimile images of valued museum objects with improvisatory drawings (Figure 4).

Figure 5. Sachiyo Goda in her studio.

We propose that creative methods which distress both artwork and artist, the processes we use to undertake practice-led research, are, precisely, audience-free in that important parts of the experience lie beyond the indexical, interpretive focus of exhibition audiences. In the studio, when the ironing has to stop because the noxious fumes have become too dangerous to stay in the room, or the drawing process begins to destroy the integrity of the object it is meant to enhance, bad-ma impairs

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our physical and psychological engagement. For example, in the gallery only the bewilderment of coffee-for-tea experiences can match this level of discontinuity and incoherence. We will now consider these distressing methods, seemingly out of sight of exhibition interpretation, as a variant of Action Research methodology, an investigatory approach often used by practice-led researchers in the arts.

Distressing Methods The founder of social psychology, Kurt Lewin (1890–1947), coined the term ‘action research’ in 1946. The method is described as ‘a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and factfinding about the result of the action’. (cited in Burnes, 2006, p. 140) Because the method is grounded in the active experience of the researcher it has seemed well suited to practice-led research by artists. When the spiral of steps unfolds in a studio activity, the four actions (plan, act, observe, and reflect) are often increased to five in order to capture the creative momentum that keeps artists going when success eludes them – for example, when the polythene fumes become intolerable and the ironing has to stop. As a result, for artists the action research cycle plays out in the following manner: 1) Experiencing problems when one’s values are negated. 2) Imagining ways of overcoming the problems. 3) Acting on a solution. 4) Evaluating the outcomes of these actions. 5) Modifying the problems, ideas and actions in the light of these evaluations. This five-step formula is based on changes made to the action research process by the educationist Jack Whitehead (1989) who felt that Lewin’s original scheme ignored personal incentive, the motivation to continue when there is little sign of progress. The key Whitehead experience is that of finding oneself to be a living contradiction, a form of personal dissonance that occurs when a researcher cannot act in accordance with his or her values. We associate this dissonance with bad-ma. For example, at the start of a day’s work in the studio ironing polythene should feel as creative and aesthetically fulfilling as any other fine art technique. However, when the studio fills with fumes, this idea cannot be sustained and good-ma turns into bad-ma. As a result the action research cycle looks like this:

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1) As one begins to work, ironing the polythene is creative and aesthetically fulfilling and alive with a potential for good-ma. 2) The studio fills with fumes and bad-ma is experienced. 3) The artist responds to herself as a living contradiction. 4) The discontinuity of not being able to avoid moments of personal dissonance is addressed. 5) The problems, ideas and actions are modified in order to balance reoccurring moments of bad-ma within the flow of studio creativity. The acceptance, in steps 4 and 5, of personal dissonance is, for a Japanese artist, a reversing of bad-ma into good-ma. Thus the fracturing of the action research cycle modifies the interface between planning and acting in steps 1 to 3 and reflecting and acting in steps 4 to 5. Following this modification, momentum has returned to the flow of creative action. Let us now explore bad-ma in a non-Japanese context. In Figure 6 we see a Nicolo Amati violin made in 1649 that forms part of the Hill Collection at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Hill’s bequest stipulated that the instruments should never be played. When this violin was in use, or so we are told, it was the sonority of Amati’s varnish that earned his instruments their reputation. Now that this particular product of the Amati workshop is permanently on display, the famous varnish is an entirely visual experience (the colour is particularly admired). However, within each visual encounter, museum visitors can also experience the nonsonorous presence of the violin as a form of visual alterity. Here the business of looking seems to have neutralized but not abandoned the possibility of listening to the instrument. The kind of auditory engagement that is so evocatively absent is described by Jean-Luc Nancy (2007) as being: a complex of returns [renvois] whose binding is the resonance or “sonance” of sound, an expression that one should hear … as much from the side of sound itself, or of its emission, as from the side of its reception or its listening: it is precisely from one to the other that it “sounds”. (Nancy, 2007, p. 16)

Accordingly, it is a characteristic of listening that, as sound traverses an environment, the arrival and departure of wave after wave of sonic energy ‘resounds’ through every physical body that sonority is able to penetrate. Nancy’s point is that, at any given moment, the listener is just one of many ‘re-sounding’ bodies. In the Ashmolean Museum the Hill Collection can only hint at this lost unity of the sound world. The exhibits wrap up our scanning of the display environment in what Nancy calls a

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Figure 6. The ‘Alard’ violin by Nicolo Amati on display in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

‘motionless “at the same time”’. (Nancy, 2007, p. 16) Here everything comes into view as if it has simultaneously fallen before the beam of a single headlight. Nevertheless, within this beam the visual beauty of the

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varnish is an attention-grabbing trace of past sonorities and the viewer can easily imagine ‘the come-and-go between the source and the ear’. (Nancy, 2007, p. 16) It is our contention that this friction between visual simultaneity and audible contemporaneity creates ma-rich exhibition viewing.

Figure 7. Chris Dorsett: ‘Quiet Varnish Series (The ‘Alard’ violin by Nicolo Amati, 1649)’. Photographic print, graphite and French polish. 2009.

However, when the violin is photographed and reproduced as a highresolution same-size print in a studio, the artist finds that the opportunity to draw on this facsimile destroys the good-ma that enlivened the gap between the visual and the audible. As a result, the action research cycle proceeds towards bad-ma as follows: 1) The visual presence of the Amati varnish is aesthetically stimulating and, as one prepares to draw, it is also alive with creative expectations generated by the poignant absence of sonority. The artist thinks of this poignancy as good-ma. 2) The drawing begins to blot out the surface of the varnish and the good-ma is eclipsed as the flow of drawing ideas comes to a stop. This cessation is experienced as bad-ma. 3) The artist responds to himself as a living contradiction.

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As the Amati varnish disappears, the artist-researcher ceases to imagine what the auditory otherness of the violin would look like. The graphic improvisation is brought to a halt, not by the absence of Nancy’s re-sonance, but by Whitehead’s contradictory state of personal dissonance. In Figure 7 we can see that the facsimile image has been distressed with graphite and French polish leaving dense sheens of pencil marks and layers of shellac that do not really operate as a drawing. Indeed, mundane materiality has started to approximate the practices of everyday violin production. In this sense, the Amati violin has been ‘unfabricated’ before our eyes – its completeness has been spoilt. The paradox is that this apparently unredeemable state of bad-ma can, in the hands of an artistresearcher, play a pivotal role in driving the creative process forward. We are now in a position to describe how the artist-researcher returns to a state of good-ma even though steps 4 and 5 of the action research cycle have been eliminated by the ‘unfabrication’ of the drawing. The key term here is, rather surprisingly, ‘flow’.

Distressing Flow The concept of ‘flow’ developed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi describes the seamlessness of actions that are enjoyed because they are intrinsically rewarding. This concept, we are told, was based on the ability of artists to optimize their studio routines, to make routine valuable in its own right. (Csíkszentmihályi, 1988) Interestingly, ‘flow’ includes situations that are neither valued nor enjoyed. For example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s stories of imprisonment and Charles Lindbergh’s description of the physical and mental ordeal of his solo Atlantic flight are said to be examples of flow emerging within anxiety and danger. However, whilst we ‘flow’ in a sequence of steps not too different from those in the action research cycle, Csíkszentmihályi says we do not reflect. This is because Csíkszentmihályi’s concept operates non-dualistically – the ‘me’ is absent. (Logan, 1985, p. 86) In other words, once the awkwardness of bad-ma sets in, the ‘doing of it’ prevails and the ‘what it does for me’ disappears. (Logan, 1985, p. 86) At this point the reflective capacity that we have associated with the fifth step in the action research cycle ceases to be relevant.

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Figure 8. The Wheelwright, Plate 1 Vol. 3 Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts, edited by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert, 1751–1772.

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Looking at the Amati violin in the Ashmolean Museum we can imagine the sonorous ‘flow’ of Jean-Delphin Alard’s (a past owner) playing or the technical ‘flow’ of the instrument-makers at the Cremona workshop. Given that we now know that ‘flow’ can involve experiences that are both dangerous and anxious, we can also appreciate that the history of this object is not an uninterrupted unfolding of signification. In his essay The Plates of the Encyclopedia (1989), Roland Barthes proposes a formula that captures the role of asignification in museum and gallery environments. He refers to the illustrations in Denis Diderot’s (1713-1784) Encyclopédie which were divided into a lower section featuring equipment or raw material laid out in inventorial rows and an upper ‘vignette’ in which the same items are shown in use within lively scenes of human productivity or consumption. In the lower section it is as if a universe of disconnected mechanical parts exists independently of any obligation to a mechanistic whole. We are shown nothing but fascinating details – component after component, cog by cog. However, in the section above, we view the utilizations of parts, we see what happens when all manner of thing is gainfully employed in busy rooms or cavernous ateliers. Diderot’s plates insist on the separation of these two domains. Following the paradigm-syntagm binary of semiotics, Barthes claims that the lower zones of these plates are like paradigmatic units awaiting configuration in a linguistic statement and the vignettes are the resulting syntagmatic combinations that bring about meaning. If you view each illustration from bottom to top you follow a trajectory in which the material world is transformed into social and cultural significance. But if your eyes scan from top to bottom you descend through the realm of the instrumental into a zone of disconnected, non-compliant thinglyness. From this lower zone, the vignette above appears to be too full of meanings for its own good. The many types of coffee-for-tea moments described throughout this paper, in rupturing semiotic coherence, are in accord with the bad-ma of non-compliant things. In Barthes’ formulation, this disruptive presence can subvert the ascending journey towards the vignettes giving us a model for the interpenetration of the everyday studio into the semiotic zone of exhibition interpretation. Equally, the non-compliance of museum or gallery displays can help us understand the audience-free experience of studio production in which the flow of creative actions forces the artistresearcher to engage unreflectively with the material world. This paper has sought to make a case for a form of fine art research that is not modelled on acts of interpretive reception. If artists are going to undertake doctoral research, and art school tutors supervise practice-led PhDs, the process will not necessarily proceed from objects to

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interpretations, but, conversely, move downward from the ever-changing semiotic busy-ness of the ‘vignette’ to the semiotic stillness of a brand new object in the world. Indeed, the moments of bad-ma we have described in this paper are best understood as a nascent stilling of signs that heralds the possibility of interpretation without offering any clues about actual meaning.

Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, the Ashmolean Museum and Taylor Institution Library for allowing the reproduction of material from their archives and collections. Tucker Densley took the photographs of the Ashmolean Museum’s stringed instruments used in the drawings reproduced in Figures 4 and 7.

Bibliography archive.balticmill.com. (2004). Julian Rosefeldt: Asylum: Walk-through: Level 3. Retrieved March 14, 2011, from website: http://archive.balticmill.com/index.php?itemid=30529 Barthes, R. (1989 [1980]). The Plates of the Encyclopedia. In S. Sontag (ed.), Barthes: Selected Writings (pp 218–235). London: Fontana Press. Burnes, B. (2006). Kurt Lewin and the Planned Approach to Change: A Re- appraisal. In J. V. Gallos (Ed). Organization Development: A Jossey-Bass Reader, Rochester, NY: Jossey-Bass. Dorsett, C. (2007). Exhibitions and their Prerequisites. In J. Rugg & M. Sedgwick (Eds.), Issues in Curating, Contemporary Art and Performance (pp 77–87). Bristol and Chicago: Intellect Press. —. (2008). Glimpsing the archive, In J. Bacon (Ed.), Arkive City (pp.126– 131). Belfast: Interface University of Ulster & Locus+. —. (2011 in press). Things and Theories: the unstable presence of exhibited objects. In S. Dudley, A. J. Barnes, J. Binnie, J. Petrov, & J. Walklate, (Eds.) The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation. London and New York: Routledge. Duchamp, M. (1960). The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. A typographic version by Richard Hamilton of MARCEL DUCHAMP'S Green Box translated by George Heard Hamilton. London: Percy Lund, Humphries & Co, Ltd. de Certeau, M. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Csíkszentmihályi, M. (1988). The flow experience and human psychology. In M. Csíkszentmihályi & I. Selega Csíkszentmihályi. (Eds.), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (pp.15– 35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goda, S. (2010). An Investigation into the Japanese Notion of Ma: Practicing ma through the process of making sculpture. Unpublished PhD thesis. Northumbria University. Hogwood, C. (2003). The Secret Bach. In C. Hogwood, The Secret Bach, Works for Clavichord (CD sleeve notes). Metronome Recordings Ltd. Krauss, R. E. (1977). Notes on the Index: Part 1. In R. E. Krauss (1985) (Ed.), The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (pp. 196–209). Cambridge, MA.: The MIT Press. Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. J. Soc. 2(4), 34–46. Logan, R. D. (1988). Flow in solitary ordeals. In M. Csíkszentmihályi & I. Selega Csíkszentmihályi. (Eds.), Optimal Experience: Psychological Studies of Flow in Consciousness (pp. 172–180). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. (1985). The "Flow Experience" in Solitary Ordeals. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 25(4), 79–89. Matsuoka, S. (2000). Ma: twenty years on. Tokyo: Tokyo Art University. Nancy, J-L. (2007). Listening. New York: Fordham University Press. O’Doherty, B. (2007). Studio and Cube: On the relationship between where art is made and where art is displayed. New York: Buell Center / FORuM Project Publication. Rancière, J. (2009). The Emancipated Spectator. G Elliot (Trans), London: Verso. Short, T. L. (2004). The Development of Peirce’s Theory of Signs. In C. Misak. (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Peirce (pp. 214–240). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, J. (1989) Creating a Living Educational Theory from Questions of the Kind, “How Do I Improve My Practice?”, Cambridge Journal of Education, 19 (1), pp. 41–52. Retrieved January 9, 2009, from website: http://people.bath.ac.uk/edsajw/writings/livtheory.html

EVERYDAY PRACTICES ON THE INTERNET AND THE EXPANSION OF CROWDSOURCED TRANSLATION TITIKA DIMITROULIA

1. Introduction The purpose of this article is to describe the translation of everyday multilingual, scriptural, multimodal and multisemiotic writing on the Internet, a task which is no longer – or at least not only – performed on a professional basis, and thereby as a commercial service offered for a fee. It is indeed also very often carried out on a non-professional and/or voluntary basis, by non-professional but also by volunteer professional translators, fully assisted by machine translation software and a plethora of collaborative, open-source, software applications.1 Therefore, this article lies at the intersection of at least three already largely interdisciplinary fields: (1) communication and media sociology, i.e. the study of changes that technology has brought to the media, communication, culture and society, with emphasis on the tribe-community theory; (2) theory of the everyday, particularly as shaped by Michel de Certeau and transferred to internet communication by Marianne Franklin; and (3) translation theory, which is the study of translation as a product, a process and a complex social phenomenon. This article deals with a form of computer-mediated translation in the context of present day computer-mediated intercultural communication in cyberspace.2 1

See, for example, the list of tools for massive collaborative translation http://www.wiki-translation.com/Processes+and+tools+for+massively+collab orative+translation; and best practices for collaborative translations, http://collaborative-translation-patterns.wiki4us.com/tiki-index.php, accessed April 23, 2013. 2 For an overview of participatory and crowdsourced translation practices and their impact on translation and translation studies, see ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), The Translator 18, 2. Special issue: « Non-professionals

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Having conducted a survey over the Internet as regards the supply of and demand for non-professional translation services, we shall attempt to describe the conditions in which non-professional translation develops, as another, new “practice of the everyday” – according to Michel de Certeau’s concept of the everyday3. Such conditions include an interconnected hypermodernity, among other practices which it helps diffuse and with which it takes part in an ‘antidiscipline’,4 shaped by all the everyday practices and tactics of ordinary, dominated people, the "marginal majority" who endeavour to bypass the systems of power and domination.5 These are consumers-non-producers who are, in fact, secretly producers, according to de Certeau (who foreshadows, somehow, the Web 2.0 theory of consumers/users-producers). Our sole purpose shall be to ask some initial questions on the status and impact of non-professional translation (crowdsourcing)6 systematically used in these new everyday scriptural practices of the network, and to examine the essential dimensions of our relation with the Other.

2. cyberspace, a new informational ecosystem, its tribes and communities a) A new ecosystem, an ‘antidiscipline’ system Defined by Pierre Lévy as the new communication space opened by the global interconnection of computers, the term cyberspace “refers not only to the material infrastructure of digital communications, but also to translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”. Cf also the comprehensive contribution of Alain Désilets, “Translation Wikified: How will Massive Online Collaboration Impact the World of Translation”, in the Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 29 (London, 2007), http://www.mtarchive.info/Aslib-2007-Desilets.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 3 Michel de Certeau, The practice of everyday life. Transl. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See for example his analysis on the transition from the medieval anti-hero Everyman to Nobody, Nemo, following the quotation from Musil’s The Man without Qualities, page 1 ff., that can be applied also to Internet ordinary users. 4 The term ‘antidiscipline’ is borrowed from Foucault, ibid., xiv-xv. 5 Michel de Certeau, ibid. 6 The term crowdsourcing was initially proposed by Jeff Howe with no reference to translation. Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing”, Wired 14.06.2006, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html, accessed April 23, 2013; Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2008).

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the oceanic universe of information it holds, as well as the human beings who navigate and nourish that universe.”7 One might even argue, following Joël de Rosnay’s perspective, that the Internet is neither a new medium nor a new information and communication technology, but instead a whole “informational ecosystem”,8 “a relationship technology” (RT), self-organizing and producing a new culture, cyberculture.9 This collective and collaborative community culture is so open and democratic in its essence that Joël de Rosnay goes as far as to speak of the emergence of a new “proletariat”, the “pronetariat”, armed with new electronic tools, struggling against traditional infocapitalists, owners of mass media such as TV, radio, newspapers etc., and fighting for the freedom of the ordinary man, of the “man without qualities”: Pronetariat or pronetarians (from the Greek pro, “before”, “in front of”, “forward”, but also “in favour of”, and the English Net, which means network and is also the colloquial word used in French for the Internet –le “Net”) are two terms I use to refer to a new class of users of digital networks who are able to create, produce, broadcast and sell open or nonproprietary digital content by applying the principles of the ‘new new economy’. 10

This pronetariat emerges from the great marginalised majority of people, who are considered to consume culture without producing it: Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.11

7

Pierre Lévy, Cyberculture (Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997), 17. Joël de Rosnay, L’homme symbiotique (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 100. 9 See the 4 web editions according to de Rosnay: Web 1.0 = top-down Internet. Web 2.0 = user-generated contents. Web 3.0 = intuitive, semantic web Web 4.0 = pervasive, symbiotic web http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x47z47_les-quatre-web-de-joel-de-rosnaydu_tech, accessed April 23, 2013. 10 Joël de Rosnay and Carlo Revelli, La révolte du pronétariat (Paris : Fayard, 2006), 12. Our translation. 11 De Certeau, ibid., xvi-xvii (and passim). 8

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The practices of this silent majority, excluded from cultural production, form in cyberspace, according to Franklin, “the ordinary users everyday as they commute and commune in the cyberspaces of a noncommercial, openly accessible Internet”,12 where “everyday practices indelibly mark, co-construct, and potentially contest given socio-political economic spaces and social orders”.13 Placing emphasis on the masses but also on their media, de Rosnay adheres thus, in a way, to the hacker movement, defined as a movement supporting the free flow of knowledge and ideas, with the aim of enabling people to use their intellect freely and produce new and innovative ideas.14 This flow is guaranteed only in the “second Internet”– the first being that “of a world of gargantuan electronic financial movements twenty-four hours a day” – as described by Franklin: an Internet that relies upon easy, affordable access to computers and telephone lines, relatively “low-tech” hardware and software configurations, and viable transmission pathways for different technoeconomic political and geographical situations. These Internet’s cyberspaces are where people talk-write about their everyday lives, confront political and social issues of the day, muse on their (mutual) hopes and fears in what are spontaneous, negotiated sorts of intercultural and intracultural exchange.15

This “second Internet” is an Internet apart as well as being part of the Internet, and its texts embody online everyday practices.16

b) Secondary orality, the narrative paradigm and ordinary writings The network has been a privileged space for development and diffusion of “subjugated knowledges”, everyday knowledges in the sense used by de Certeau, who borrows this notion from Foucault, as well as the notion of “discipline” and “surveillance – which the ordinary man escapes 12

Marianne I. Franklin, Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life (London / New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 13 Ibid, 49. 14 See Kenneth McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that apart from the permanent interference of everyday practices inside and outside the network, hackers now also meet in metalabs and form new communities, both virtual and real ones. See www.hackerspaces.org, accessed April 23, 2013. , 15 Ȃarianne ǿ. Franklin, ibid., 2 ff. 16 Ibid.

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by means of intersubjective interactions, ruses performed in his everyday practices, in the ordinary ways of doing things in everyday life.17 Though originally a medium for the elite, the Internet has subsequently become the popular medium par excellence (considering, of course, the digital divide), hosting the spatial and scriptural everyday narrations-ruses of those very ordinary people. These subjugated knowledges constitute a multifaceted everyday discourse, both written and oral – at the level of secondary orality on the network18 but also in multimedia and audiovisual format – textual and pictorial, private and public, flowing freely, encompassing all forms of texts and utterances and multiple semiotic modes. Marianne Franklin describes the cyberspace counterpart of spatial practices of the everyday,19 laying emphasis on the “plus” of the text: in an online quartier, spatial practices of the everyday can be discerned not only in the immediate on-screen content, symbols and conversations, but also in the complete or partial texts left behind in caches, indicated in deletion or “server down” notices, online statistical records like “total hits”, electronic tags like “cookies”, the server logs, email “mailboxes”, the ubiquitous hyperlink itself, the appearance and disappearance of avatars in live chat scenarios, and so on. While these are digital comings and goings, they are nonetheless actual ones, part of a whole new set of polysemic “murmurs” of the everyday that overlie those on the ground (“offline”). The texts comprising these discussions have their own particularities: those of “onlineness,” as we will see. Cyberspatial practices construct other sorts of proximity, (re)embodiment with both familiar and new tactical and/or strategic operations in play.20 This everyday discursive practice spreads through e-mails, chats, forums, blogs, social networks, videos within the framework of established – and sometimes commercial – communities that provide their members with tools and software facilitating multilingual communication and translation (subtitling on youtube, “translate” function in wordpress, collaborative work platforms, workflow management software etc.).21 On 17

Michel de Certeau, ibid., passim. Franklin, ibid., 50. Cf. Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, second edition (New York: Routledge, 2002). 19 De Certeau's assumption on the spatial dimension of discursive practices represents in a way the reality in cyberspace. de Certeau, ibid., 148, as cited by Franklin, ibid., 54. 20 Marianne I. Franklin, ibid., 62. 21 The web 2.0 specifically is also called "second web", containing social networking sites and content sharing sites, such as the ones mentioned above. See danah boyd and Nicole Ellison "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and 18

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Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, 1(2007): article 11, http://www.danah.org/papers/BlogTalksReloaded.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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the network, the ordinary man meets experts as well as non-expert interlocutors; story-subjects and story-tellers, partners in a common discourse, narrators according to Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm, the homo narrans.22 As de Certeau affirms, there is “a proliferation of stories and heterogeneous operations [that] make up the patchworks of everyday life”.23 This includes ordinary writings/narrations, letters, recipes, personal diaries, notes on various subjects, invitations, evaluations, presentations, song lyrics, photos and videos, advertisements, subtitles, news and all forms of texts and discourses. It also includes political texts, texts arguing for immigrant integration, religious texts, texts concerning games, codes, routines as well as entire books and the most elementary form of everyday contact. This scriptural/textual/narrative fabric, which is multiple, multiform, multimodal and multisemiotic (images, video and audio features are usually embedded), is the expression of an equally multiform everyday activity, both material and immaterial. It needs to be translated in order to meet more or less imperative and urgent communicational needs: sharing, communicating and acting.

c) The network, its tribes, its communities The phenomenon of non-professional translation, placed in the core of this counter-cultural production and undermining the stereotypes of the translation studies discipline,24 is complex, as demonstrated by the number of terms used for it. Anthony Pym notes: unprofessional translation, paraprofessional translation, lay translation, community translation, untrained translation, crowdsourcing (by analogy with outsourcing), nonprofessional translation, collaborative translation, volunteer translation.25 O’Hagan uses the term user-generated translation, adopted also by Perrino; and Cronin uses the terms open, crowdsourced and wiki

22

Walter Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm. In the beginning”, Journal of Communication 35, 4 (1985): 74-89; Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987/1989). 23 de Certeau, ibid., 20, as translated and cited by Franklin, ibid. 51. 24 ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González, ibid., 157-158 25 Antony Pym, Translation research terms – a tentative glossary for moments of perplexity and dispute, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research _methods/ 2010_terms.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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translation.26 Désilets includes it in “Massive Online Collaboration”MOC.27 Guyon depicts the diversity of collaborative and community crowdsourced translation.28 Of course, this is not the first time in history that translators collaborate in the context of a project.29 Probably, though, it is the first time that this collaboration is so intense: the expansion of crowdsourcing is explained not only by technological innovation but also by the deep changes of our age, an era of migrations and intense cross-cultural communication through multiple strategies, covering multiple cultural needs – outside the official, institutional cultural systems.30 “The boundary between the professional translator and the amateur is no longer clear”, as O’Hagan points out,31 and professional and non-professional translators translate through various structures and with various objectives the everyday contents of the Internet, thus of our world, especially but not exclusively in Web 2.0 applications.32

26

Minako O’Hagan, “Fan Translation Networks: An Accidental Translator Training Environment?”, in Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates, ed. John Kearns (London / New York, Continuum, 2008), 158-183; Saverio Perrino, “User-generated Translation: The Future of Translation in a Web 2.0 Environment”, Journal of Specialised Translation 12 (2009): 55-78, http://jostrans.org/issue12/art_perrino.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013; Michael Cronin, “The Translation Crowd”, Revista tradumàtica 8 (2009): 1-7, http://www.fti.uab.cat/tradumatica/revista/num8/articles/04/04.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 27 Alain Désilets, ibid. Cf: A. Désilets, L. Gonzalez, S. Paquet, M. Stojanovic (2006). "Translation the Wiki Way". Proceedings of the WIKISym: 19. doi:10.1145/1149453.1149464. ISBN 1595934138. 28 André Guyon, “The ups and downs of online collaborative translation , L’ Actualité langagière 7, 1, (2010): 33, http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/favart/indexfra.html?lang=fra&lettr=indx_autr8o7vhUcC4c0s&page=9Q0FtHBZRpRk.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 29 See, for example, James St André, "Lessons from Chinese History: Translation as a Collaborative and Multi-Stage Process”, TTR 23, 1 (2010): 71-94 30 Anthony Pym, “Interview on current issues in Translation Studies”, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/2010_interview.pdf 923.4.13), accessed April 23, 2013. 31 Ibid, 97. 32 For methodological reasons, the term ‘translation’ also covers here ‘interpretation’.

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In our attempt to clarify the content and forms of crowdsourced translation, it would be useful to look at the tribes and communities of the network, whose action takes place in cyberspace as part of the real world.33 Adhering critically to the theory of neotribalism, which presents some very interesting methodological tools, we use the definition of “tribe/neo-tribe” coined by Federico Casalegno,34 as “a temporal crystallization of persons sharing pleasures, emotions and moments of empathy”; whereas the “community” “is formed by autonomous individuals who have different roles and goals to achieve”35 – yet making a distinction, following Pierre Lévy’s perspective, between the community36 and the virtual community. Levy defines the latter as “simply a group of people who are in contact by means of the cyberspace. The extent of this may vary from a simple temporary e-mailing list to virtual communities whose members maintain strong and long-lasting intellectual, emotional and social relationships, such as the Well community described by Howard Rheingold.37 There is thus a continuum of possible intensity or involvement in virtual communities”.38 In both cases we are dealing, in some way, with community relationships, 33

Cf. the European Commission contribution to the matter, published in May 2012 and defining, describing and evaluating crowdsourcing and its impact on translation practice. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/crowdsourcing_translation_ en.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. 34 On the notion of tribe, see Michel Maffesoli, Le temps des tribus (Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde, La petite vermillon, 2003) Du nomadisme. Vagabondages initiatiques (Paris Editions de la Table Ronde, 2006); “Tribalisme postmoderne. De l’ identité à l’identification », http://1libertaire.free.fr/Maffesoli04.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 35 Federico Casalegno, “Entre tribalisme et communautés; des configurations sociales émergeantes dans le cyberspace”, http ://www.ceaq-sorbonne.org/ node.php?id=97&elementid=94 ; accessed April 23, 2013. Our translation. 36 On the notion of virtual community, see also Serge Proulx; Louise Poissant et Michel Sénégal (eds.), Communautés virtuelles : penser et agir en réseau ( Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006) ; Serge Proulx, Françoise MassitFolléa et Bernard Conein (eds.), Internet, une utopie limitée. Nouvelles régulations, nouvelles solidarités (Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005); Serge Proulx and Guillaume Latzko-Toth, “La virtualité comme catégorie pour penser le social : l’usage de la notion de communauté virtuelle”, Sociologie et sociétés XXXII, 2 (2000): 99-122. 37 Howard Rheingold, “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community,” in Linda M. Harasim (ed.), Global Networks: Computer Networks and International Communication (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 57–80. 38 Pierre Lévy quoted by Federico Casalegno, ibid.

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although communities constitute “structured aggregations among individuals, which are targeted, hierarchical and instrumental”, whereas tribes are “more ephemeral forms of association, transversal and empathic, among people who play in the theatre of everyday life”39 – without excluding the element of empathy from the formation of community. Starting with tribes (which can under some circumstances be transformed into communities) acting in the context of cultural production, we can mention groups of fans of video games, films, comics etc., such as scanlation (scan & translation) groups, whose members scan Japanese manga comics and translate the dialogues (sometimes they even write new ones, in which case we use the term scangine); fansubbing groups, engaging in subtitling animation programs (also Japanese), known as anime; fanfiction or fanfic groups, formed around fiction written by fans of television series, films, animation (anime), video games, books or comics, inspired by the universe and/or the characters of the work they admire. These stories can also be translated on a voluntary and nonprofessional basis. Some theorists argue that scanlation and fansubbing practices can be perceived as a resistance to mainstream aesthetics and politics in a globalized world, explaining thus the contribution of those practices of participatory culture40 to the antidiscipline of de Certeau.41

39

Ibid. Cf. Samuel Archibald’s genealogy of participatory culture, “Épître aux Geeks: Pour une théorie de la culture participative", Kinephanos 1, 1 (2009), http://www.kinephanos.ca/2009/epitre-aux-geeks-pour-une-theorie-de-la-cultureparticipative/, accessed April 23, 2013. 41 Jorge Díaz Cintas, Pablo Muñoz Sánchez. “Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation in an Amateur Environment”, Jostrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation. 7, 6 (2006): 37-52, http://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_diaz_munoz.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. Luis Pérez Gonzáles, “Amateur subtitling as immaterial labour in digital media culture”, Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19, 2 (2012): 157-175; “Fansubbing Anime: Insights into the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of Globalisation on Audiovisual Translation”, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14, 4 (2006): 260-277, http://www.scribd.com/doc/12629008/Fan-Subbing-Anime, accessed April 23, 2013. See also Tessa Dwyer, “Bad-Talk: Media Piracy and ‘Guerilla’ Translation”, in Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher (eds.), Words, Images and Performances in Translation (London / New York: Continuum, 2012), 194-215. 40

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Image 4 http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/speaking-in-more-languages.html

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There are also tribes, though, formed around social networks such as Facebook or search engines leading to data/information – often confused with knowledgeʊ such as Google:42 The particularity of the tribes translating for Facebook or Google lies in the fact that their members offer their services to public companies listed on the stock exchange, justifying criticisms of crowdsourcing, such as the Yang thesis about “aggravated corporate exploitation”43, and illustrating the ever-growing interest of companies in taking advantage of “crowdsourcing” for their own profit.44 However, this interest in volunteer translation demonstrates above all the vitality of this activity and its plusvalue in the framework of intercultural communication, as well as the cultural power of social networking. It makes us wonder if, in the context of these operations, there are not ruses which bypass the commercial dimension in a subversive way. The greatest, most studied and cited tribe, though, is the Wikipedia team, which is not exactly a team but an association of individual interests and efforts, which enrich and promote the Wikipedia project of dissemination of free knowledge, probably the most influential project on the Internet:45

42

For the great difference between content, information and knowledge, or the DIKW Pyramid (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom), see Jay H. Bernstein, revisiting Ackoff’s model, “The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis”, https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/article/viewFile/12806/11288, accessed April 23, 2013. 43 Ling Yang, “All for Love: The Corn Fandom, Prosumers, and the Chinese way of Creating a Superstar”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, 5 (2009): 527. 44 See the report by the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory on non-professional translation and how its clients can benefit from it: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/AbstractView.aspx?ArticleID=1317, accessed April 23, 2013. Common Sense Advisory in order to refer to crowdsourced translation has coined the acronym CT3. 45 See Julie McDonough Dolmaya, “Analysing the crowdsourcing model and its impact on public perceptions on translation", in ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva, and L. Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 167-191.

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As regards more or less structured communities, we will start with volunteer translation communities, supporting non-profit humanitarian organizations and NGOs such as “Translators Without Borders”, although we must take into account the fact that, as Mona Baker demonstrated, this association is linked with a commercial firm, and thus its "narrative” is incoherent.46 Much more interesting and coherent is the project of the Rosetta Foundation, promoting equality through linguistic and cultural diversity.47 We also draw attention to the Kiva project, which the Kiva team describes as follows: "a non-profit organization with a mission to connect people through lending to alleviate poverty", and is obviously supported by volunteer translation.48 Among the first users who resorted either to self-translation or to nonprofessional/volunteer translation are the supporters of the free software movement, hackers belonging to open but strongly motivated communities such as the GNU/FSF, founded by Richard Stallmann, or the LINUX community, founded by Linus Torvalds. The free software community (and free does not simply mean free of charge, but freely distributed and collectively developed)49 provides, among other things, the infrastructure of a new media of the masses which, as optimists see it, will soon replace the mass media.50 Nevertheless, advocating free access to resources, primarily to source codes and software, these hackers in both senses of the term meet with the pronetariat, the creators of entirely volunteer-based citizen media.

46

A non-profit association established in 2010 as a sister organization of Traducteurs Sans Frontières, founded in 1993 by Lexcelera (groupe Eurotexte). See Mona Baker, “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community”, The Massachusetts Review 47, 3 (2006): 462-484; a revised version of the text in Translation, Resistance, Activism, ed. Maria Tymoczko (Amherst / Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), 23-41. 47 About localization for social purposes, cf. Dimitra Anastasiou and Reinhard Schäler, “Translating Vital Information: Localisation, Internationalisation, and Globalisation”, Synthèses 3 (2010): 13-27. 48 http://www.kiva.org/about, accessed April 23, 2013. 49 http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 50 For this essential turn, besides de Rosnay's contribution (see footnote 10), cf. Ignacio Ramonet, L’Explosion du journalisme. Des médias de masse à la masse des médias (Paris : Galilée, 2011), where he depicts the current transformation of the media ecosystem.

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ٝ Image 10 http://www.therosettafoundation.org/blog/volunteer-with-us/ 55 There is a large bibliography on activist translating communities. See Julie Boéri, “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice”, ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 269-90; Julie Boéri and Carol Maier Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación - Translation/interpreting and Social Activism (Granada: Ecos, 2010); Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007), http://www2.univparis8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky_-_M._Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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ٝ Image 6 http://www.kiva.org/volunteer#reviewTranslationProgram

55 There is a large bibliography on activist translating communities. See Julie Boéri, “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice”, ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 269-90; Julie Boéri and Carol Maier Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación - Translation/interpreting and Social Activism (Granada: Ecos, 2010); Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007), http://www2.univparis8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky_-_M._Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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ٝ Image 11 The GNU community 55 There is a large bibliography on activist translating communities. See Julie Boéri, “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice”, ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 269-90; Julie Boéri and Carol Maier Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación - Translation/interpreting and Social Activism (Granada: Ecos, 2010); Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007), http://www2.univparis8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky_-_M._Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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Image 12 The GNU community in Greek

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Image 13 http://globalvoicesonline.org/

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Image 14 www.agoravox.fr

Finally, the most studied and most cited groups in translation theory bibliography are communities engaging in political activism, such as Ecos and Babels55. 55 There is a large bibliography on activist translating communities. See Julie Boéri, “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice”, ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), ibid., 269-90; Julie Boéri and Carol Maier Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación - Translation/interpreting and Social Activism

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Image 15 www.babels.org (Granada: Ecos, 2010); Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007), http://www2.univparis8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky_-_M._Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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See also Tlaxcala, the international network of translators for linguistic diversity:

Image 16 http://www.tlaxcala-int.org/

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4. Translation as an alternative everyday practice on the network Translation-localization is active most of the time, with the use of various software applications,56 such as the wordpress translation plugin shown below that provides translation of blog content:

Image 17 http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/gts-translation/ 56

On the non-professional dimension of localization, see Anthony Pym, “Website localization”, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/translation/2009_website _localization_feb.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013.

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Translation-localization also works on the platform developed by the proz translator community for “Translators Without Borders”:

Image 18 http://www.proz.com/screening-platform/overview?cid=1197983

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Non-professional translation on the Internet can be defined as: 1. translation offered to support a cause in the framework of a community, on a voluntary and/or collaborative basis, involving multilingual persons who are not professionals, yet without excluding professionals from this community; this type of translation is unprofessional, lay, community, untrained translation, crowdsourcing, non-professional, collaborative, volunteer translation. Nevertheless, collaborative, community, voluntary/volunteer translation and crowdsourcing may also include professionals, in which case we can eventually use the term paraprofessional translation. 2. translation offered in the context of a tribe, most often not involving professionals, which can also be characterized as unprofessional, lay, community, untrained translation, crowdsourcing (by analogy with outsourcing), non-professional, collaborative, volunteer translation. 3. translation offered in order to facilitate elementary everyday communication by communities such as cucumis, whose emergence, however, highlights an urgent need for human translation as opposed to machine translation offered over the network. This observation can orient machine translation research towards fields where repetitive content and limited vocabulary can provide reliable results. On the network, as it turns out that even the simplest human translation is better than machine translation, the latter can only be of interest in terms of information extraction. Casalegno’s definition of tribes and communities, though, meets, in a way, Walter Fisher's definition of two types of narrative communities, a model already used by Mona Baker in order to describe the communities of activist translators and interpreters.57 According to Fisher, cited by Baker, “the first type of community is created by concession or conformity: members of the community adhere to a story because it provides justification for a way of life that leads to success or survival. The second type is created by election or conversion; one becomes a member of such a community because the story that brings its members 57

Walter Fisher, “Narration, Reason and Community”, in Memory, Identity, Community: the Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, eds. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 307-27. Mona Baker, “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community”, ibid.

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together provides an ‘honoured’ perception of oneself”.58 If we accept, along with Mona Baker, Fisher’s thesis, it is obvious that translation type 1 falls within the latter category, while tribes are in between the two and type 3 underlines the new challenges of intercultural communication. Nonprofessional translation type 1 is thus associated with values and ethics, the ethics of translators as citizens, their responsibility and their choices in conflicting political situations.59 Hacker communities as well as communities of activists and those supporting humanitarian causes are governed by ethics based on solidarity and responsibility, ultimately leading to increased awareness of the translator’s role as well as of the nature of translation.60 Hacker communities are working for language standardization in translation, activist communities such as Babels even provide translation training.61 Nevertheless, as Mona Baker argues, these communities are narrative communities, and their stories must be characterized by coherence and fidelity. In this context, Translators Without Borders do not meet ethical standards, as they are dependent on a private society.62 Conversely, within communities like “cucumis” not only is translation quality and function not a major concern, but translation is generally limited to the “meaning” of utterances –and this is highlighted by the site.

58

Walter Fisher, ibid., 323, cited by Baker, ibid., 472. See, Mona Baker, Translation and conflict (London / New York: Routledge, 2006); See “Tlaxcala’s Manifesto”. (2006), http://www.tlaxcala.es/manifiesto.asp?section=2&lg=fr, accessed April 23, 2013; Verena Jung and Maria Brander de la Iglesia. “Free as in free beer vs. free as in free speech: Volunteer Translation on the Internet”, in Translation, Technology and Culture, ed. Ian Kemble (Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth, 2007), 61-79. 60 Ibid. 61 http://www.babels.org/spip.php?rubrique27; http://www.babels.org/wiki/TrainingandSelectionJune06, accessed April 23, 2013. See also Yan Brailowsky and Maria Brander de la Iglesia, “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, ibid. 62 Mona Baker, ibid., p. 477 ff. 59

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Image 19 Project on language standardization and collective work of the Linux community

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Image 20 Training for volunteer non-professional translators

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Image 22: This translation request is «Meaning only»

Finally, as regards tribes, such as groups of fans, they are driven, by the nature of their work, towards a preoccupation with aesthetics, although

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they do not often develop a metadiscourse on translation. Still, we do find discourse on the evaluation of translation within these communities:

Image 23 http://forums.mangafox.com/threads/165585-Translation-Quality-byShinhou

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Thus, the complexity of crowdsourced translation reflects the complexity of everyday communication on the net, which is a simple dimension of our world. The sociological perspective in which it is studied today is perhaps the most accurate macro-approach to the phenomenon, which has a serious impact on translation as practice and education. As this everyday text, though, is a multimodal and multisemiotic text, semiotics can contribute a lot to its definition on a micro-level, which finally falls definitely into the social.

5. In lieu of a conclusion Joël de Rosnay characterizes pronetarians as “professional amateurs”, “pro-ams”. His term could also be used for translators belonging to communities, or maybe even to certain tribes, depending on their norms and objectives.63 For any other activity reducing translation to a mere “transcoding”, the term “non-professional translation” seems to be the most neutral one. However, given the complexity of the phenomena and the rapid pace of change, we can only ask questions about the future, as regards the important aspects involved in this new form of translation, associated with our culture and our existence in the world. Obviously, as Pérez-González underlines, translation studies must take into account the non-professional and collaborative dimension of translation practice.64 In consequence, translation studies must address the transformation of the translation field and reform their perspectives, taking into account the fact that non-professional translation has contributed to intercultural dialogue throughout human history.65 Many subjects must be studied in the context of this reform and re-orientation, which is not only practical, but also conceptual – in the sense that Somers and Gibson give to the term conceptual narrative, revisited by Baker: "stories and explanations that scholars in any field elaborate for themselves";

63

For example, the International Children’s Digital Library is a very interesting case in point. See Hilary Browne Hutchinson, Benjamin B. Bederson and Allison Druin, “The International Children’s Digital Library: A Case Study in Designing for a Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural, Multi-Generational Audience”, Information Technology and Libraries, 24, 1 (2005): 4-12; http://en.childrenslibrary.org, accessed April 23, 2013. 64 ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González, ibid, 149-152. 65 Anthony Pym, Negotiating the Frontiers: Translators and Intercultures in Hispanic History (Manchester: St. Jerome, 2000).

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conceptual also as influential metanarratives / master narratives, which shape our conscience as citizens and contemporary actors of history.66 For example, concerning the transmission of information, the questions are: if transmission of altered information is preferable to no transmission at all; and what is the impact of this alteration when very serious political and social issues are involved. Pym, for example, suggests that we must abandon “all pretence to perfect understanding; we should attempt to grasp the pragmatics of ‘good enough’ strategies”, “as translation cannot be studied in isolation from alternative strategies for cross-cultural communication (language learning, pidgins, code-switching, bilingual conversations)”.67 Désilets, depicting the differences in workflow between traditional and massive online collaborative translation, points out some very important dimensions of this critical change, concerning, for example, the impact of collaborative translation on minority and small languages, and its contribution to the improvement of machine translation and of open terminological databases.68 Other questions that arise from crowdsourcing concern the author’s rights, for whom and how; the protection that should be provided for free and volunteer-based works in relation to commercial companies (see ‘delicious’ and the use of its “nonpersonal data” for advertising purposes)69; also the measures to be taken in order to prevent unfair competition and dumping when crowdsourcing supports commercial businesses;70 what training should be provided for volunteer translators, and what quality control mechanisms can be established by structured communities; at last but not least what education there should be for translators, encompassing the values of peace, democratic citizenship, justice and solidarity, as translation is not a process in vitro. The discussion is open and the only thing that is certain is that, as an everyday practice of a society which very soon will live inside the Internet, 71 non-professional translation will be at the heart of discussion 66

Mona Baker, ibid., 465 f. Anthony Pym, “Interview on current issues in Translation Studies”, ibid. 68 Alain Désilets, ibid. 69 http://deliciousbrains.com/privacy-policy/, accessed April 23, 2013. 70 See the translator’s group against commercial business use of crowdsourcing in linkedin. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Translators-against-CrowdsourcingCommercial-Businesses-2032092?home=&gid=2032092, accessed April 23, 2013. 71 According to de Rosnay “Demain on ne sera pas sur Internet mais dans Internet” (“Tomorrow we will not go on the net, we will live inside the net”). http://www.rendezvousdufutur.com/archive-archive_rosnay-9-30.html, accessed April 23, 2013. 67

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about translation theory, as well as of debate about sociology and the media.

Bibliography Anastasiou Dimitra and Reinhard Schäler. “Translating Vital Information: Localisation, Internationalisation, and Globalisation”, Synthèses 3 (2010): 13-27. Archibald Samuel. “Épître aux Geeks: Pour une théorie de la culture participative", Kinephanos 1, 1 (2009), Accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.kinephanos.ca/2009/epitre-aux-geeks-pour-une-theorie-dela-culture-participative. Baker, Mona. “Translation and Activism: Emerging Patterns of Narrative Community.” The Massachusetts Review 47, 3 (2006): 462-484. —. Translation and conflict. London/New York: Routledge, 2006. Bernstein, Jay H. “The Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Hierarchy and its Antithesis.” Accessed April 23, 2013. https://journals.lib.washington.edu/index.php/nasko/article/viewFile/12 806/11288. Boéri, Julie. “Translation/Interpreting Politics and Praxis The Impact of Political Principles on Babels’ Interpreting Practice.” The Translator 18, 2. (2012): 269-90. Special issue: “Non-professionals translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”, edited by ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. Boéri Julie and Carol Maier. Compromiso Social y traducción/interpretación Translation interpreting and Social Activism. Granada: Ecos, 2010. boyd danah and Nicole Ellison. "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship." Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13, 1 (2007): article 11, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.danah.org/papers/BlogTalksReloaded.pdf. Brailowsky Yan and Maria Brander de la Iglesia. “Babels, la traduction et l’éthique hacker: la liberté en action?”, Actes de la 1ère Journée d’étude Traduction et Mondialisation (8th December 2007). Accessed April 23, 2013. http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/T3L/IMG/pdf/Y._Brailowsky_-_M._ Brander_de_la_Iglesia.pdf Browne Hutchinson Hilary, Benjamin B. Bederson and Allison Druin. “The International Children’s Digital Library: A Case Study in Designing for a Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural, Multi-Generational Audience.” Information Technology and Libraries, 24, 1 (2005): 4-12. Accessed April 23, 2013. http://en.childrenslibrary.org.

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Casalegno, Federico. “Entre tribalisme et communautés ; des configurations sociales émergeantes dans le cyberspace”. Accessed April 23, 2013. http ://www.ceaq-sorbonne.org/node.php?id=97&elementid=94. Cronin, Michael. “The Translation Crowd”. Revista tradumàtica 8 (2009): 1-7. Accessed April 23, 2013, http://www.fti.uab.cat/tradumatica/revista/num8/articles/04/04.pdf. de Certeau Michel. The practice of everyday life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. de Rosnay, Joël. L’homme symbiotique. Paris: Seuil, 2000 de Rosnay, Joël. and Carlo Revelli. La révolte du pronétariat. Paris : Fayard, 2006. Désilets, Alain “Translation Wikified: How will Massive Online Collaboration Impact the World of Translation”. In Proceedings of Translating and the Computer 29 (London, 2007), http://www.mtarchive.info/Aslib-2007-Desilets.pdf, accessed April 23, 2013. Díaz Cintas Jorge and Pablo Muñoz Sánchez. “Fansubs: Audiovisual Translation in an Amateur Environment/” Jostrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation. 7, 6 (2006): 37-52. Accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.jostrans.org/issue06/art_diaz_munoz.pdf. Dwyer, Tessa. “Bad-Talk: Media Piracy and ‘Guerilla’ Translation.” In Words, Images and Performances in Translation, edited by Rita Wilson and Brigid Maher, 194-215. London/New York: Continuum, 2012. European Commission, Crowdsourcing Translation, accessed April 23, 2013, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/translation/publications/studies/crowdsourcing_ translation_en.pdf. Fisher, Walter. “The Narrative Paradigm. In the beginning”, Journal of Communication 35, 4 (1985): 74-89 —. Human Communication as Narration: Toward a Philosophy of Reason, Value, and Action. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987/1989. —. “Narration, Reason and Community.” In Memory, Identity, Community: the Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, edited by Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman 307-27. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Franklin, Marianne I. Postcolonial Politics, the Internet, and Everyday Life. London/New York: Routledge, 2004. Guyon, André. “The ups and downs of online collaborative translation, L’ Actualité langagière 7, 1, (2010): 33. Accessed April 23, 2013,

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http://www.btb.termiumplus.gc.ca/tpv2guides/guides/favart/indexfra.html?lang=fra&lettr=indx_autr8o7vhUcC4c0s&page=9Q0FtHBZR pRk.html. Howe, Jeff. “The Rise of Crowdsourcing.” Wired, 14.06.2006, accessed April 23, 2013, http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/crowds.html. —. Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business (New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2008. Jung Verena and Maria Brander de la Iglesia. “Free as in free beer vs. free as in free speech: Volunteer Translation on the Internet.” In Translation, Technology and Culture, edited by Ian Kemble, 61-79. Portsmouth: University of Portsmouth, 2007. Lévy Pierre. Le cyberspace. Paris: Odile Jacob, 1997. Maffesoli Michel. Le temps des tribus. Paris: Editions de la Table Ronde, La petite vermillon, 2003. —. Du nomadisme. Vagabondages initiatiques. Paris Editions de la Table Ronde, 2006. —. “Tribalisme postmoderne. De l’ identité à l’identification ». Accessed April 23, 2013. http ://1libertaire.free.fr/Maffesoli04.html. McDonough Dolmaya, Julie. “Analysing the crowdsourcing model and its impact on public perceptions on translation.” The Translator 18, 2. (2012): 167-191. Special issue: “Non-professionals translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”, edited by ùebnem Susam-Sarajeva and Luis Pérez-González. McKenzie Wark, Kenneth. A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, second edition. New York: Routledge, 2002. O’Hagan, Minako. “Fan Translation Networks: An Accidental Translator Training Environment?” In Translator and Interpreter Training: Issues, Methods and Debates, edited by John Kearns, 158-183. London/New York, Continuum, 2008. Pérez Gonzáles, Luis. “Amateur subtitling as immaterial labour in digital media culture.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19, 2 (2012): 157-175. —. “Fansubbing Anime: Insights into the ‘Butterfly Effect’ of Globalisation on Audiovisual Translation”, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 14, 4 (2006): 260-277. Accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.scribd.com/doc/12629008/Fan-Subbing-Anime.

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Perrino, Saverio. “User-generated Translation: The Future of Translation in a Web 2.0 Environment”, Journal of Specialised Translation 12 (2009): 55-78, accessed April 23, 2013, http://jostrans.org/issue12/art_perrino.pdf. Proulx Serge, Louise Poissant et Michel Sénégal (eds.), Communautés virtuelles : penser et agir en réseau. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006. Proulx, Serge, Françoise Massit-Folléa et Bernard Conein (eds.), Internet, une utopie limitée. Nouvelles régulations, nouvelles solidarités. Québec : Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005. Proulx Serge et Guillaume Latzko-Toth, “La virtualité comme catégorie pour penser le social : l’usage de la notion de communauté virtuelle”. Sociologie et sociétés XXXII, 2 (2000): 99-122. Pym, Antony. Translation research terms – a tentative glossary for moments of perplexity and dispute. Accessed April 23, 2013, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/2010_terms.pdf. —. “Interview on current issues in Translation Studies”. Accessed April 23, 2013, http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/research_methods/2010 _interview.pdf 923.4.13). —. “Website localization”. Accessed April 23, 2013. http://usuaris.tinet.cat/apym/on-line/translation/2009_website_ localization_feb.pdf. Ramonet, Ignacio. L’Explosion du journalisme. Des médias de masse à la masse des médias. Paris : Galilée, 2011. Rheingold, Howard. “A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community.” In Linda M. Harasim (ed.), Global Networks: Computer Networks and International Communication, 57–80. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1994. Susam-Sarajeva ùebnem and Luis Pérez-González. (eds.), The Translator 18,2.(2012). Special issue: “Non-professionals translating and interpreting: Participatory and engaged perspectives”. Yang, Ling. “All for Love: The Corn Fandom, Prosumers, and the Chinese way of Creating a Superstar”, International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, 5 (2009): 527-543

Sitography http://www.wiki-translation.com/Processes+and+tools+for+massively+ collaborative+translation; and best practices for collaborative translations, accessed April 23, 2013

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http://collaborative-translation-patterns.wiki4us.com/tiki-index.php, accessed April 23, 2013 http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x47z47_les-quatre-web-de-joel-derosnay-du_tech, accessed April 23, 2013. www.hackerspaces.org, accessed April 23, 2013 http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/AbstractView.aspx?ArticleID=13 17, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.kiva.org/about, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.tlaxcala.es/manifiesto.asp?section=2&lg=fr, accessed April 23, 2013 http://www.babels.org/spip.php?rubrique27 http://www.babels.org/wiki/TrainingandSelectionJune06, accessed April 23, 2013. http://deliciousbrains.com/privacy-policy/, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Translators-against-CrowdsourcingCommercial-Businesses-2032092?home=&gid=2032092, accessed April 23, 2013. http://www.rendezvousdufutur.com/archive-archive_rosnay-9-30.html, accessed April 23, 2013.

CHAPTER 4: REPRESENTING THE QUOTIDIAN

THE AFRICAN QUOTIDIAN OF THE IVORIAN SOCIETY AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF AYA OF YOPOUGON KAREN FERREIRA-MEYERS

Introduction The quotidian in African literature has been the subject of several studies. However, no analysis of the presence of the African quotidian in comic books has, to my knowledge, been published. Since 2005, the Franco-Ivorian writer Margaret Abouet and the French illustrator Clément Oubrerie have been collaborating creatively and have, to date, published six volumes of Aya de Yopougon in Paris. This comic series, which recounts the lives of Ivorian families of the 1970s and 1980s through the eyes of Aya and her friends Bintou, Adjoua and Moussa, offers readers an overview of the historical reality of the 1970s in Yopougon, a popular area in the capital Abidjan. It is one of the few works of postcolonial African fiction to focus almost entirely on the middle class. Although not entirely autobiography, the story is based on the author’s life in Ivory Coast. The author uses several strategies to show Ivorian daily life. The quotidian/daily is what people do every day, which is common, which takes place regularly. To represent these ordinary, mundane, daily things Abouet incorporates, among other things, a socio-linguistically interesting idiom, Nouchi, in standard French and provides multiple intercultural inputs. The author and the graphic artist deliberately chose an Afrooptimistic viewpoint to convey images of happiness and kindness to counteract the multiple images of misery and violence that often accompany discourse about Africa and Africans. The “slices” of life proposed in this comic book offer readers1 a variety of themes ranging 1

Too often the readers are European or American, but the Gallimard-Paris Editors have tried to make the volumes as accessible as possible to the African public: there is a low-cost version which only costs about 3900 FCFA, the equivalent of 4 euros instead of 15 euros, the usual sale price in France.

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from corruption, bureaucracy, extended families, polygamy, sexual harassment, children born out of wedlock, to the impact of homosexuality on Ivorian society. Themes about the advancement of women in society, family and community are mixed with stories of infidelity and dishonesty. This is described in very "everyday" places of the Ivorian people: in the market, in the bush, in the street in front of houses and huts, under the palm tree, in jail and in hospital, in large, opulent villas but also in poor neighbourhoods2. The African décor is then completed by the presence of elements of everyday African life such as Ivorian food, drink, music and entertainment. These themes are seen mostly through the eyes of the main character, Aya, a young female student in Ivory Coast, living with her parents, whose character was born of Marguerite Abouet’s childhood and youth memories, noted from the age of 17 in her notebooks.

African comic books 2010 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first comic published in Africa, Le curé de Pyssaro written by the Togolese author Pyssaro Pyabélo Chaold3. In recent years African comics, published in Europe or in Africa itself, have become "fashionable", that is to say publishers are interested in the publication of cartoons and comic books which have as their principal setting Africa or an African country with African characters, and with writers and designers setting out to use Africa as the point of creation and readers buying these published books. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Cameroon and Ivory Coast were among the first French-speaking countries to engage in this area and continue to be the most active4. More recent is the launch in South Africa 2

Within the first page of Aya of Yop City, the family units are mapped out, laying the groundwork for the strong family ties and connections throughout the novel. These initial family trees let the reader know immediately that family ties are going to be an important force in the community. Within each scene multiple community members from each of the families interact, showing they are ever present in each other’s lives. 3 In this cartoon, the author describes the life of a White pastor with his Black parishioners. 4 Serge Diantantu, Alain Kojelé, Fifi Mukuna, Al'Mata, Hallain Paluku, Jean Claude Kimona and Dominique Mwankumi figure amongst the best known Congolese comic book writers (see also http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=9433), while readers probably also know Cameroonian writers like Almo the Best, Achille Nzoda and others.

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of a journal called Bittercomix in which Anton Kannemeyer (aka Joe Dog) and Conrad Botes publish provocative drawings, talking about sex and racism since 1992. With about 15 full-time designers, Gbich!, a weekly Ivorian publication with some 40 000 copies of more than 500 numbers, has an undeniable economic and cultural weight in Abidjan. Lassane Zohoré, cartoonist and creator of the magazine, said the "magazine appealed to people who impatiently await each publication". Africa Drawn5 is an association of comic artists and scriptwriters sensitive to African realities. It brings together a dozen authors, including Christophe Ngalle Edimo, Willy Zékid, Simon Peter Mbumbo, Adjim Dangar. The association's activities are grouped into three areas: to bear witness to the realities of contemporary Africa by drawing and to increase the visibility of African comic books, to encourage its members to express themselves and to give them professional support, and to create a platform for international exchanges for artists (graphic designers, writers, and others). Africa Drawn is actively involved in networking, especially with African associations that bring together cartoonists and media caricaturists. Thus, since 2001, the association has been participating in festivals in Africa: Fescarhy in Yaoundé, Cameroon (2003, 2004) and Cocobulles of Grand-Bassam in Ivory Coast (2001, 2003). African publications are often made to order: NGOs or international institutions6 ask graphic designers, illustrators, artists and authors to talk (http://almoactu.canalblog.com/archives/historique_de_la_bd_camerounaise/index. html). 5 In French, Afrique dessinée, for more information: http://afrikabd.blogspot.com/2008/10/un-etat-des-lieux-de-la-bande-dessine.html. 6 An unpublished cartoon written in French has just been published by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) in Brussels; it has as its main objective to inform the public on the causes and dangers of illicit migration. This cartoon, entitled “Clandestine people at sea”, wants to reach a young readers’ public in Francophone countries in Africa and Europe. The troubles and tribulations of immigrants are told in a 50-page cartoon, written by author and actor Pie Tshibanda and drawn by Tchibemba. The two authors of the cartoon are of African origins, which gives them more credibility in the eyes of the target readership, explains the HCR. The writer has wanted to deconstruct the myth according to which Europe is a paradise for all Africans who have survived the dangerous crossing of the seas. In addition, the cartoon explains to the Europeans why certain Africans feel forced to leave and why they have the right to be respected and protected. The book is financed by a vast project of the European Commission and the Danish Government. About 7.000 copies have been printed for the first edition. 5.000 free copies will be distributed through institutions and non-governmental organisations working on issues of migration and asylum in

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about important topics like AIDS, drugs, prostitution, etc. Recently, editorial attention has turned to African cartoons created independently, beyond NGO control. Founded in 2002 by Alix Fuilu, comic book illustrator and cartoonist from Congo - Kinshasa, Afro-Bubbles, an association specializing in the publication of African comics, set as its goal to promote this still unknown art to the general public on the continent. The association has already published two albums, entitled Vies Volées (Stolen Lives), which denounce violence against women on the African continent, and Corne et Ivoire (Horn and Ivory). Other albums already published by Afro-Bubbles speak of everyday life, the African quotidian7. In Brussels, the Congolese Bienvenu Séné Mongala has created a publishing house Mabiki which has already brought various novels and books onto the market as well as some comic books. One of these is a trilogy by painter Andrazzi and an album by Kojélé Makani (Zamadrogo in 2006). With the latter, Mabiki also launched Idéologie plus plus, a bilingual publication (French - Lingala) of 16 pages, in 2003. Two comic series on immigration and the lives of the Congolese were published. Unfortunately, Idéologie plus plus only lasted for a short while.

The Ivorian everyday in Aya de Yopougon’s main themes According to Abouet, Aya de Yopougon is autofictional8 : the children given to the family to take care of them, the absent fathers, female solidarity, false pastors/healers and church, all are part of what Abouet saw as a child and are still part of today’s African reality. Among the recurring, major and/or secondary themes which Abouet addresses throughout the six volumes9 published so far, corruption, which is abuse of power to obtain a personal gain or for the benefit of others, forms part of her description of the lives of the inhabitants of Yopougon-Koute or Yop City, one of Abidjan’s10 suburbs. Abouet describes the life of a generation, their hopes French-speaking Africa. 2,000 copies will be distributed in schools and NGOs. (http://www.africatime.com/ci/nouvelle.asp?no_nouvelle=543986&no_categorie= 4) 7 Couleur Café, La piste malagasy, Africa Comics and Africalement. 8 http://www.mondomix.com/actualite/599/5e-tome-de-la-bd-aya-entretien-avecmarguerite-abouet-et-clement-oubrerie.htm. 9 Volume 1 (20/11/2005), Volume 2 (29/09/2006), Volume 3 (09/10/2007), Volume 4 (21/11/2008), Volume 5 (05/11/2009) and Volume 6 (November 2010). 10 According to Yacouba Konate (« Génération zouglou », Cahiers d'études africaines, 168 | 2002, online 25 December 2005. URL :

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and aspirations. Less populated than the commune of Abobo, Yop City, which has still more than a million people, has the advantage of being spread over an immense extent. Yacouba Konate (2002) explains that: [s]eparated from the Plateau, the business and administrative centre by a laguna, the district [Yop City] runs along the seaside and opens towards the north of the country. This aperture gives space to the district which is really the most extended of the ten communes of Abidjan city. For a long time despised by the middle classes who preferred Marcory, Treichville and Adjamé, the district of Yopougon welcomed its first groups of young civil servants during the economic boom of the Seventies, but it was only after Port-Bouët and Vridi the decentralization politics of the University, which started in 1972, gave the district a university campus in 1980.

Yopougon is also known as the city of 2 000 maquis11. It is in one of those that the Miss Yopougon 1980 elections are held; Adjoua observes that the organisers “have made a deal”; they are examples of corrupt individuals seen throughout the comic series. Bureaucracy is a second favourite theme. On page 84 of the third volume there is a long queue outside the prefecture: the reader learns that it opens at 8 am but at 10 am the employee has not yet arrived. When she arrives, she gets angry and decides not to open at all. Another day, still at the prefecture, customers are once again waiting to be served ("When we need them, we are forced to wait without complaining", p. 89). It is however not only of African bureaucracy that Abouet complains through her comics. In the sixth volume, Inno, an African immigrant in France, must get up early to queue up before the prefecture; like all the "undocumented" people (the infamous “sans-papiers”) in France, when he finally gets to the employee to regularize his residence permit, the latter, after repeated questions about his job, his home, his family and friends in France, sends him away while asking him to come back with "the birth certificate of his great-great-grandfather". Sexual harassment experienced by Aya herself and by her friends is also a recurring theme. The first mention of this evil is found in the first http://etudesafricaines.revues.org/index166.html. Accessed 24 March 2010), "Abidjan is no longer encountered in Abidjan but rather in its suburbs : in Yopougon, Abobo, Port-Bouêt, even if the inhabitants continue to hang around the Plateau district in its administration buildings. In fact, as zouglou’s birthplace, Yopougon confirms Treichville longstanding hegemony (1950 to 1980) of libidinal economy of the Abidjan all-nighters". 11 Maquis: cheap restaurant, mainly operated at night where Ivorian specialties are eaten.

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volume (page 39-41 where Aya is harassed in town by a man she does not know). It continues into the sixth, through the fourth volume (p. 26-27, where her biology teacher requires "special attention"). Sexual demands are part of everyday life. In both cases, Aya, a literary example of the strong African woman (although often literature portrays the African woman as inferior, weak and dependent) is very clever because, after fleeing in the first volume, after biting the teacher in the fourth, she uses a trick to catch the culprit in the sixth volume. Only after several adventures can Aya finally unveil Professor Amonchi for what he is (volume 6, pages 95-97). The world of students is also on the list of Abouet’s favourite settings. Thus, on page 44 (Volume 3) Bintou tells Aya that "everyone knows that STAs (Sexually Transmitted Averages) exist. Especially at the university!”. Illegal abortion is also treated in detail by the author. In a fairly playful manner, Abouet talks about some stereotypes that can be found in Cote d'Ivoire: pregnancy, for example, is seen as a disease that can be healed; the reader also learns that illegal abortion is a real trade, it is "sold" on the market in Abidjan. Daily life in African prisons only appears in Volume 6 of the series. Of course, the characters had been confronted by the police and had been in the hands of the police, but it is only in the fifth volume that the church theme becomes paramount. And then in the sixth volume Gregory, having disguised himself as a priest to rob Christians, and Moussa, who fled his parents' home in the fifth volume, land up in prison, both in a small cell of the MACA (Central Detention Centre in Abidjan). Polygamy becomes, in the third volume, an overarching theme. Through humoristic drawings "presenting amusing scenes of daily life, making fun of some of our contemporary evils" (Runge and Sword 1987: 5), Abouet transmits her vision of polygamy12. That Abouet is so keen to 12

The main critique Adouet seems to throw at polygamy is that the first wife is not aware of what is going on. After long palavers between the men, they finally decide to announce « the good news » (p. 57). Koffi’s wife Alphonsine’s reaction is clear. She absolutely refuses what he proposes; this is how she expresses her refusal (p. 57). Power relations in the family are also shown, for example on page 60. When Fortuné comes to complain to Koffi that he is not yet married to his daughter, the reader finds out that certain problems are on their way (see also page 73). The polygamous marriage wish of the husband has consequences on the extended family too. Hervé, young apprentice in mechanics and cousin of Aya, living in their house, fears that he might lose his room. Seeing that there are only three rooms in the house, once the father brings his mistress along, she gets her own room and Hervé will have to move (p. 82).

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talk about this, while, officially, polygamy was abolished in Ivory Coast several years ago, is understandable given the persistence in reality of noninstitutional polygamy (customary marriage, parallel marriage, etc.)13. On page 31 of the third volume of Aya of Yopougon, Koffi, Bintou’s (Aya’s friend’s) father, tells his friend Ignatius (Aya's father) and Hyacinth (father of Adjoua, Aya’s other female friend) that he will take a second wife; but his wife, Alphonsine, is not yet aware of his plan14. The phenomenon of the "mistress", that is to say, a woman kept by a married man, has brought about - and still causes - attention, mobilizing

The financial reasons why certain fathers « push » their daughters into marriage, into a second marriage with their friends, colleagues, old men, are manifested on page 88. Women’s strength is highlighted on pages 102-103 (annexe); they get together and decide to confront their « fate ». All is well that ends well, and at the end of the third volume, Koffi renounces from his second marriage. Page 120 explains how the women dissuade him from his upcoming wedding. 13 This is also highlighted by Vléï-Yoroba (op.cit.). 14 To the traditional excuses that polygamous husbands use to justify the taking of another wife, such as the fact that their first wife was unable to have children or only had one child (annexe, page 62 of volume 3 of Aya de Yopougon), the cartoon Aya de Yopougon opposes male egoism (the husband who wants a young and beautiful wife; see annexe, page 62 where Koffi claims his “right” to a “freshnie”, a pretty girl with nice “rounded” forms), an egoism that is sanctioned and institutionalized by the Ivorian tradition, by African traditions, showing the legendary superiority of men in that way. It is mostly in the third volume of the Aya de Yopougon series that the negative consequences of polygamy are described, but also in the fourth volume certain observations inform the reader about the negative aspects of this matrimonial tradition. On page 19 of volume 4 of Aya de Yopougon, we meet Zékinan, the old, polygamous villager, who doesn’t even know who among his four wives is his daughter Félicité’s mother. In addition, the wives are described as being rivals (even though in the African tradition the women in a polygamous union should not be competing amongst themselves). Zékinan tells his wife Aïcha: "I am going to fetch Félicité, the daughter of your rival", words to which Aïcha replies: "Zékinan, Félicité is my daughter". The vision that the Western world has about polygamy is expressed on page 48 during a small discussion among African men about family reunification. Here is what Camara says to his friend Drissa: "Family reunification, hey, that is hard! I have been going in and out of the prefecture for more than three years for that, without results". Drissa answers by telling him to be brave and that they all had to go through those phases. This makes Camara respond thus: "As if we were not man enough to have our wives". Drissa’s reply pushes part of the responsibility onto the Western world as he says: "They push us so far that we take another wife, and then they say that is polygamy".

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regular columnists and journalists from the national press...15. This is the famous “deuxième bureau” which Abouet extensively highlights. At the end of the second volume, Jeanne, the “deuxième bureau” mistress of Ignatius, Aya's father, drops her two children at Ignatius and his wife Fanta’s house. In the third volume Aya confronts Jeanne and calls her a "home wrecker" (p. 10). Jeanne is then dumped by Ignatius and goes to live with Gervais, a man of a certain age who is nonetheless still living with his mother. Only in the sixth volume will Jeanne finally be able to stand up to her mother-in-law. After leaving her new home because of the negative treatment she suffers from her mother-in-law (Vol. 6, p.10), can she hope to return to it when she saves her mother-in-law (p.104)16? And in the fourth volume Aya and Bintou try to play a prank on one of Aya’s teachers using the excuse of the “deuxième bureau” to hasten the taxi driver: "But there is a problem, it's our dad. Yes, he has a mistress, our mom is ..." to which the taxi driver replies:" it's alright, it's alright" (p. 83). The reverse, a man who is kept by a woman richer than him, is also documented in this series. In volume 6 (p.41-42, p.56), we find Mamadou, the young mechanic who becomes a male prostitute to successfully support his family. Abouet seems to want to lecture the reader; each story in this sixth volume ends on a positive note, on the most acceptable solution from a moral standpoint. Thus, Mamadou tells Monique that their love affair is over. The importance of traditional family counselling is emphasized, among other themes, in this same volume (p.55) when Moussa’s mother fetches his grandfather to appease her husband, Bonaventure (p.68- 69) when Moussa is imprisoned. Homosexuality is another strong theme in this series. In the first volumes no character speaks frankly about homosexuality. It is only in the sixth volume that homosexuality is discussed more openly when Albert dares to unveil his "homosexual tendencies" (p.103) to his parents. The everyday as described by Abouet and Oubrerie is also transmitted through language. In Aya of Yopougon’s case three registers are present:

15

Vidal Colette, « Maris et maîtresses à Abidjan », in Les femmes et l'argent. Actes de colloque, November 1985. Gardanne, 1986, pp. 251-260, quoted by VléïYoroba. 16 On page 100, the reader thinks that Jeanne will kill her mother-in-law when he sees her carrying a pillow. But it will later be revealed, on page 104, that she saved her life, something for which Gervais will surely be grateful and she can, thus, hope to return to ‘her’ home.

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standard French, Ivorian French17 and Nouchi. Nouchi18 is the language spoken by young people in the street. Yacouba Konate (2002) presents it in the following manner: Unlike popular Ivorian French, the urbanised version of the French used by the « tirailleurs », Nouchi is a language spoken by youngsters which does not go against the grain of standard language. It deliberately invents words, expressions and borrows from local languages, but also from English. Nouchi is used to commune and to communicate. Far from pompous circumlocutions, it draws a universe of lively images and expressions, constructs new words, and changes nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. It is both rich and poor youngsters who indulge in this game, even if its aesthetes and poets are young street children. No zouglou song is written in it, as it would not be comprehensible by the general public. But no zouglou song would work if it had no Nouchi at all in it. Popular French remains the dominant language in texts, songs and chorus who are rather sung in African languages. The proximity between Nouchi and zouglou is 17

Here are some examples of Ivorian French : • Several verbs such as: décaler (= to dance), gâter (= to say bad things about someone), s’affairer (= to meddle in people’s lives), enceinter (= to make pregnant). These verbs exist in standard French but have different meanings. • Several nouns refer to the Ivorian everyday: koutoukou (= a drink made with palm wine, fermented at 70º), maquis (= cheap restaurant in open air where the patrons can dance), dègué (= a drink made with millet, milk curdles and sugar), foutou with a grain/seed sauce • Many proverbs such as the following: « Si pressée que soit la mouche, elle attend que l'excrément soit sorti » (a fly can be in a hurry, she’ll nevertheless wait for the excrement to be out of the body). • Typical Ivoirian expressions: « j’ai même déchiré » (I even became better than all the others), « le chocobisme » (to talk like White people who roll their r’s), « à la revoyure » (see you next time), “une blessée de guerre” (a woman left by her husband, with children; literally “a war victim”). The use of a noun without article/determiner (“tes amis vont en France pour construire maisons pour leurs parents”, p. 24, vol.3; “trop parler, là, ça donne maladie”, p. 25, vol. 3, “c’est enterrement de qui, même?”, p. 66, vol.3) or the opposite, the use of an article where there is no need for it (“je suis un responsable, maman”, p. 25, vol. 3). 18 For example, in volume 1: « un galérien »: a young man who has time to waste, who does not do anything; « un génito »: a young man who has money to waste; “une go/une gazelle”: a (pretty) girl; “bodjo, tassaba ou pétou”: buttocks; “une gardienne”: a married woman. Examples in volume 2: « une go »: a girl; « môgô »: a man, a boy, a guy; « côcôta »: a thumb on the head; « bellaïsse”: beauty; “brezo”: someone unfashionable; “woubi”: homosexual.

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very real, and in many people’s thoughts it is exactly this proximity which highlights the sociological identity of this music, seeing that they both exist in the same world.

Conclusion The African comic, like its European, American or Asian counterparts, can give a realistic view of a historical period through the pictures it paints and the language it uses. Many cartoonists from the African continent choose to live in Europe to better describe their society of origin, but above all to be edited and published. Does this geographical distance allow them to take a step back and have the distance needed to better understand their society of origin, or does it instead install a break from everyday African life? The publication in Europe of comic books about Africa and Africans produced by African authors gives the general public a new vision of the continent. Often more realistic than European products on the same subject, these comic books show a complex Africa. Thus, the reader can discover the customs of daily life in the neighbourhood of Yopougon through the six volumes of Aya of Yopougon. This is the daily African life of the decade 1970-1980 as seen by a young woman, her family and friends. The author pays particular attention to the inner life of women, their way of inhabiting their bodies. The minimal decor, realistic enough so the reader can recognize real places in Abidjan, and the rather schematic drawing19 of Clement Oubrerie give the writer Abouet the opportunity to write a dialogue in standard French with multiple intrusions of Ivorian French and Nouchi. At a fairly high rate - moving from one story to another in a few pages20 - the story intertwines the characters’ journeys. 19 Even if the resemblance between Aya and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, former Dutch Member of Parliament of Somali origin, threatened by fundamentalists following her viewpoints on Islamic extremism, is striking, in general Oubrerie’s pictures remain simple and schematic. 20 Sometimes the reader receives information about several characters on a single page. For example, on page 93 we see Gervais in a hotel while his mother is expecting him at home, Aya returns home after a short stay in hospital for emotional stress, Moussa goes back home, to his « mummy » and Mamadou proposes that Adjoua comes to live with him and their baby. The sixth volume ends in a similar way: several updates on a single page. Jeanne, who rescued Gervais’ mother, has also rescued her relationship with him; Inno lives with Sébastien, and his mother seems to have accepted his homosexuality; there is a party going on in Yopougon and Moussa Sissoko receives accolades from the country’s president.

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Bibliography Abouet, M. et Oubrerie, C., Aya de Yopougon, volumes 1 (2005) to 6 (2010), Paris : Gallimard. Pyabélo Chaold, Le curé de Pyssaro, 1960. Konate, Y, « Génération zouglou », Cahiers d'études africaines, 168 | 2002, online 25 December 2005, http://etudesafricaines.revues.org/index166.html, accessed 24 March 2010. Runge, Annette and Jacqueline Sword, La BD, Paris : Clé international, 1987. Vidal C., « Maris et maîtresses à Abidjan », in Les femmes et l'argent. Actes de colloque, November 1985. Gardanne, 1986, pp. 251-260, quoted by Vléï-Yoroba. Vléï-Yoroba, Chantal, “Droit de la famille et réalités familiales : le cas d’Ivoire après l’indépendance », Clio, 1997.

Webography http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=9433 http://almoactu.canalblog.com/archives/historique_de_la_bd_camerounais e/index.html http://afrikabd.blogspot.com/2008/10/un-etat-des-lieux-de-la-bandedessine.html http://www.africatime.com/ci/nouvelle.asp?no_nouvelle=543986&no_cate gorie=4 http://www.mondomix.com/actualite/599/5e-tome-de-la-bd-aya-entretienavec-marguerite-abouet-et-clement-oubrerie.htm

AESTHETICS OF EVERYDAY LIFE IN TWO ARAB MOVIES: THE TIME THAT REMAINS, OR THE STAGING OF SILENCE; AND LIVING HERE, OR THE POETRY OF ORDINARY PEOPLE SANA MSELMI

It is rare to laugh watching Arabic movies of the last decade. A kind of malaise settles down, ties up the entertaining drive of film-makers, and suffocates the laughter of the spectators; too many defeats, disappointments and concerns. Stupefaction becomes a habit. In both movies we are going to study here – The Time That Remains and Living Here – not only do we laugh, but we laugh up to tears. And we realize at the end that we cried at some point in the film. We cried, not because it shows dying Palestinians but, rather, living Palestinians. Not because it shows groaning people, but because the camera tracks the pathetic and the ridiculous and exposes them in all their poetry. The Time that Remains is Elia Suleiman's last movie. It tells of the return of the film-maker to his hometown, to colorful flashbacks which describe the everyday life of the Palestinians of Nazareth under Israeli occupation. Living Here is the latest documentary-fiction of the Tunisian Mohamed Zran. It describes life in Zarzis, his hometown, through a colorful crowd, simple and charming characters, who represent the twin pillars of identity and heritage in this southeast Tunisian city. In both movies, we have in common the return to origins and the description of various attitudes in facing life’s difficulties. This paper aims to show, first, the dominant role of silence in the construction of Elia Suleiman's movie. The silence: matrix element par excellence, pylon of the artistic creation and, especially, an essential component of Palestinian everyday life. Second, we shall bend over the specificity of the "day after day" unveiled by Mohamed Zran’s documentary. We shall see how Zran manages to recreate a poetic and

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subjective everyday life through the documentary, the best means to expose everyday life. Both movies, as a matter of fact, exhale the poetry of everyday life, which, in spite of repetitions and déjà-vu, unfolds, exempt from routine.

The Time That Remains, or the staging of silence If we believe its director, The Time That Remains comes in reaction to silence. Elia Suleiman confides to Flora Zaghini (2009): The Palestinians lived in a kind of situation which we consider as "presentabsent" […] Because of the History, there is a will to ignore them, to erase them. When we speak about Jewish State, and about the will of the world to recognize the Jewish State, what does this mean? That there are only Jews and that they want to erase, to make forget all the persons about whom I speak in my movie, as if they had never existed.

Paradoxically, it is through silence – the characteristic or rather fundamental component of the movie – that Elia Suleiman rebels against the silence whereby the Palestinian people fade away in the eyes of humanity. By focusing on small unimportant facts, zooming in on an ordinary everyday life, turning a non-event into an event deserving to be filmed, he succeeds in overcoming this aporia: fight the silence by silence. In the same perspective, the intimate alternates with history and becomes even more important because the movie is a round trip between a chronicle of the family Suleiman and the history of the Palestinian people. This coming and going between the public and the private is stressed by the movie structure itself, built on "a continuation of comic subversive playlets, where the oppression is shown in a funny mode." (Douin, 2009) This structure in successive little “pictures” strengthens the documentary side of the movie, already stressed by the demonstration of everyday life in all its aspects. Our approach to the movie will articulate this by means of snapshots-paragraphs, which will redraw the various scenes sketched by Suleiman.

Inside leather, outside thunderstorm The movie opens on noise, on a cacophony. A storm rages in Nazareth. A car fights against the streams of water beating down on the ground like a lead screed. Inside, the driver, surprised by the thunderstorm, fights against the silence and because of it, enters into a state of trance. A trance made by words; a ceaseless round. The questions multiply: oratories,

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without answers, no hope of answers. Speaking into his transmitter, he feels reassured by giving his position to his interlocutor who is… absent. He realizes it, but he persists in his speech. He rebels against the elements of nature. He rails against the loud sky. Behind him emerges a silhouette, barely visible but of overwhelming power by being silent and by the silence that it imposes: presence-absence which could establish a balance with the taxi driver whereby the more he speaks, the more he lapses into stupefaction, and finally into silence. The noise of the storm is stronger. The silence of the passenger is even stronger.

Shut up so that I kill you The city stirs in all directions: between bombardments and gunfire, shouts of soldiers and screams of people running away. From time to time, we hear the gentle hiss of the wind through the branches of trees, or papers darkened by messages flooding the city of Nazareth, messages sometimes caressing sometimes threatening. The invader marks his territory with threatening words. The soldiers shout, hoot and arrange a pleasant moment by listening to some Arabic music. On the other side, the invaded reacts with silence. Fouad Sulaiman is a young man full of words kept silent, whose eyes say everything. Yet most of the time they remain hermetically opened. They speak of the visceral silence of a man surprised in his sleep, by too many vain words and few useful acts. As a weapons’ craftsman, he spends his days in the noise of machines. He rarely speaks. He listens. Although threatened with death, Fouad Sulaiman sticks to his silence for the sake of his life. Under the threat of weapon, they summon him to count to ten before admitting; one, two, three, four, five, ten; he shortens the break, preferring to keep silent and maybe die rather than speak and negotiate with the enemy. Once again, a man keeps silent and his silence says everything.

In black and white The voice says that it is compulsory to surrender. The deafening noise of a twin-engine plane indicates the way to go. With the engine problem, both passengers of the car find themselves on the edge of a sheer cliff. Two powerfully noisy engines, two passengers heavily silent. The silence speaks of revolt. Silence is also surrender. A very noisy-silent scene where the car follows a rough road leading to… submission. A black car appears in the foreground, glancing through a tortuous and white track, pursued – I

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would even say – harassed by a yellow plane which sticks to it. A black car whose color is reminiscent of the shots separating every shutter or episode of the movie; a moment of cut, of absolute silence. A white track which recalls, by its color, the torrent of pamphlets sent by the Israeli planes at the beginning, asking the Palestinians to lay down their weapons and their tongues. The white is, thus, the color of silence. Yet even the silence has its words in this movie: it expresses itself through the white flag held by the passenger of the black car. Instead of meaning resignation, the white flag means refusal and revolt, by rebelling against the hand holding it and by setting itself in the windscreen of the car, thus veiling the road which the mayor has to follow to sign the final surrender. But the pact is signed. Around a Round Table, the invader speaks at great length. The invaded keeps silent, losing himself in the intricacies of a history mutilated by too much silence, by excess of the unspoken. Behind the blank mayor, a procession of men in black display by their silence their perplexity in the face of contradictory and hermetic speeches of Time. Men in black in front of men in tawny: the face-to-face is horizontal. But, the ownership and the control of speech on one side and the reign of silence on the other side, allow the encounter to become vertical. Vertical, like this yellow plane which harassed, earlier, the black car; as an eagle would harass a poor fugitive prey: a terrified rabbit, or a mole that would not have time to look on the ground for a repairing and protective silence. The movie, thus, is built on dichotomies as clear-cut as white and black: silence against speech, tawny against black. White ends by meaning black. The mourning settles down as well as the silence of defeat.

The silence of the crack Elia Suleiman "massacres" his own movie, imposing on it black shots meant as transition. Is it about the silence of history? Is it about ellipses of the out-of-shot, which happened behind the camera and which the camera turns out to be unable to transpose onto the screen? These cuts separating the various shots, would they be the undergone grief that the word cannot transmit properly? Is it about black pages of Palestinian history, or pages torn away from all the books of history? Is it, finally, about a metaphor of the systematic and tactical silence of those "Arabs" which available in the public square but not even sold1? Hypotheses are multiple. But what is

1 The Arabs: Title of a newspaper distributed in the public square for free, but which nobody wants to take.

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certain, is that The Time that Remains is split by cuts and black breaks just like this broken country, ripped by birds of prey of all kinds.

Silence, it speaks! However disrupted it is, Elia Suleiman's last movie gives the impression of winding up instead of unfolding. The narrative is at the same time twisting and linear. It progresses by successive jumps, separated by falls in the black. And it follows the path of a spiral, making on-thespot, and stagnating jumps, returning to the start, and then advancing in jerky movements. It seems to search its way; a metaphor for people who want to remember their path. Just like this Olga, who because of looking too much became almost blind. In this movie, it is repetition which structures everyday life. Indeed, the movie is punctuated by repetitions: already-seen occasions, far from complicating the plot, provoke laughter from the audience. Let us just keep in mind that the grin is a cousin of laughter and that sarcasm hides many wounds. One of the funniest scenes which return in The Time that Remains is the fishing scene: Fouad Suleiman and his friend, seen from behind, plunge their fishing rods into the sea. An Israeli patrol comes every evening; with every evening, the same questions, the same remarks and the same jokes. Soldiers talk, friends barely speak. And the patrol goes away switching off its searchlight, plunging both men into total darkness and complicit silence. Fouad Sulaiman has a heart disease, light blue eyes and a penetrating gaze. He has also an eccentric neighbor: a defeated patriot, a convinced alcoholic, suicidal in his spare time; he is keen on strategies and theories, which he exposes to Fouad in a very daring language. And if he is not in full demonstration of a new tactic to liberate the country, he is splashing himself with gasoline, shouting at his miserable life. Punctually, his wife calls Fouad for help. At the end, no need of words or petitions, she walks slowly to him, looks at him, and here once again silence says everything. This is the aesthetics of the representation of everyday life, an aesthetics that exceeds simple description and which consists in seizing ordinary facts and in carrying them on. By transforming the everyday life, usually the perfect antonym of the extraordinary, this movie hoots in mockery the real events of history, flooded by a politics of misappropriation of reality. Leaving untold the heroic deeds of Palestinian history, carrying the small frictions, the squabbles of the neighborhood, zooming in on this mess of pottage offered by the neighbor and that goes, every time, directly to the family trash cans. This is the way the movie, by developing the hypertrophied sense of detail, shows an everyday life freed

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from the routine. In this sense, Elia Suleiman assured on the microphone of Flora Zaghini (2009): In fact, I do not present arguments on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I do not wish to raise a debate or a discussion about the rights of the Palestinians, but just draw an autobiographical portrait. I do not try to give lessons of History and especially I want to deviate at most from the media approach. What I wanted to show is the intimacy of a family. I remember myself certain moments which marked me the most, and I was inspired by these same moments to structure my movie.

The more we speak around him, the more he sinks into a silence which isolates him from the world. But within his family, the silence of Fouad Suleiman seems contagious. Only eyes are speaking. The only time when he chooses "to silence" the silence surrounding him, he begins listening to the song which opened the movie, through a gramophone stolen by Israeli soldiers. And when he ends the silence, Fouad leaves in front of his son Elia. Elia who wonders: "it is funny how our life can sometimes determine our work." (Zaghini, 2009)

Living Here, or the poetry of ordinary people Provided with his camera, with an immense tenderness for his hometown and with a hodgepodge of vibrating ideas, Mohamed Zran attacks with Living Here a challenge of size: reporting the everyday life of a sleepy city with the touch of poetry that always characterizes his films; describing the life and the city from day to day, replacing events by persons-characters; scrutinizing the everyday life, while manipulating a language which is situated at a respectable distance from this everyday life. Speaking about his movie, Mohamed Zran defines it as being “a documentary fiction feature film”. The definition carries a contradiction which spreads out in the entire movie: both a documentary – sticking to reality – and a fiction – an open field for the imagination. How to exceed this paradox, which consists of stowage between an ordinary reality and a film narrative, which combines the private individual and the extraordinary? How does Mohamed Zran succeed in marrying documentary and cinematic style, by means of a perfect sense of observation and listening?

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A false documentary for a false everyday life? Just as a good scenario is the strength of a fiction, the presence of a vital lead is also important for making a documentary, in spite of the impression of spontaneity that emerges in it. And Mohamed Zran films the everyday life without falling into the trap of voyeurism and affectation, thanks to this peculiarity of the scenario, which changes according to the risks faced by characters in their everyday life. It means that the reality, and consequently the everyday life told or transposed by the movie, are transformed. In other words, the film-maker loses the reality to find it distorted, by means of his camera and of the film writing material. It joins in the questioning of the veracity of the facts brought back by documentaries. The film-maker, even while wanting to be as faithful as possible to everyday life – by the choice of a perspective, a shot, a transition, a freeze-frame, a close-up or an editing – betrays this objectivity and brings forward a detail to the detriment of the whole. And finally, it is the everyday life of the film-maker which we discover, or rather what he captures of the everyday life of a town. In the same perspective, the film-maker thwarts the repetitive aspect of everyday life that is not shown, but lived from within. Mohamed Zran, revisiting his hometown, creates the event and manages to by-pass the danger to create the event. He gets softly into the everyday life of this city by enlisting the city’s key personalities.

Characters-events Mohamed Zran sneaks around following the wanderings of some people who intersect, cross, find themselves off-screen or are admired in close-up. This cinematic strategy shades off the technical and artificial effects of a documentary, and gives to the spectator the impression of roaming the streets of Zarzis. The movie poster presents two characters standing on one leg on the beach, heads tightened towards Europe beyond the sea, a kick towards the city, hands interlaced to acquire a precarious balance. Yet it is this precariousness, this uncertainty which the movie tends to transpose. And doing so, this documentary denies the definition of everyday life as being a monotonous progress without real stories and without reliefs, by advancing the funny and the burlesque, the brief and the trivial. Indeed, watching Living Here is immersing oneself into a daily carnival: all the characters of the movie are molded by a sense of humor turning everyday life into a farce where Freud would assert gladly that “the grocer Simon is

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schizophrenic if he does not sell works of art, but if he sells them, well he is also schizophrenic!” (as Hédi, the cursed artist of the movie, says to us). This is what establishes the fragile universe of Living Here: prominent personalities, who act as vital leads, who are a sort of ranging-pole of the everyday: Fakhri: a young man who wants to leave and go to Berlin in order to build a house in Zarzis, a young man who beats his fifty-years-old German fiancée, who uses the woman as a means of departure and a passage beyond the Mediterranean, who worships his horse as we worship a beloved one. Whereas the dialogue of Fakhri with Youta the German is not established because of language problems, the communicationcommunion with his horse Mabrouk is perfect. Si Tahar: a primary school teacher who still believes in the prophetic mission of the schoolteacher. He retires with his head full of dreams, utopias and falsereal truths. A retired teacher who calls his wife as a child would call his mother, to escape the solitude and the silence. Hédi: a painter who lives in an unspeakable mess, who voices out improbable truths, hilarious theories, fantastic lessons in metaphysics and psychology as a knowledgeable person, to people who listen to him and to those who don’t. Now soon, he gets entangled in an obscure explanation, and finds a way out with the statement: “all people have two personalities, the good one is always punished and the bad one always not!” Surrounded by old men who read only the Torah or the Koran, Hédi does not lose his eloquence with a speech full of difficult words, metaphors, weird images, simplistic psychoanalysis. For this artist, nothing is worth Simon's small shop, nothing prevents him from spending time in front of the sea. This father lives within a theatrical disappointment, a remnant of black coffee in his broken cup, and a deep bitterness in the heart - a father deprived of his daughter. Kazimir: a street seller whom we discover in an absurd conversation with deaf-mutes to whom he tries to sell a drum. A seller who jokes about suicide attacks: "a way to pass to Al Jazeera!" A seller who recommends good grilled fish and alcohol as a road to happiness, except that he would be caught up by religious fever as those girls halfveiled mid-tight jeans. And then the camera slides as if inadvertently, and shows through the branches of an olive tree, some old ladies who bicker because of some rags in the stands of secondhand clothes shops. These old ladies sing and dance and pose spontaneously in front of Zran’s camera. Is not Zran, after all, the city’s prodigal son? And then, these ladies deserve to enter history and to display their wrinkles, their eyes squinting, their hands full of onion "herigua" in the dialect of Zarzis, "feu" (fire) in its second language

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French, the language of the mistress, of this destination so dreamed of by the inhabitants of Zarzis. And Simon, did not he deserve too to be immortalized by art? Dying two months after the shooting of the movie, did he feel this end? His gaze closing the movie, his bent shoulders confirm it. This old man who did not stop giving himself throughout the movie, opening his heart, his shop and his story, turns away. He curls up, hides jealously his last secrets and leaves without saying goodbye. The entire movie is carried by Simon, an ordinary person who becomes a character thanks to the camera, then a myth because of the movie and especially because of his death. So this is how everyday life becomes special: out of a simple person, the grocer is transformed into a character. A grocer who leaves his condition of simple supplier of objects of any kind, by his healing mission; especially, in that his remedies are free of charge. A grocer who moves in his shop as an astronaut in his space shuttle. A shop with the image of this dirty drawer, always open, with this swing which falls over alone under Simon’s sharp glance, filled with a profound acuteness. In Zran’s movie Simon is a vital lead, as tenuous as firm. Mohamed Zran is a big dreamer and he knows how to make us dream, how to pick up dreamers: simple characters with all the complexes of simplicity. Living Here is a realistic movie about a surrealist universe. Contradictory characters come together, and when the contradictions are aggravated, it is the Wide World which settles down in Zarzis. Zran chose persons distorted, who tried to live too much and to dream too much, in vain. And therefore his movie is overflowing with sensitivity, with humor, and with a rare subtlety. Living Here takes place as a series of snapshots, striking and poignant images which punctuate the movie and act as temporal indications, as seasons which pass and return. As with this image of a rope which hangs from the olive tree, the hanging of this not-granted visa. Rope hanging off a boat, the boat of this clandestine journey which would finish at the bottom of the sea; rope-scarf hanging in the bedroom of the artist who has lost his theater. Rope-scarf-curtain which separates him from the Zarzissian final act – he left to have his family life back, to have his leg and his France back as the credits say. Living Here is not only about a juxtaposition of anecdotes but also about scenes- chapters which register – thanks to exquisite random meetings – the key moments of the film-maker’s nostalgia; and which register a matrix of space and life. The real central character of the movie is the city, or rather the everyday life of a city.

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The city: real hero of the movie The applicant for illegal immigration knows Kazimir, friend of the taxi driver whose favorite customer is the black matchmaker, a shopper at Simon’s, the Jewish grocer. The latter knows everybody and welcomes into his shop all Zarzis: from the father who intends to marry his daughter, to the farmer who wants to cure his goat. If by his wanderings around the town, the taxi driver assures the tracking in the movie, then by his charisma Simon in his shop is the beating heart of this city and the coherence of Zran’s documentary. At the beginning, the camera is placed at the bottom of the grocer's shop. At the end, it faces us from the bottom of the same grocer's shop. The circle comes back around, as if to say that everyday life is also this return, this both linear and circular movement of time or rather, of consciousness of time, of each day, of all days. The movie is built as if the film-maker made an ascent through his encounters with the characters. None is central; each of them leads the spectator towards the other one. The movie is made in concentric circles which intersect somewhere in the mountain-city. And yes, Zarzis is as inaccessible as the most difficult and high of mountains; it is the central figure of the movie. Mohamed Zran aims in his movie at showing his city, but we have the impression that all that is to be said is off-screen. Zarzis does not come to light easily. The proof: the image of this central olive tree - emblem of the city - which remains alone at the end of the movie. Living Here is the staging of a simple and effective poetry, the poetry of simple people and a movie of ordinary days. Far from being a paradise on Earth, Zarzis is a space where we collect people at nightfall, where the young people are cataloged into five groups: drug addicts, bearded men, drunkards, persons with suicidal tendencies, and applicants for clandestine immigration. It is a place where the youth unemployment rate decreases because there are no young people anymore! It is so; it is the everyday life of Zarzis. Everyday life is often considered as raw material, an often-avoided simple material; but in these two movies, it is more than the instigator of the film narrative, it is the very substance of the story. Now, according to the statements of Blanchot, "The everyday life escapes ". And it is maybe the consciousness which the film-makers have of the elusive nature of everyday life which incites them develop it by marrying documentary and fiction, ordinary and extraordinary, daily and factual, commonplace and unusual.

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Bibliography Jean-Luc Douin, « "Le temps qu'il reste" : Etre drôle et facétieux sur fond de tristesse infinie », Le Monde (2009), accessed August 11, 2009 Flora Zaghini, «"Le Temps qu'il reste": rencontre avec Elia Suleiman! », Allociné (2009), accessed August 12, 2009

THE VISIBILITY OF THE OTHER IN GREEK EVERYDAY LIFE: A SEMIOTIC STUDY OF CONTEMPORARY GREEK CINEMA REA WALLDÉN

This paper consists of a comparative semiotic analysis of the 17 fulllength fiction films that competed for the Great Award of the Hellenic Film Academy in 2009. It examines the film representation of groups that are defined in juxtaposition to a dominant perception of identity in contemporary Greek society. It focuses particularly on how this representation is articulated with space. To approach the complicated dialectics of identity and otherness, I choose to begin with the latter. I believe that, in many ways, who is excluded from a collective identity is more significant than the collective’s positive understanding of itself – a view which is compatible with a structuralist differential definition of signification, as well as with the deconstructive critique of identity and with a psychoanalytic notion of the repressed. This, however, may imply a privileging of the dominant conceptualization and an external view of the other. In other words, is the other still the other from their own point of view? This question underlies much of my research. A preliminary hypothesis would stress the asymmetry of the relation between self and the other, as well as the social nature of its construction. I start by locating which groups are defined in juxtaposition to the collective ‘us’ of contemporary Greek society. Then, I investigate how these ‘others’ are represented, if they are evaluated positively or negatively, if stereotypes of exoticism and/or demonization are reproduced, which identifications are constructed and where the film’s point of view is situated. I am interested both in the representation of Greek society’s otherness and in the representation of Greek society’s relation to otherness, particularly if and how the films deal with different kinds of intolerance.

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One has to remember that films are both part of the everyday and a discourse on the everyday. On the one hand, there is the question of the function of representation, which is by no means neutral. A film is a signifying construction and cannot be used as a transparent medium. It is a document more of the ways of this construction than of its referent. On the other hand, there is the question of what constitutes the ‘everydayness’ of the everyday, especially in the dialectical opposition of structure and particularity, discourse and experience. If one is looking for ‘what is left over’ after all structured activities have been abstracted1, this cannot be the conscious signifying construction that is a film. Films are, of course, a part of material culture and of everyday experience, although the latter description refers rather to their consumption than their production. Moreover, films, as all other texts, carry a ‘left over’ in their very structure, in their unconscious significance and in their accidental elements, all of which however can be perceived as signifying retrospectively. Most importantly, the very division between significance and remainder is a priori unresolved, because all cultural products and practices are both signifying and material. An important methodological clarification regards the way one interprets the filmic text: how one reads films. The triviality that what is said by a text is intimately related to how, seems to be often neglected when the text in question uses audiovisual language. The present study is not limited to the thematic content of the films; it also emphasises their forming aspects, both narrative and visual. It claims that significance lies not only in what is represented but how – while equally significant is what falls outside representation. It is also important to emphasise the specificity of audiovisual language and not to fall into the common mistake of interpreting only its spoken component. The heterogeneity of its expression-substance results in a high complexity in the modes of producing signification2 – a complexity which our societies are inadequately educated to deal with. This paper chooses to concentrate more on the question of visibility – i.e. whether and how otherness is represented – rather than on particular representations. It evolves in three parts: The first locates who the groups defined as ‘others’ are, the second investigates the ways otherness is articulated with space, while the third is a tentative approach to factors which may explain patterns in our sample. 1

Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, [1947/1958] 1991), 97. 2 Christian Metz, Langage et cinéma (Paris: Larousse, 1971), 17-18.

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It uses a methodology loosely inspired by the Greimas-ian semantic analysis, looking for isotopies and their organization into codes3. It is by no means fully systematized yet. The main problem is the difficulty of quantifying such an analysis on a film, as it is not quite clear what constitutes the signifying unit and how a single occurrence is defined. The seventeen full-length fiction films that competed for the Great Award of the Hellenic Film Academy in 2009 comprise the sample for my analysis. This choice is partly accidental, led by the logic of the everyday: which films could be more relevant to the everydayness of a contemporary Greek just now than the ones screened at the theatres this particular moment? However, the year 2009 can also claim a more general interest. It was the year that the economic crisis hit Greece. It was also the year that many small productions by young directors were both critically acclaimed and very well received by the audience. Moreover, it was the year that saw the birth of the movement of the ‘Filmmakers of Greece’ (FoG), which – for the first time after many decades of individualism and political inactivity – united film-directors, script-writers and small producers, fulllength and short-length filmmakers, fiction and documentary filmmakers, modestly commercial and avant-garde, older and younger, famous and unknown. Several of the competing films were made by FoG members. Finally, it was the year that the Hellenic Film Academy (HFA) was founded and gave its first awards. [table 1] Table 1. Sample: 2009 Nominations for the Great Award of the Hellenic Film Academy 1 2 3 4 5

3

Film ǹțĮįȘȝȓĮ ȆȜȐIJȦȞȠȢ Plato’s Academy Bank Bang īțȓȞİȢ Guines Guilt ȀȣȞȩįȠȞIJĮȢ Dogtooth

Film-Director ĭȓȜȚʌʌȠȢ ȉıȓIJȠȢ Filippos Tsitos ǹȡȖȪȡȘȢ ȆĮʌĮįȘȝȘIJȡȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ Argyris Papadimitropoulos ǹȜȑȟȘȢ ȀĮȡįĮȡȐȢ Alexis Kardaras ǺĮıȓȜȘȢ ȂĮȗȦȝȑȞȠȢ Vassilis Mazomenos īȚȫȡȖȠȢ ȁȐȞșȚȝȠȢ Giorgos Lanthimos

Algirdas-Julien Greimas, Sémantique structurale: recherche et méthode (Paris: Larousse, 1966).

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

ȂĮȪȡȠ ȁȚȕȐįȚ Black Field ȅ ǻȚĮȤİȚȡȚıIJȒȢ The Building Manager ȅ ǾȜȓĮȢ IJȠȣ 16Ƞȣ Elias of the 16th Precinct ȆĮȡȐįİȚıȠȢ ıIJȘ ǻȪıȘ Eden Is West ȆİșĮȓȞȦ ȖȚĮ ȈȑȞĮ I’m Dying for You Ricordi Mi ȈȠȪȜĮ DzȜĮ ȄĮȞȐ Soula Ela Xana ȈIJȠ ǺȐșȠȢ ȀȒʌȠȢ The Tell-Tale Garden ȈIJȡȑȜȜĮ Strella – A Woman’s Way ȈȣȞIJȡȓȝȝȚĮ ȌȣȤȒȢ Fugitive Pieces ȋȡȣıȩıțȠȞȘ Gold Dust ȌȣȤȒ ǺĮșȚȐ With Heart and Soul

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ǺĮȡįȒȢ ȂĮȡȚȞȐțȘȢ Vardis Marinakis ȆİȡȚțȜȒȢ ȋȠȪȡıȠȖȜȠȣ Periclis Hoursoglou ȃȓțȠȢ ǽĮʌĮIJȓȞĮȢ Nikos Zapatinas ȀȫıIJĮȢ īĮȕȡȐȢ Costa-Gavras ȃȓțȠȢ ȀĮȡĮʌĮȞĮȖȚȫIJȘȢ Nikos Karapanagiotis ȈIJȑȜȜĮ ĬİȠįȦȡȐțȘ Stella Theodorakis ǺĮıȓȜȘȢ ȂȣȡȚĮȞșȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ Vasilis Myrianthopoulos ȀȜİȐȞșȘȢ ǻĮȞȩʌȠȣȜȠȢ Cleanthis Danopoulos ȆȐȞȠȢ ȀȠȪIJȡĮȢ Panos Koutras Jeremy Podeswa ȂĮȡȖĮȡȓIJĮ ȂĮȞIJȐ Margarita Manda ȆĮȞIJİȜȒȢ ǺȠȪȜȖĮȡȘȢ Pantelis Voulgaris

Who is the Other? It is not obvious who the other is, given that this is a relational determination. Who is named ‘the other’ depends on the speaking subject and, therefore, each film constructs a different relation between selfhood and otherness. Yet this is not the entire story. The experiences of identity and otherness are mostly socially constructed. This study attempts to understand the formation of contemporary Greek social identity, through its fear and opposition to several others, and as it is articulated by the 17 films of our sample. Yet again, ‘contemporary Greek society’ is an elusive abstraction; contemporary Greek society is by no means united and homogeneous, as is apparent even from the small sample of films under investigation. However, some dominant ideological schemata are identifiable and recognisable as formative tendencies. In its social construction, the relationship ‘us vs. the others’ is a power relation, noninvertible and by no means neutral. It is not a question of equivalent and

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interchangeable choices, but of a hierarchized dichotomy. Defining the other as other implies already a form of exclusion. Therefore, the existence of prejudices against a group is an indication that the group in question functions as an ‘other’. Moreover, a particular film may participate in or distance itself from a dominant ideological construction, in different degrees. So the first step of this study was to investigate whether each film criticises or endorses forms of prejudice against specific groups, and which ones. Then, there is great complexity in the way one can analyse the approach to otherness. On the one hand, there was each film’s presentation of the groups constituted as ‘others’ with regards to the mainstream Greek society; and a cluster of questions to ask: Who are the others? Are they represented positively or negatively? How important are they considered? How much space do they take in the narrative and on screen? And, importantly, are they represented at all? Under-representation or absence often is not neutral but a form of active silencing. Do they ever constitute the film’s point of view? On the other hand, our study includes the relation itself, i.e. the film’s presentation of Greek society’s relation to its constituted others. For example, how much is the film aware of racism, and what stand does it take on this issue? In addition, there is another level of analysis, distinct but not unconnected with the previous ones: how much does the film recognise the complexity of the issues addressed or, inversely, how many stereotypes does it reproduce? A film can easily thematise otherness, even with good intentions, without necessarily avoiding stereotyping, which sometimes contradicts the expressed intention of the film. However, a high complexity of approach entails an awareness of the issues addressed, while stereotypes – even positive ones – constitute a form of intolerance. The degree of stereotyping is difficult to quantify, and depends much on the researcher’s judgement. I have composed a table which groups in a simplified form the results of my analyses of the 17 films. [table 2] The colour scale refers to a film’s presentation of otherness and prejudice against it. With red are marked films that chose as their main subject otherness and its related issues. With pink are marked films that show awareness of the related issues, without having them as their main subject. With lilac are marked films in which the other exists or is referred to, without any indication of a specific awareness of related issues. With light blue are marked films in which the other is completely absent. This may not always be prejudice, if it is required by the film’s intrinsic logic; a consistent absence, however, particularly in films claiming some kind of realism, constitutes a form of

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Plato’s Academy Bank Bang Guines Guilt Dogtooth Black Field The Building Manager Elias of the 16th Precinct Eden Is West I’m Dying for You Ricordi Mi Soula Ela Xana The Tell-Tale Garden Strella – A Woman’s Way Fugitive Pieces Gold Dust With Heart and Soul

Sexism

Homophobia

Racism

Fear of the Other

Table 2. Presentation of the Fear of Otherness

++ – – –

++ – 0 0

+ 0

+ 0

++ – – – ++ – –

––

––

––

+ 0 0 –– –

– – 0 –– 0

– + + –– –

+

++

+

–– + –

0 0 0

–– + –

++

–

Notes:

Main Issue

Awareness

Existence

Absence

Endorsement

Highly Complex ++

Complex

Zero

Stereotypical

+

0

Latently Stereot. –

––

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silencing and therefore prejudice. Finally, with blue are marked films that endorse some kind of prejudice against the other. The plus/minus scale refers to the complexity of a film’s approach to otherness. The plus signs indicate degrees of complexity, while the minus signs indicate degrees of stereotypical approach. One immediately observes that issues of otherness are very prominent as subject-matter in our sample. Half of them thematise otherness as their main topic. Then, one observes that three main kinds of prejudice appear (criticised, referred to or endorsed by the film): racism, homophobia and sexism. There are two exceptions. The film ȌȣȤȒ ǺĮșȚȐ [With Heart and Soul] presents the Greek Civil War and, therefore, has as main subject a kind of otherness that does not fit in the above classification, i.e. political otherness. The film ȀȣȞȩįȠȞIJĮȢ [Dogtooth] addresses precisely the fear and exclusion of the other in a highly symbolic narrative and a minimalistic form. Having consciously denied realism and having situated its plot in a restricted protected area from which the other is excluded, this film turns its relative under-representation of otherness into an active critical comment. Additionally, a code of class difference appears in several films but it is not formulated on a structure of otherness, unless articulated with the question of immigration, with the exception of the films Dogtooth and Ricordi Mi. Almost all the films situated in contemporary Greece recognise the existence of immigrants as part of Greek everyday life; and most of them are aware of and concerned with issues of racism. Furthermore, there are two films that address ethnic and religious otherness in a different context from that of contemporary society. ȂĮȪȡȠ ȁȚȕȐįȚ [Black Field] deals with ethnic tensions during the Ottoman Empire and ȈȣȞIJȡȓȝȝȚĮ ȌȣȤȒȢ [Fugitive Pieces] deals with the persecution of Jewish people in World War II. One third of the films are concerned with issues of homophobia. However, half the films have no reference to or appearance of a gay or a lesbian person. It seems that silencing is an issue here. Another interesting observation is that the homosexuality represented in this sample is almost exclusively male. The most active form a prejudice in this sample is sexism. While half of the films are aware of the problem, almost all the other half overtly reproduce and occasionally propagate sexism. Finally, one observes that stereotypes are pervasive in the films’ approach to all the above issues. As expected, the dominant conception of contemporary Greek identity opposes itself to that of non-Greeks. Interestingly enough, in most cases, in contemporary Greece non-Greek means poor and manually working

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immigrant, where the ethnic otherness coincides with a class-relation. The aspect of religious difference as constitutive of Greek identity is not central in our sample, with the exception of Black Field, which is not situated in contemporary Greece. Then, the most hidden and most demonised other is the gay man. It is important to point out that the dominant ‘us’ is opposed to gay men; lesbians don’t appear in our sample, with the exception of Dogtooth. Sexual orientation seems to be mainly an issue of men, between men, and about manhood. This underlying machismo is consistent with an ever-pervasive sexism. Prejudice against women is the most endorsed and least thematised kind of prejudice in our sample. Greek women cannot but be Greek and yet they are partially excluded from the conception of the collective ‘us’. If one was to formulate these observations into simple antithetical couples, the opposition ‘us vs. the others’ would be transformed successively into: ‘us vs. the immigrants, ‘us vs. gays’, ‘us vs. women’. Therefore, it seems that ‘we’ are Greek men, where a ‘true’ Greek man is heterosexual and, mostly, not a manual worker. [table 3] Table 3. The structure of Identity and Otherness in contemporary Greek society ‘Us’ Contemporary Greek Society

vs.

The Other Not Greek Not a Man = Gay Not a Man = Woman

[= Greek Men]

Where is the Other? In this study particular interest is placed in expressions of spatiality, with the aim of articulating the conceptual geography of the films with their different kinds of filmic spatiality. One has to start with the conceptual spatiality of identity and otherness, which is different from both its articulation with literal spatiality and from its expression in specific spaces-places. A topology is implied already by the antithetical couple of ‘self vs. the other’. The couple can isotopically correspond to an ‘inside vs. outside’ relation, as Derrida has convincingly

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argued4. This topology constitutes culturally a background that supports the notion of selfhood, at least in Western thought after the Enlightenment. Furthermore, it is extended to the definition of all culturally dominant social identities, as opposed to their externalized (and yet structurally internal) others. The cultural and social constitution of these structures explains why a personal change of view does not immediately or easily lead to a change or inversion of the structure. Moreover, the conceptual topology of the ‘self vs. the other’ relation does not refer to literal space. The articulation of specific identities with literal space belongs to a different epistemological level. A classic example of this would be the isotopic correspondence between the couples ‘male vs. female’ and ‘outside-city vs. inside-home’, which functions in many Western societies. In this study, both levels were under investigation. There are different kinds of spatiality that are active in a film. These include (a) the spatial elements that are present on screen, (b) the construction of a signified space, as well as (c) its relation to its constituted referent space, when this exists. The surface of the screen functions both as a two dimensional composition and as an elusive representation of three-dimensional space, with time-motion as an additional dimension in both cases. Frame composition, direction of movements, position of the camera and editing are used to construct the filmic spatial-signified ‘reality’. This exists in the audience’s minds and nowhere else. It should be clearly distinguished from both the real locations that were used for the shooting of the film and the real locations to which the film may be referring. A first issue that is particularly relevant to this study is the notion of point of view, as well as the construction of identifications. Point of view in cinema may refer to different things, from the literal position of the camera to the perceptual, psychological or ideological position of characters, narrators or the narration, to the general position of the film. Furthermore, as Metz has explained5, there are different kinds of identification in cinema: the identification of the spectator (a) with the camera, (b) with the narration and (c) with characters in the narration. Identification is not a simple question of empathy but a textual construction of the film. Films may rely on identification techniques in different degrees, while others may apply techniques of distancing. For

4

See Jacques Derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967); and elsewhere. 5 Christian Metz, Le signifiant imaginaire: psychanalyse et cinéma (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977), 61-81.

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example, in our sample, ȈIJȡȑȜȜĮ [Strella – A Woman’s Way] invites identification, while Dogtooth uses many techniques of distantiation. A second issue is each film’s relation to its constituted space-andlocation-referent, particularly when this referent is contemporary Greek everyday life. This relation is affected by the kind of relation to reality each film claims through the means of visual and narrational styles and conventions. In this sample, there are films of different degrees of realism, of magical realism, abstraction, surrealism, boulevard comedies and others. The means and conventions that each of them applies affect its relation to referent-reality in general and referent-space in particular. There is no style that is a priori more faithful to reality. The simplest question to ask is when and where the film is supposed to take place. Considering the subject of this paper, we are primarily interested in the films taking place now in Greece; not exclusively though. [table 4] The distinction, firstly, refers to temporal location. The majority of the films have ‘now’ as their temporal referent, which is very convenient for our study. Three films only are situated in the historical past: Guilt in the British occupation of Cyprus, Black Field in the Ottoman Empire and With Heart and Soul in the Greek Civil War. Unlike all the films situated in the temporal ‘now’ that deal with ‘small stories’, two of the films situated in the past deal with important historical events; these, however, are also viewed from an individual point of view, the small story inside big History. Moreover, interestingly enough, all three of them deal centrally with some form of otherness, and can be easily interpreted as comments on contemporary issues. A fourth film, Dogtooth, through its surrealistic narration and minimalistic visual style, is situated outside a specific temporality – yet there is no doubt that it primarily refers to and comments on a contemporary condition. Then, 13 out of the 17 films of our sample are situated exclusively in Greece. Of the remaining four, three have some scenes in Greece. The fourth, Dogtooth, could have been anywhere in the West; yet the characters speak Greek. Of particular interest is the fact that in the two of the films mainly not situated in Greece – ȆĮȡȐįİȚıȠȢ ıIJȘ ǻȪıȘ [Eden Is West] and ȈȣȞIJȡȓȝȝȚĮ ȌȣȤȒȢ [Fugitive Pieces] – the point of view of the film is not Greek, which gives the researcher the opportunity to observe several of the stereotypes about ‘Greekness as the other’.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Main topic: OTHERNESS

Not City

City

No-Greece

Greece

Out of time

Then

Now

Table 4. The Spatial and Temporal Referent: Where and When?

Plato’s Academy Bank Bang Guines Guilt Dogtooth Black Field The Building Manager Elias of the 16th Precinct Eden Is West I’m Dying for You Ricordi Mi Soula Ela Xana The Tell-Tale Garden Strella – A Woman’s Way Fugitive Pieces Gold Dust With Heart and Soul

When I began this study, I thought that the distinction between city and country would be significant. This has not proved to be the case. It happens that the majority of films are situated in urban environments, and the articulation of the code ‘city vs. country’ with ideology is indeed a significant one. However, its articulation with otherness in this particular sample is secondary. The exception is the film Strella, which deals with

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trans-gender and male homosexuality, where the ‘city vs. country’ code is isomorphically related to a ‘freedom vs. repression of otherness’ code. A similar articulation features less prominently in the film īțȓȞİȢ [Guines]. In the ten films situated in contemporary Greek cities there are several recurrent elements, such as traffic jams, political demonstrations and working immigrants. They are part of the background, as if inseparable from the feeling of the city. And this is what immigrants constantly appear to do: work. In all of the films the immigrant is more or less conflated with the poor and the manual worker. There is only one occurrence of an immigrant Indian woman doing an intellectual job, in the film ȈIJȠ ǺȐșȠȢ ȀȒʌȠȢ [The Tell-Tale Garden]. The fact of immigrants constituting the new working class is very effectively presented by the film ǹțĮįȘȝȓĮ ȆȜȐIJȦȞȠȢ [Plato’s Academy], where the Greeks are seen as permanently doing nothing in a constant visual juxtaposition to a whole series of immigrants of different origins working hard in all kinds of different jobs. This film is probably the most interesting approach to the issue of racism in my sample. Its subject is a Greek racist who finds out that he is of Albanian origin; a racist who finds he is the object of his fear and hatred. A very effective visual technique used by the film is the inversion of the literal point of view; for example, in one shot we have in the first level the group of Greeks framing with their bodies the working immigrants in the distance; in the following shot, the camera is situated between the immigrants looking toward the Greeks. Then again, the film Eden Is West is the only one which chooses as central to the narration the point of view of the immigrant who has to face racism and persecution. It is a roadmovie, the narrational conventions of which invite identification with the travelling hero: in this case the immigrant. Non-Greeks that are not immigrant appear only in the films that are either situated in the past or outside Greece; there, they hold positions of power. It is significant that that in the three films that deal with Greek history, the power asymmetry favours non-Greeks, Greeks being in the receiving end of imperialism. As we have observed earlier, homosexuality is silenced by half of the films in our sample. When it is represented, its recurrent characteristic is precisely this silencing. With the exception of Strella [Image 1], which situates itself in the male-to-female transvestite community in Athens, (a community which is very much structured as a world apart at the margins of society) in all other films where gay characters appear they always hide their sexual identity in public. Strella is a classical melodrama in form. Its method of making its point is by emphasising, both narratively and visually, the everydayness and familiarity of the trans community. It is as if in a quite stereotypical image of normality we have substituted gay and

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trans men for the heterosexual characters. Actually, a question mark in the film’s dramaturgy is the literal incest that takes place, weakening the strength of the normality argument (or maybe not).

Image 1. “The ancient Greeks! Miss Sophocles, Miss Euripides…” - Photogram from the film Strella – A Woman’s Way by Panos Koutras

Finally, of the 17 films our sample, only 5 have a woman as the main character; which may be understandable considering that out of the 17 only 2 were made by women: Ricordi Mi and ȋȡȣıȩıțȠȞȘ [Gold Dust]. Who is the main character in a film may be an indication but it is not proof of the film’s point of view. In our sample, one of the most sexist films has a woman as a main character: ȈȠȪȜĮ DzȜĮ ȄĮȞȐ [Soula Ela Xana]. It is significant that in the majority of the films all female characters are mainly concerned with issues about existent or prospective marriages, romantic relationships and procreation. Male characters seem to have a wider range of interests. Correspondingly, women characters are more often seen in or related to private space. Significant exceptions are the two films made by women directors. Both of them place their central character, who is a woman, in an external urban environment for half the duration of the film. Interestingly, both films use a very strong ‘inside vs. outside’ code but they don’t articulate it with the gender code. Riccordi Mi is the clearest example in our sample of a subjective point of view [Image 2]. While narration follows the un-linear structure of memory, the camera is often

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placed in the literal point of view of the main character. The result is a fragmented vision of Athens, made by successive close-ups of parts of architecture that we normally look at without seeing. This view does signify alienation and is indeed juxtaposed to images of calm interior environments. This code, however, is not articulated with the social codes of otherness (interior spaces are actually organised on a strong social class code, but this exceeds the present study).

Image 2. Photogram from the film Ricordi Mi by Stella Theodorakis

The film Dogtooth deserves a special mention. Its entire narrative and visual concept constitutes an actualization of the spatiality of identity as exclusion of otherness. The story takes place in the enclosed garden of a private house, in which the parents of a family have imprisoned their children in order to protect them from the outer world. The code of ‘inside vs. outside’ is very strong. The dominant conceptualization, imposed by the parents, has it corresponds to ‘safety vs. danger’, while the resisting conceptualization implied by the film would also have it correspond to ‘imprisonment vs. freedom’. The issue of point of view and perspective is very central, dramatized by the constant distortion of the children’s beliefs about the outer world, extending even to the meaning of words. A very interesting example, which literalizes the question of perspective as affecting the scale of things, is when the children see the airplanes flying and then they are given toy-airplanes by their parents, and so are led to believe that this is the airplanes’ real size. Several elements of the film can support its reading as a parable for the West’s relation to its others. One

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could also consider it as a critique of racism, despite the fact that not a single person of different race or ethnicity appears, because what essentially unites the ‘insiders’ is the fact that they belong to the same family. The family structure functions as the central metaphor for ‘us’, which also means obvious inequalities in power relations: the first being the ‘parents vs. children’ dichotomy and the second the ‘men vs. women’. Quite clearly the film comments critically on patriarchy; among other things, the father is the only member of the family who travels in and out of the enclosure. The issue of class is also clearly articulated. The family is upper middle class, while the only outsider that enters the house is a working class woman. She is the one who introduces into the family elements of the excluded reality. She is also the one who, in a game of power devoid of sentiment, initiates one of the daughters to homoeroticism; this is the only reference to lesbianism in our sample of films. Dogtooth’s critique does not particularly refer to Greek society but could be applied to any contemporary Western society.

Why? The final stage of our study investigates whether there are significant factors that differentiate the films’ approach to otherness; whether we can locate characteristics which unite those films that share between them a similar approach to our topic. [table 5] My first observation was that there is a differentiation along the ‘closeness vs. distance’ demarcation line. The few films whose plot is situated at some distance from the ‘here and now’ are more prone to stereotypes; particularly the view of the past seems to lose in complexity. One may dare the, possibly simplistic, hypothesis that closeness in space and time means personal experience for the filmmaker and, therefore, a more complicated approach. This observation is meaningful in a dialectics of otherness, as distance in space and time constitute a kind of otherness. Secondly, an obvious differentiation between the films of my sample was that half of them were comedies. This did not prove significant with regards to the choice of subject matter. Then I asked whether the conventions of comedy would be a factor intensifying the use of stereotypes, because it has often been claimed that stereotypes are appropriate to this genre. However, in my sample at least, this assumption was also proved wrong. I could identify no relevant pattern. While there are indeed frighteningly stereotypical comedies, such as Soula Ela Xana, there are others producing a complex approach to otherness, such as Plato’s Academy.

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Plato’s Academy Bank Bang Guines Guilt Dogtooth Black Field The Building Manager Elias of the 16th Precinct Eden Is West I’m Dying for You Ricordi Mi Soula Ela Xana The Tell-Tale Garden Strella – A Woman’s Way Fugitive Pieces Gold Dust With Heart and Soul

Otherness

Distance in space / time Closeness

Not Comedy

Comedy

Distribution Company Small Producer

Table 5. Factors possibly influencing the films’ approach to Otherness

++ – – – ++ + 0 –– – 0 + – – + – + –

Note:

Main Topic of the film Otherness / Fear of Otherness

Other topic

Complexity or Stereotyping of the approach of the film Highly Complex Zero Latently Complex Stereot. ++ + 0 –

Stereotypical ––

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Thirdly, a possible differentiating factor that I had on my mind when I first approached my material was the mode of the film’s production. There are roughly two ways of producing films in Greece today. The first way is a project planned and executed by a film-director, who is either also the producer of her work or is collaborating with a small producer. The second way, which was recently re-introduced into Greece, is a project planned and executed by a big production and distribution company, usually hiring the script-writer and the film-director. There is a general consensus that the kinds of films produced by these two modes are usually easily distinguishable. I was wondering whether this was true in this particular case. How does this important extra-semiotic factor affect the films’ ideology? In our sample, nine films were small productions and eight were made by big companies, i.e. half and half. The numbers are slightly misleading, because two of the films produced by big companies are the films of the highly esteemed ‘auteurs’ Gavras and Voulgaris, and can therefore be assumed to be director-led projects. However, as they were financed, promoted, distributed and screened by big companies, I chose to keep them in that group. Comparing the two groups, what I observed was not a difference in choice of subject-matter but rather in the way of treating it. Interest in otherness is widespread and quite equally distributed between the two groups, a possible indication that it is recognised as both politically crucial and economically marketable. However, the sophistication of approach does indeed differentiate the two groups, the widespread use of stereotypes characterising the big companies’ productions. This has often been justified with reference to their marketability; an argument which is a stereotype in itself and is constantly proved inaccurate – recently by the small-production films Plato’s Academy, Dogtooth and Strella which were financially successful. The ideology around the marketability of films deserves a whole study by itself. The least one can say here is that indeed the film’s mode of production affects the filmic text in many ways, including ideology. It would be interesting to investigate the ways the extra-filmic experiences of the film-makers are inscribed and transformed in their films. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present study. Anyway, one should avoid simplistically hypothesising immediate relations. I am just observing that the two films made by women have indeed a complicated view of the female characters, while Strella’s vivid and unconventional approach to the Athens gay and trans community is obviously linked to the militant activism of its film-maker. Another

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interesting area of research, which is also beyond the scope of the present study, is the way these films are perceived by different audiences. In a future study one could investigate the degree films in general and Greek films in particular are part of the contemporary Greek experience of everyday life, the ways spectators interrelate with the films, whether they identify themselves with some films’ point of view or with specific characters.

Conclusions To sum up, in our sample there appear three main forms of otherness as opposed to an ideologically dominant definition of Greek society’s identity; these correspond to three kinds of intolerance: racism, homophobia and sexism. The films’ approaches range from identifying with the other to endorsing intolerance, and from highly critical to stereotypical. Our study investigated the visibility of the people belonging to ‘otherized’ groups, as well as the representation of their social position as others and the ideological structures of their exclusion. We concluded that the most recognisable form of prejudice, as prejudice, in our sample is racism. The majority of films recognise it as a problem and take a position against it; many times though without avoiding stereotyping. The receivers of racism are exclusively immigrant, who are omnipresent in our sample, and also – with few exceptions – the only non-Greek and working class people. The less represented group are the gay and lesbians, while when appearing they are most of the time represented as hiding their sexual orientation. Exclusion in this case takes the form of repression. Conversely, women appear in every film; yet sexism is the most widely endorsed form of prejudice. Sexism seems to be the less thematized and less conscious prejudice in our sample. This sample is both too small and too localised to draw general conclusions about Greek society. However, as it comprises the entirety of a year’s full-length fiction film production of the country, it is an interesting contribution to its ideological portrait. If I attempted a comment, I would say that there seems to be a pronounced interest in issues of otherness and the problem of intolerance, while a lot has yet to be done towards increased consciousness, particularly with regards to the fight against stereotypes.

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Bibliography Derrida, Jacques. L’Écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Greimas, Algirdas-Julien. Sémantique structurale : recherche et method. Paris: Larousse, 1966. Lefebvre, Henri. Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1. Translated by John Moore. London: Verso, [1947/1958] 1991. Metz, Christian. Langage et cinema. Paris: Larousse, 1971. —. Le signifiant imaginaire: Psychanalyse et cinéma. Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1977.

THE SEMIOTICS OF SUBTITLING OF LANGUAGE VARIATIONS IN TELEVISION ADVERTISEMENTS IN GREECE EVANGELOS KOURDIS

1. Some Preliminary Thoughts This study attempts to show the semiotic dimension of subtitles in television advertisements in Greece. It examines television advertisements that were subtitled from provincial Greek (and more precisely from the regional accent of Epirus) and from the Pontic dialect in standard Greek (Modern Greek Language). There is a difference between the two language varieties: the regional accent of Epirus belongs linguistically to the northern regional accents of Greece, while Pontic belongs to the dialects of Greek language. It is, therefore, interesting to enquire into the reason for their translation into standard Greek in Greek television. Gonzalez (2008: 15) mentions that « intralingual subtitles were traditionally addressed at minority audiences, such as immigrants wishing to develop their proficiency in the language of the host community or viewers requiring written support to fully understand certain audiovisual texts shot in non-standard dialects of their native languages». For Munday (2009: 6), the subtitling of dialects, « as well as being either intralingual or interlingual, [...] is also a form of intersemiotic translation, the replacement of a source text (ST) spoken verbal code by a target text (TT) written verbal code with due regard for the visual and other acoustic signs ». Moreover, it is interesting to investigate why advertising, which tries to promote and impose models of everyday life (do this, choose that, we recommend this product, etc.), prefers to introduce into it, both through the linguistic system and subtitling, varieties of Greek language which are not related – from a linguistic point of view – to the everyday life of the average Greek. Is it possible that advertising may try to persuade us that it is a bad idea to underestimate or not use language varieties in everyday life? If we take into account the financial and commercial objective of advertising, its moralist character is called into question: after all, the

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purpose of an advertisement is to promote a product, not linguistic positions.

2. Television and Advertisements as Everyday Activities We know that intralingual translation is not the rule in television advertisements. Translation is considered by De Certeau (1984: 160) as a « mechanism, perfected over the generations, that makes it possible to move from one language to another, to eliminate exteriority by transferring it to interiority […] this notion of translation assumes the ‘‘translatability’’ of all languages (whether iconic, gestural, or voiced) into ‘‘natural everyday languages” ». However, how is exteriority eliminated through translation in our case, given that the language varieties that are subtitled in Modern Greek are actually already Greek? Furthermore, how is subtitling, which is semiotically linked to the translation of foreign natural languages, helping eliminate this exteriority? One should remark here that the subtitling of language varieties is not a diffused practice in Greek television advertisements. Lotman & Ouspenski (1990: 177) observe that « there are eras when art intrudes life by aestheticizing its everyday course. Such were Renaissance, the Baroque, Romanticism, and the art of the beginning of 20th century». However, after the diffusion of diverse media, the influence of art in the course of everyday life is no longer so strong. Other means of influence, such as television, the Press and advertising penetrate everyday life in order to influence and sometimes change it. This penetration is recorded by a cultural industry established by the media. For Silverstone (2004: 110), « the cultural industry produces a standardized, homogenized mass culture, in which the market, like a lava flow, consumes everything of value in its path ». Television advertising normally obeys this norm because it profits from the standardized media culture, which mainly uses language in order to impose a communicational homogenization, increasing in this way the number of consumers who receive the message of the advertisement. Nevertheless, if one accepts such a practice in everyday communication, it is difficult to reply to Silverstone’s remark (2004: 110) that « advertising offers signs without meaning ». Signs without meaning – as is the case with the linguistic varieties in question, which remain incomprehensible for the large majority of Greek television viewers, whence comes the need for their subtitling – constitute major obstacles to everyday communication. Of course, according to Silverstone (2004: 119), «advertisers […] orient their campaigns in such a way as to make their products appear and appeal

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to socially defined and located groups and individuals ». However, we think that such localization could be not linguistic but commercial, taking into account the consumers’ needs and their purchasing power. Moreover, it could not be moralizing, given that advertising exploits values and does not serve them. Therefore, it is difficult to justify the choice in question, of language varieties, by Greek advertisers, a choice which does not facilitate wide public communication and which is, for this reason, usually excluded from the Greek media.

3. Subtitling Language Varieties in Greek Television One must stress that «subtitles differ from the common notion of target text, because they are part of a polysemiotic text» (Pedersen, 2005: 13) and that, additionally, they are additive (Gottlieb, 1997: 141), because they add information to the source text. According to Lambert & Delabastita (1996: 40), subtitling can be defined as «repetition of signs that compose the original [text] mediating a partial substitution of verbal signs for visual and non-verbal signs ». We think that this repetition implies intersemioticity, considering that we are dealing with a verbalization – occasionally partial – of non-verbal signs. Moreover, we observe that in the television advertisements under examination there is no dialogue, no interaction, only monologue, a fact that facilitates, we think, their subtitling and the viewers’ concentration on the content of the subtitled verbal message. One should notice that in general no text is monosemiotic. Accordingly, in our case, we observe the synergy of semiotic systems, such as song, kinetics, proximity, color, image, and the oral and written languages. Furthermore, in Karamitroglou’s (2001: 311) words, «subtitling seems to be firmly established as an overall norm not just because of its broad applicability across the whole spectrum of audiovisual modes but also because of the complementary motivations that lie behind it». We share this position and we think that the advertisers’ choice to subtitle the varieties of Greek into standard Greek is characterized by the motivation to diffuse latent messages and connotations. These connotations may be the reason why Diaz Cintas & Remael (2007: 185) remark that «the current trend is for film language to exhibit more rather than less variation». According to Peeters (1999: 188), « the dialectalisation of language is in the core of translation », because dialectalisation poses problems of communication. In television, subtitling seems to be a solution to communication problems caused by the use of dialect varieties. Greimas &

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Courtés (1993: 113) consider that the «natural languages are reservoirs, places of manifestation and construction of multiple and diverse semiotics ». One of the semiotic constructions of which they are bearers is identity, individual or collective. Gauntlett & Hill (1999: 286) observe that « people’s individual identities are clearly touched by the media in very gentle ways», and they go on observing that the ways «in which people see themselves and others may be subtly influenced by many different television elements». We think that one of these ways is the subtitling of language varieties, which are bearers of both ethnic and ethnotic identity. Karamitroglou (2000: 5) remarks that subtitling may be either intralingual (or vertical), when the target language is the same as the source language, or interlingual (or diagonal), when the target language is different from the source language. In our study, we are going to examine the former case, given that the Pontic dialect is a particular form of Greek, not only spoken but also written, while the regional accent of Epirus is an oral form of Greek. In this frame, a positive connotation of these Greek language varieties remains the only reason that could justify their being chosen by the Greek advertisers. Gambier (2006: 269) observes that «for its defenders, marketing cannot ignore the linguistic diversity, without concluding that the more languages are offered, the more viewers there are». Therefore, the issue that arises is to find out why the advertisers have chosen to use in their advertising messages these two Greek linguistic systems, knowledge of which is limited to two specific linguistic communities, instead of using the standard language, Modern Greek, which is understood by the entirety of the Greek population, avoiding thus the process of subtitling. According to Lambert & Delabastita (1996: 53), «advertising illustrates the degree in which the local accent functions as a seduction or as a marketing strategy».

3.1. Television ǹdvertisements in Pontic We are going to use as a typical example of these advertisements, the advertisement in Pontic (fig.1) which presents two musicians playing Pontic music and singing1, while another person is dancing a Pontic dance. The scene takes plays in a restaurant (at the background plane, we also see momentarily a waiter). The song is about a stomach ache and that is why, 1

Drettas (1999: 92) remarks that there is a contemporary literary production in Pontic, especially works for the theater and, above all, songs, with the very large audience they enjoy.

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toward the end of the advertisement, the dancer offers the drug Maalox which heals digestion problems. It is interesting that what is subtitled in standard Greek is not a dialogue or narrative but a song. At the end of the advertisement, a commentator continues in standard Greek (change of linguistic code) to advertise the drug and ensure the transmission of the message, using the standard language which is present in all advertisements and which links semiotically the non-everyday (the Pontic dialect) with the everyday (Modern Greek). In the table that follows, we see in the first column the song in Pontic, in the second column the subtitling of the song and its translation in English, and in the third column the words of the narrator and their translation in English. Song in Pontic transliterated in Modern Greek

Song subtitled in Modern Greek and our translation in English

OOh...ȕȠȖțȓȗȦ țĮȚ țȠȚȜȠʌȠȞȫ, İʌȡȑıIJİȞ Ș țȠȚȜȓĮ ȝ’.

ǺȠȖțȐȦ țĮȚ țȠȚȜȠʌȠȞȫ, ʌȡȒıIJȘțİ Ș țȠȚȜȚȐ ȝȠȣ (I am moaning and I have a stomach ache, my tummy is bloated)

Discourse of the commentator in Modern Greek and our translation in English ǼʌİȚįȒ ȩȜĮ ʌİȡȞȐȞİ Įʌȩ IJȠ ıIJȠȝȐȤȚ, ȝȘȞ ıțĮȢ. Maalox plus. (Because the way to the heart is through the stomach, don’t you worry: Maalox plus!).

With regards to the subtitling of songs, Diaz Cintas & Remael (2007: 127) mention that « most languages prefer to italicize the content of the subtitles and put them in the same place in the screen as the other subtitles». They add that «in the case of companies, the subtitles of a song are punctuated following the conventions of poetry: each line starts with a capital letter and no punctuation is used at the end of a line». In our case, we observe that the content of the subtitled song is not in Italics, that each line doesn’t start with a capital letter and that there is no punctuation at the end a line. We think that this happens because the entire advertisement is constructed around the Pontic song, the only text to subtitle, a fact which allows the subtitlers to use different conventions and not the ones used in poetry. We also observe that the advertisers have chosen to use the Pontic dialect in the advertisement message, despite the fact that it is not understood by a large number of the viewers, in order to show that the advertised product can be used by everyone, even by language communities with a very strong ethnotic identity, such as the Pontic community.

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Fig. 1. Frame from the television advertisement

3.2. Television Advertisements in the Regional Accent of Epirus Let us now examine a typical example of the second type of advertisements (fig. 2), which is about cooked meats. In this television advertisement, a young woman in sport apparel is jogging at the bank of a small river, then stops and utters a few phrases in the regional accent of Epirus, which are subtitled. The beauty of the natural surroundings, the characteristics of the young woman (blonde with green eyes), and the language system she uses, are all in synergy so as to connote the region of Epirus, a region of great natural beauty, known for its agricultural produce. The region of Epirus, along with the utterance « ĮȢ ijȐȝİ ıĮȞ ȐȜȜȠIJİ» (let us eat as we used to), are mentioned by the commentator, who speaks after the young woman, in Modern Greek (change of linguistic code) and in the written slogan at the end of the advertising message. This advertising choice links an everyday event of the past, eating, with the present event, trying to transfer to the contemporary time the connotation of consumption of natural products made the old way.

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Fig. 2. Frame from the television advertisement

With regards to the subtitling, we observe that the letters are very small and not in Italics. We also observe that the ellipsis mark appears at the end of a subtitle when the period continues to a second subtitle. What is interesting is that the advertisers subtitle in Modern Greek a language variety which is not far from the standard language and of which the differences lie at the levels of phonetics and vocabulary alone. Although the northern regional accents are looked down on, the advertisers have preferred to use them in their advertising message because they connote an everyday life of the past, characterised by simplicity and proximity to nature.

4. Intralingual Subtitling as a Semiotic Means Lambert & Delabastita (1996: 54) consider it important to establish «at which point the subtitle accomplishes a function simply informative, in the service of the screen and the non-verbal semiotic signs (or even of verbal signs in a non-accessible language), or rather a function deliberately narrative, and consequently mimetic and cultural, linked to determined sociolects and value systems ». In our case, the intralingual subtitling accomplishes a double function: on the one hand, informative, as the Pontic dialect and the regional accent of Epirus are verbal signs nonaccessible to the viewers who don’t speak these varieties, and on the other, simultaneously, narrative, because the subtitling becomes a cultural and ideological sign, linked to specific ethnotic groups and specific values (a

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simple and natural way of life), introduced into the everyday life of contemporary Greece. One should also notice that the subtitling of Greek language varieties in Greek television presents certain particular characteristics. Thus, we observe that no advertisement in our research sample includes dialogue in these language varieties, and that there is always an utterance in Modern Greek at the end of each advertisement, which presents the qualities of the advertised product. This shows that although the advertisers may use language varieties in order to exploit the connotations transferred from the past to the everyday life of the viewers, they don’t risk a confusion which would possibly damage the launching of the product. This is the reason why they use the commentator in Modern Greek at the end of each advertisement. Moreover, this shows that it would be incorrect to suppose that advertising serves noble ideals, such as multiligualism, ethnotic consciousness and expression, and the protection of cultural tradition – ideals which are now considered European, because of the European Union. One should not forget Eco’s famous words (1985: 154): «advertising wakes up desires; however, by doing this, not only does it compel the world to desire, it also tells them what they should want and what it would be good to want» (our translation from the Greek text). The change of linguistic code, the recourse to the standard language, is not the only means the advertisers use in order to make certain of the reception of their advertising message. They also use intersemiotic translation in order to create a phenomenon of redundancy of semiotic signs. We observe that at the end of all the advertisements there is an intersemiotic translation between the advertised product (visual semiotic system) and the discourse of the actor or the commentator (verbal semiotic system). The intersemioticity, present in a great number of human activities – for certain semioticians, everywhere – remains one of the principal characteristics of television discourse. This intersemioticity is put to the service of the diffusion of underlying, connotative messages. Therefore, nowadays, television exploits the positive connotations produced by the use of language varieties at a time when the predominance of the standard language is well established. Furthermore, the standard language in Greece is not linked to connotations of the same kind as the several varieties, because it is a neutral system, devoid of specific connotations and used as a common code. One should mention that the launching of these language varieties constitutes an ideological choice as « the media transfer these ideologies that the receivers use as codes which originate from the social situation in

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which they live, their level of education and their psychology at the moment» (Eco, 1985: 31).

5. Instead of a Conclusion The connotations shared by all the television advertisements studied here concern the traditional, a notion which covers, according to the advertisers, the ethnotic group (Pontic, of Epirus), as well as health, eating and the past. It is these connotations reflecting the everyday of yesteryear that the advertisers try to revive in our actual reality. More precisely, the choice of the Pontic celebration invokes a representation of the Pontic tradition with music, dance, singing and tempting rich food. These values are historically invariable. Then again, the television advertisement of Epirus chooses to invoke a traditional way of life, with natural products that come from an environment far from urban activity. These cultural signs are diachronic for the Greeks. Fabbri (2008: 52) remarks that «the signs of a culture become the equivalents of the words of a culture», and it is these signs that one has sometimes to subtitle, even intralinguistically. Lotman & Ouspenski (1990: 246) consider that “the more far away from us is an era in history, geography or culture, the more evident is the fact that its everyday behaviour deserves to be specifically studied”. To this is linked the fact that the documents that fix the norms of the everyday, the ordinary behaviour for a determined socium, generally originate from foreigners or are written for the use of foreigners. They suppose an observer external to the given socium. May the advertisers play this role of external observer? We think that they may, particularly considering how other studies on the traditional in Europe (Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy and Finland) remind us that the same semantic fields are forming the traditional in these countries too (see Wehn, 2001: 67). Wehn also claims that the advertising industry distinguishes between standardised and non-standardised advertisement, the former actualising the philosophy of selling the same things in the same way everywhere, the latter varying locally the messages and their verbal and visual actualisations. It is obvious that the television advertisements that we have studied belong to the latter category. However, they are constructed on values and connotations which, we think, are common everywhere. This shows that the contemporary everyday can also be composed of diachronic and diatopic elements.

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Bibliography De Certeau, Michel. The practice of everyday life. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984. Diaz Cintas, Jorge & Aline Remael. Audiovisual translation: subtitling. Manchester and Kinderhook: Sait Jerome, 2007. Drettas, George ‘‘The Greek-Pontic Dialect Group’’. In Dialect Enclaves of the Greek language, edited by A.F. Christidis, 91-96. Athens: Ministry of National Education and Religious Affairs, Center for the Greek Lnguage, 1999. Eco, Umberto. Semiology in everyday life. Athens: Maliaris, 1985. In Greek. Fabbri, Paolo. Le tournant sémiotique. Paris: Lavoisier, 2008. Gambier, Yves. ‘‘Orientations de la recherche en traduction audiovisuelle’’. Target 18/2 (2006): 261-293. Gauntlett, David and Annette Hill. Television, culture and everyday life. London and New York: Routledge, British Film Institute, 1999. Gonzalez, Luis Perez. ‘‘Audiovisual translation’’. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by M. Baker and G. Saldanha, 13-20. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Gottlieb, Henrik. Subtitles, Translation and Idioms. Copenhagen: Center for Translation Studies, University of Copenhagen, 1997. Greimas, Algirdas and Joseph Courtés. Sémiotique: Dictionnaire raisonné de la théorie du langage. Paris: Hachette, 1993 [1979]. Karamitroglou, Fotios. Towards a Methodology for the Investigation of Norms in Audiovisual Translation. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. Karamitroglou, Fotios. “The choice between subtitling and revoicing in Greece”. Target 13/2 (2001): 305-315. Lambert, José and Dirk Delabastita. ‘‘La traduction de textes audiovisuels: modes et enjeux culturels’’. In Les transferts linguistiques dans les Médias audiovisuels, edited by Y. Gambier, 33-58. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1996. Lotman, Jurij and Boris Andréévitch Ouspenski. Sémiotique de la culture russe: études sur l’histoire. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1990. Munday, Jeremy. The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies. Oxford and New York, 2009. Pedersen, Jan. “How is culture rendering in subtitles ?”. In Mutra 2005Chanllenges of Multidimensional Translation: Conference Proceedings, edited by H. Gerzymisch-Arbogast and S. Nauert, 2005, accessed September 28, 2012,

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www.euroconferences.info/.../2005_Pedersen_Jan.pdf. Peeters, Jean. La médiation de l’étranger: Une sociolinguistique de la traduction. Arras: Artois Presses Universitaires, 1999. Silverstone, Roger. Televison and everyday life. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. When, Karin. ‘‘About remakes, dubbing & morphing: some comments on visual transformation processes and their relevance for translation theory’’. In (Multi)media Translation. Concepts, practices, and research, edited by Y. Gambier and H. Gottlieb, 65-72. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2001.

“ANY DAY IS A WHOLE STORY, EVEN WHEN YOU BELIEVE NOTHING’S HAPPENED”: JACQUES RÉDA AND THE EVERYDAY ALEXANDER HERTICH

In The Invention of the Present [L’Invention du présent] the writer Pierre Bergounioux contends: “One sees when one reads Réda. You look at things differently, how they are constituted, in part, by our gaze upon them. It’s an integral part of their reality, it brings them into being; we no longer inhabit the same world once he has passed through” [On voit lorsqu’on lit Réda. On regarde autrement les choses comme elles consistent, en partie, dans le regard que nous portons sur elles, qu’il est partie intégrante de leur réalité, les fait être, c’est n’est plus le même monde que nous habitons après qu’il a passé]. In Réda’s works the poet observes daily routines, banal activities, and infuses them with a new point of view, offering a deeper and more appreciative understanding. A prime example of what Ross Chambers calls “a mobile consciousness” and “a consciousness of mobility,” Réda has chronicled his meanderings through Paris and its suburbs for over 30 years in a series of poems and essays with titles such Recommendations for Walkers [Recommandations aux promeneurs], Traveling Accidents [Accidents de la circulation], or The Asphalt is Exquisite [Le Bitume est exquis]. “The picturesque poet of the pavement” [Le poète pittoresque du bitume] according to Maulpoix, Réda follows in the footsteps of those who previously ambled through the streets of Paris. He continues the tradition of the nineteenth-century flâneur, a stroller and observer of life in the streets, as found in works by Balzac and Baudelaire. Like Baudelaire, he “goes botanizing on the asphalt.” Like Balzac he imagines that streets have stories to tell. In “Rue Laferrière,” for example, he wonders about “their ambitions, their dreams, their desires. Would they like to become avenues? They know that they would lose their character and meaning here, and this helps them to accept their limits willingly” [leurs ambitions, leurs rêves, leurs désirs. Voudraient-elles devenir des avenues? Elles

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savent qu’elles y perdraient de leur caractère et de leurs sens, et cela les aide à consentir de bon cœur à leurs limites], a query reminiscent of the descriptions from Balzac’s Ferragus, for example, where the narrator declares: “the streets of Paris have human qualities and such a physiognomy as leaves us with impressions against which we can put up no resistance.” Yet, while Réda is conscious of his nineteenth-century predecessors, he is not simply an imitator. Unlike Balzac’s narrator who strives to provide an authoritative and unquestionable catalog of the city’s streets and citizens, Réda’s fascination with his surroundings is more personal and frequently ephemeral. Baudelaire’s flâneur viewed the city with “fascination and terror.” “I love you, oh vile capital!” [Je t’aime ô capitale infâme!], the poet tellingly proclaims in the “Epilogue” to Paris Spleen [Le Spleen de Paris]. The crowds that fill the streets captivate the poet’s attention, yet he cannot understand them. For him, “everything is empty” [tout est vide]. As a result, the poet turns his gaze inward: a distance is created between perception and writing. Réda’s protagonist, however, does not simply relate from his isolated mansard what happened; he is part of the action. The landscape unfurls sentences in front of our eyes, explains the poet. Speaking of his poetry since the 1960s, Réda explains: “In the following years, a kind of osmosis between writing and walking came about (…) in other words, movement that writes” [Dans les années suivantes, il s’est produit une sorte d’osmose entre écrire et circuler [. . .] c’est pour ainsi dire le mouvement qui écrit]. Réda’s works fuse the act of walking and writing, which engenders a new relationship between the poet and his subject, ultimately creating a new space of philosophical understanding for the reader. Often celebrating commonplace, everyday “incidents” as Réda has described them, his texts are a guide both to the banality of life in the city and the transcendence that such an existence can offer both the poet and the reader. One frequently finds a feeling of joy in Réda’s works. In “A City Dweller” [Un Citadin], a poem whose liminary position in the collection The Race [La Course] underlines its importance and imparts it with a manifesto-like tone, he declares: . . . A feeling of absolute joy must be uttered As if coming from outside my own body, To the point that the street itself at this moment suspects That it, the whole city and its unresolved space Are but one with the mobile but trusty network Of sentences that our steps write when we walk about.

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[Il faut aussi qu’un sentiment de bonheur absolu Se prononce comme en dehors de ma propre personne, Au point que la rue elle-même à ce moment soupçonne Qu’elle, toute la ville et son espace irrésolu Ne font qu’un avec le réseau mobile mais fidèle Des phrases que nos pas écrivent quand nous circulons.]

With Réda’s texts, there is an unquestionable enchantment that results from walking through the city and observing one’s surroundings. As Marie Joqueviel-Bourjea writes, “The vastness of the world produces an explosion of joy in the subject overcome with meditated beauty.” [La vastitude du monde provoque l’éclatement de joie d’un sujet que la beauté contemplée envahit]. Although occasionally bittersweet and tinged with an ambivalent sadness, for the poet recognizes the “ruins” of his surroundings and the ephemerality of our existence, his texts constantly reassert that meaning and aesthetic worth persist in the world. In “Being and Having Been” [Être et avoir été], for instance, after proclaiming that: Nothing exists nor will exist: I never was Nor all those whom I would have liked to have been able to resuscitate [Rien n’existe et n’existera: je n’ai jamais été Ni tous ceux que j’aurais voulu pouvoir ressusciter]

he does admit: But I still hear the faint brush of sandals On the lost paths that blind eternity follows. [Mais j’entends encore un léger frottement de sandales Sur les chemins perdus que suit l’aveugle éternité].

There is always a vague rustling, something that approaches “airily” [à pas légers] maintaining our astonishment. Dispossession is “happy” [heureux], to borrow from the title of Joqueviel-Bourjea’s monograph on Réda. Modern life does not elicit regret, as frequently found in Baudelaire’s poetry. The poet does not lament that “Old Paris is no more. . .” [Le vieux Paris n’est plus. . .]. Réda, in “Things were Always Better Before” [C’était toujours mieux autrefois] for example, retorts: “Of course not! Come on, it was like today.” [Mais non, c’était comme aujourd’hui, voyons].

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Réda’s texts are filled with descriptions of seemingly mundane incidents, routine errands and commonplace occurrences. As the poet parenthetically observes: “(Any day is a whole story, even when you believe nothing’s happened)” [n’importe quel jour est toute une histoire, même quand on croit qu’il ne s’y rien passé]. In this way, he is able to appreciate a world that escapes others. Réda’s poet “manages. . . to turn ordinary movement into a constant journey off the beaten track” [parvient. . . à faire de l’ordinaire circulation l’occasion d’un incessante sortie hors des sentiers battus], argues Jean-Claude Pinson. Pierre Bergounioux similarly notes: “The wake of his journeys raises things dormant inside other things, unknown shores and islands, marvels, mysteries. . .” [Le vent de sa course fait lever les choses endormies dans choses, les rivages et les îles ignorés, les prodiges, les arcanes. . .]. The previously quoted poem “A City Dweller” concludes: Will they [passers-by] realize what I sometimes suspect: That the apparently distracted gaze we have Upon the world, is the world itself? [Ceux-là connaîtront-ils ce dont quelquefois je me doute: Que le regarde apparemment distrait que nous posons Sur le monde, est le monde même?]

Describing subtle shades of the sun— “Glowing raspberry pink, but pink like a water-ice— a sorbet fallen from its cornet and rolling about in the dust” [Rose framboise ardent mais d’un rose de sorbet— de sorbet tombé de son cornet et qui roule dans la poussière]— in The Ruins of Paris the poet grumbles: “The total indifference of passers-by is incomprehensible” [L’indifférence des passants est totale, je ne comprends pas]. Réda not only notices these commonplace moments that others ignore, but frequently perceives them as monumental. This approach closely resembles Bertrand Russell’s praise of “useless” knowledge. Russell observes: A contemplative habit of mind has advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound. To begin with minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates. Such troubles seem hardly worthy to be met by reflections on the excellence of heroism or the transitoriness of all human ills, and yet the irritation to which they give rise destroys many people’s good temper and enjoyment of life. On such occasions, there is much consolation to be found in out-of-the-way bits of knowledge. . .

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We find this approach throughout Réda’s works. Walking through the Palais-Royal for instance, the poet sees a group of young girls skipping rope and singing. Musing on their song, he notes: “And this motif from the depths of time would be transmitted. Other girls of seven with their austere bacchic frenzy and the authority of priestesses would preserve the celebration of ancient Pan on the deadened streets of Paris” [Et ce motif arrivant du fond des âges serait transmis, d’autres gamines de sept ans avec leur frénésie austère de bacchantes, leur autorité de prêtresses, maintiendraient la célébration du vieux Pan sur les trottoirs sourds de Paris]. Similarly, addressing ancient gods in Letter on the Universe and other Discourses in French Verse [Lettre sur l’univers et autres discours en vers français], he declares: Also, every time I can, In hiding, but without pretentious Intimate silence nor resonant Display of piety, I honor and salute you Everywhere where I believe I can detect Your hiding place or vestige. And it’s few things: a flower stem Half of my cigarettes An apple or daisies, As perishable as these lines. [Aussi, chaque fois que je peux, En cachette mais sans pompeux Silence intime ni sonore Étalage de piété, Je vous salue et vous honore Partout où je crois détecter Vos repaires ou leur vestige. Et c’est peu de choses: une tige Aux feuillages encore verts, La moitié de mes cigarettes, Une pomme ou des pâquerettes Périssables comme ces vers.]

These passing moments exemplify the poet’s wonder with the world. Yet, while he sings them in his poems, he understands their fragility and is careful not to crush them through pedantic or ostentatious verses. This contrast and lack of pomposity, which frequently translates into a certain tone of self-deprecation in Réda’s works, is also found in the collection Fun Physics [La Physique amusante], where he compares the

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vibration of waves, one of the fundaments of physics, to his strolls: All these waves enchant me: I remember having, when wandering Through the streets, been myself a wave. [Cette ondulation générale me charme : Je me rappelle avoir, quand je vagabondais Par les routes, été moi-même une onde.]

Similarly, in Troubles [Démêlés], Réda employs the idea of dance as a metaphor for our existence and the questions it raises. “And the best way to dance,” he explains, “remains the biped’s natural ambulation” [Et la plus juste façon de danser, reste l’ambulation naturelle du bipède]. Even the immense resonates in the everyday. This contrast and lack of pomposity, this appearance of the monumental in the quotidian, can be seen from another angle in the poem “A pigeon” [Un Pigeon]. Even though pigeons are known as dirty, willing to eat anything thrown on the ground, when perched on monuments they give “an impression of elegant control, which few other birds exhibit” [une impression de maîtrise élégante dont font preuve bien peu d’autres oiseaux]. He wonders: “how can one not discern here an allegory for the poet, a person frequently ordinary in his ways and petty in his reactions, but whose emotions, from time to time, increase with the rhythm’s beat?” [comment ne pas discerner une allégorie du poète, personnage souvent ordinaire dans ses habitudes et mesquin dans ses réactions, mais dont les sentiments de temps à autre s’élèvent sur le battement du mètre?]. Both live on forgotten scraps left behind in the streets, yet both can also soar majestically above the fray. Réda’s poet is not an ungainly albatross “awkward and weak,” “comic and uncomely,” [gauche et veule, comique et laid], but rather an average city inhabitant, one amongst the crowd. Like Russell, who finds it “pleasant to remember the chapter in Descartes’ Treatise on the Passions entitled “Why those who grow pale with rage are more to be feared than those who grow red,”” when dealing with angry individuals, Réda compares a taxi driver, whose “certain refinement” [certaine finesse] intrigues the poet, to “Trojan braggarts. . . [h]oneyed and vindictive” [les hâbleurs de Troie. . . . [m]ielleux et vindicatif]. During a trip to the flea market “shouted challenges start up, like those in The Iliad” [ces provocations hurlées comme dans L’Iliade]. A pair of street sweepers inspires him “to tragic emotion because of the way that destiny revealed itself in their posture of captive kings” [des émois de tragédie, parce que le fatum se déclarait dans leur stature de rois

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captifs]. The poet “remains quite interested in plastic bags. . .” [reste bien intéressé par les sacs en plastique. . .]. A turn down rue La Boétie brings the poet to question: I do, among a lot of fascinating but useless objects, none the less possess a knapsack, a laburnum stick and a sturdy pair of shoes. So what on earth am I doing here in the rue La Boétie, brimming with white wine and exalted thoughts of Being and The Void? [Moi qui parmi beaucoup de choses prenantes mais inutiles possède quand même un sac, un bâton de cytise, de bons souliers, qu’est-ce que je fais là seul maintenant dans cette rue La Boétie, plein de vin blanc et d’exaltation à propos de l’Être et du Rien?]

Now, this exploration of the duality of everyday life, between questions of being and musings on emptiness, is most striking in the work “That Unfindable Something” [On ne sait quoi d’introuvable], a text that exemplifies Réda’s enterprise. It begins: Sunday morning: like so many others who are Sunday painters, I am becoming a Sunday poet since this is the only day you can work from nature undisturbed. On Saturdays you are snatched up and stupified by the crowds of people stocking up with provisions for the inevitable tomorrow; all sorts of lovely goodies you simply have to have. [Dimanche matin: comme tant d’autres qui sont peintres je deviens le poète du dimanche, seul jour ou l’on puisse travailler tranquille sur le motif. Car le samedi on est happé, ahuri par les foules accumulant des provisions pour l’éternel lendemain; toutes sortes de belles et bonnes choses indispensables.]

Yet the text is ostensibly a shopping list, an enumeration and short description of nine items the poet purchases on a Saturday afternoon, including a Bud Powell record, some wine, pencils and three packs of cigarettes. Perhaps Benjamin was correct when he observed, “The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur.” Although Sunday has become the day for poetry, what we are reading here is an account of Saturday’s shopping. While the list may seem mundane, it brings the narrator great spiritual and existential joy. He describes his wine purveyor: Here on earth among us, in a single emaciated being with a thin moustache, is the triple incarnation (as far as plonk is concerned) of Thomas Aquinas, Saint François de Sales and Francis of Assisi. In a high dreamy tone, he ponders, makes suggestions and holds forth, finding his

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way into all the hidden corners of your drinker’s soul and illuminating it with his mercy and his wisdom. [Ici-bas parmi nous la triple réincarnation, en un seul être émacié à fine moustache, de Thomas d’Aquin, François de Sales et François d’Assise pour le pinard. A haute voix rêveuse il médite, suggère, disserte, pénétrant tous les replis de votre âme de buveur qu’il illumine de sa miséricorde et de son savoir.]

Similarly, explaining his interest in cigarettes and his appreciation for different brands from across the globe, the poet notes, “this is my way of seeking for the Absolute” [je recherche ainsi l’Absolu]. In this way, the poet is both part of the crowd mentioned at the work’s outset, and also unique. His shopping list is a poem, and his poem a shopping list; it is both a pragmatic and an aesthetic object. Moreover, as he describes the pencils he purchases on the Quai Voltaire, “with a special evanescent shade of pink, beige and grey” [d’une spéciale nuance évanescente du rose, du beige, du gris], the reader is there with the poet. “[M]ake sure you don’t linger about and lose your bearings amid pots of gouache, pans of watercolour and the soaring flights of heavenly Ingres or Canson paper” [[N]e pas s’attarder là sous peine de perdre le nord entre les pots de gouache, les pastilles d’aquarelle, les envols d’Ingres paradisiaques ou de Canson], he admonishes both himself and us. He concludes this third item on his list exclaiming: “It’s time to get out of here! (7,90F)” [Vite, vite (7, 90F)]. In the final item the poet turns away from his shopping list: “I am sorry to inform the reader that there will be no money spent in this tenth section. . . I arrive in the depths of the fifteenth arrondissement as evening falls, and with it my consumer extravagance” [Je suis désolé d’apprendre au lecteur qu’il n’y aura pas de dixièmement pour la dépense. . . j’arrive dans les profondeurs du Quinzième, alors que le soir tombe et avec lui mon extravagance d’acheteur. . .]. All of the service stations are closed and he is forced to pedal his Solex scooter. “Pay, I say to myself, pay now, you cretin, with the sweat of your brow for these sybaritic pranks of yours. . .” [Je me dis paye, crétin paye avec ta sueur maintenant tes frasques de sybarite. . .]. Pushing his moped home along the rue de Sèvres, he comes across an abandoned building site. Climbing to the top of a rubble heap, he sinks in thigh-deep: “Hello there, you good people, and I hail them with much waving of my cap. No one responds. They are all off back to their suburbs, encumbered, and like me, bewildered by their parcels of shopping” [salut braves gens, salut à grands coups de ma casquette, mais personne ne répond. Chacun retourne dans sa banlieue, encombré et

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comme moi hébété de paquets]. Like Winnie, from Beckett’s Oh les beaux jours!, our protagonist is buried, buried here in the conventional consumerism of everyday life. The poet wonders: “So are we all this much alike in our solitude; so much crass frenzy, so little love, merely this sullen gloom that portends the wretchedness of Sunday deep in our hearts?” [Sommes-nous donc tous à ce point semblables en solitude; tant de grossière frénésie, si peu d’amour, rien que ce renfrognement qui présage la misère du dimanche au fond de nos cœurs?]. Yet there is a positive side: our protagonist has managed to circumlocute the difficulty of being a Sunday poet by turning Saturday’s errands into an investigation of the aesthetic and philosophical pleasures of shopping. Poetry, ostensibly a Sunday activity, can occur any day and anywhere. In fact, the poet appears to have found “that unfindable something.” In this way, the protagonist of Réda’s works invites us to contemplate Deleuze and Guattari’s “plane of immanence,” a space that is, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “an affirmation of the powers of this world.” Yet do these observations indicate a greater metaphysical inquiry, philosophical meditations in the form of poetry? This is difficult to say with Réda, for he realizes that while these strolls through the streets of Paris may offer striking epiphanies and moments of great personal edification, everyday existence continues. Speaking of his quest for the Absolute in a pack of cigarettes, Réda admits, “But I’ve still not found it” [Je ne l’ai pas trouvé toutefois]. Every moment does not resonate with import. Réda indeed seems to mock: “Poems plump with emotions, twilights / Where occasionally those cheerful twins, Being and Been / Frolic” [Des poèmes remplis d’émois, de crépuscules / Où quelquefois ces gais jumeaux, l’Être et l’Étant, / Folâtrent]. Walking along the rue Babylone near Les Invalides in the text “The Stealthy Footsteps of the Heretic” [Le pied furtif de l’hérétique], for example, the poet remarks: “Bells chime behind the thick walls I brush against as I go by: touching them brings relief and disposes me to reflection.” [Des cloches tintent derrière les gros murs que j’effleure au passage; leur contact me soulage et me dispose à réfléchir]. One expects the poet here to offer a striking insight, a trenchant commentary on our existence. Yet, he continues: But on what should I reflect when the sky turns turbulent from far away in the plains and the clodhopping wind smacks my face with its load of cold soft earth? I am going home. There are eggs, cheese, wine and a stack of records, and at the push of a button you can bring out the bass line. So I move on, pizzicato. Am I happy? Sad? Am I moving towards an enigma, a sense of meaning? I don’t try too hard to find out. I have the vibration of those bass strings, tautened like hope and as resonant as love.

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[Mais réfléchir à quoi quand le ciel se bouscule du fond des plaines, et que le vent cogne dans ma figure, avec sa charge de terre molle et froide comme un croquenot? Je rentre. Il y a des œufs, du fromage, du vin beaucoup de disques où, grâce à des boutons, on peut mettre en valeur la partie de la contrebasse. Ainsi je continue d’avancer, pizzicato. Est-ce que je suis gai? Est-ce que je suis triste? Est-ce que j’avance vers une énigme, une signification? Je ne cherche pas trop à comprendre. Je ne suis plus que la vibration de ces cordes fondamentales tendues comme l’espérance, pleines comme l’amour.]

Similarly, in L’Improviste he writes: For the infinite and all this evanescent poetry are nice but where does it take us? You have to return to earth, as harsh as prose. . . where one can only advance with sturdy shoes. [Car c’est beau l’infini et toute cette poésie évanescante mais où est-ce que ça nous conduit? Il te faut redescendre sur la terre aussi rude que la prose. . . où l’on ne peut avancer qu’avec de solides souliers.]

As Réda states, the infinite may be “beau.” Yet the city remains a place where people live; mundaneness remains. The 15th arrondissement for example, “is located on the borders of the banal and the magical” [se situe aux confins du banal et du magique]. But something else persists— something frequently “unfindable.” It is this attempt to evoke the unknown, the depth of existence, that adumbrates the philosophical explorations of Réda’s texts. Nevertheless, as Jean-Claude Pinson argues, Réda should not be considered a poet in the same vein as Yves Bonnefoy or Francis Ponge. “[I]f he is not a “poetosopher,” he is far from being completely unfamiliar with philosophical preoccupations, however. . .” [[S]’il n’est pas « poésophe », Réda est loin cependant d’être totalement étranger à la préoccupation philosophique. . .], argues Pinson. Rather, Réda’s exploration of philosophy is his poetry itself, which is a direct result of the everyday’s power and worth. Being— everyday existence— is poetry with Réda, and this brings joy. In Réda’s texts, “The question of Being is posed in the immediacy of existence, day-to-day, in the actions that form it: opening a refrigerator, consulting one’s library, writing” [La question de l’Être se pose dans l’immédiat d’une existence, au quotidien, dans les gestes mêmes qui le font: ouvrir un frigidaire, consulter sa bibliothèque, écrire], explains Joqueviel-Bourja. “It is from the elucidation of everyday existence. . . that ontological interpretation is

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developed” [C’est à partir d’une élucidation de l’existence quotidienne. . . que se construit l’interprétation ontologique]. Deleuze and Guittari note: “The plane of imminence is not a thoughtout or a thinkable concept, but in the image of the thought, the image that it gives of what thinking signifies, making use of the thought, orienting one’s self in thought.” Our walks through city streets, our errands are also poems; we are part of the fabric of being. One does not have to be in front of an historical monument in order to contemplate History and our role within it. As Deleuze writes in his essay “Pure immanence,” “A life is everywhere, in all the moments that a given living subject goes through and that are measured by given living objects. . .” We are all a fusion of thought and action, poetry and prose, the mundane and the revelatory. “Useless” knowledge does have a purpose. As Réda shows us, our quotidian actions do have aesthetic and philosophical value. He notes: “In this way one ends up losing oneself, and this is precisely the road’s lesson, this point of uncertainty when a truly adventurous walker will be able to discern the long-awaited revelation” [On finit ainsi par se perdre, et c’est précisément la leçon du chemin, ce point d’incertitude où un promeneur vraiment aventureux saurait déceler la révélation attendue].

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Joqueviel-Bourjea, Marie. Jacques Réda: La Dépossession heureuse « Habiter quand même ». Paris: L’Harmattan, 2005. Maulpoix, Jean-Michel. “Celle qui vient à pas légers s’en retourne en dansant.” In Lire Réda, edited by Hervé Micolet, 181-189. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1994. Pinson, Jean-Claude. Habiter en poète: Essai sur la poésie contemporaine. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1995. Prevots, Aaron. “Entretien avec Jacques Réda.” The French Review 84.2 (December 2010): 358-369. Prieto, Eric. “Paris à l’improviste: Jacques Réda, Jazz and Sub-Urban Beauty.” SubStance 38.2: 89-112. Réda, Jacques. Accidents de la circulation. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. —. L’Adoption du système métrique: Poèmes 1999-2003. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. —. Celle qui vient à pas légers. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1985. —. Châteaux des courants d’air. Paris: Gallimard, 1986. —. La Course: Nouvelles poésies itinérantes et familières (1993 – 1998). Paris: Gallimard, 1999. —. Démêlés: Poèmes 2003-2007. Paris: Gallimard, 2008. —. Hors les murs. Paris: Gallimard (Poésie), 2001. —. L’Improviste, une lecture du jazz. Paris: Gallimard (Folio essais), 1990. —. Lettre sur l’univers et autres discours en vers français. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. —. La Physique amusante. Paris: Gallimard, 2009. —. Recommandations aux promeneurs. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. —. The Ruins of Paris. Mark Treharne, trans. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Russell, Bertrand. In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1948.