Entries tagged with France

November 16, 2024

Entry 63: Communicating Vessels I

Surrealism in Paris
October 2024

Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years, should not be considered as extant except in the a priori nonspecialization of its effort. I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on. —André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932; English trans. 1990)

In the spirit of a thought experiment, I offer my time spent in Paris attending the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference on Surrealism, one week before the American election, as charged with the co-presence of dream and reality. The first reality was Paris itself as elective site of a transformative moment—the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Being in Paris at that time, as it condenses all time passing between that moment and the present, had the feeling of co-presence of many moments all aware of each other and on the same level though not directly in contact. The crowds going about their business under a gray sky, during a school holiday where there was some release of tension and many children and families on the street, were not in direct contact with us streaming in cab or Uber to specific destinations, for instance the conference venue at American University Paris (AUP). Those presenting in multiple rooms, with visual aids and in three languages, were not aware of the cabs or Ubers picking passengers up and dropping them off. Just so, the meticulously curated book display of surrealism was not aware of the content delivered above. The array of editions, including many facsimiles of original texts, had a remote and uncanny feeling, as with the difference between books being opened and closed. The conference, as site for special knowledge (of “specialists in revolt”), was removed from the “nonspecialization” of lifeworld unaware of it outside. … More

October 21, 2023

Entry 53: With Etel Adnan at Erquy

In July 2018 I traveled with Carla Harryman to visit Etel Adnan in Erquy, the beach town in Brittany where she kept an apartment with direct access to the beach, weather, and sunset. Simone Fattal was not present, while Etel was staying with a younger companion and gifted painter, Eugenie Paultre. I cannot locate photos from the period but Eugenie’s painting titled Mer, recalling the view from Etel’s balcony, suggests the drama and strangeness of this coast—while Erquy continues as a mid-tier vacation retreat, with small hotels, flea markets, parking, normative uses of the beach, hang gliding in the distance, strong tides.

In 2020 Etel published Shifting the Silence with Nightboat Books; the bio notes state that she continues to live in Paris though the work anticipates her death the next year. In terms of genre, the writing is a hybrid poetic meditation, a sentence-level nonnarrative that records states of being and mind, with the turn to language always present and exact. Time is marked at the level of the sentence, with only the sparest narrative motivation: “My thoughts drip, not unlike the faucet. They don’t let me know what they’re about. Other ones follow, strangers equally. / The daylight is getting dim. We’re not in winter, no, we’re somewhere in early July. The sunset will happen soon. Then it will disappear too” (5–6) Temporality emerges from the writing as a form of roughing out, coloring in, and smoothing over—and along with it rhetoric, perception, memory, affect, comprehension: … More

December 30, 2022

Entry 47: Liberating Gertrude Stein

“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)

To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.

The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below). … More

July 23, 2022

Event 96: Travels in Reparative Space

Monday, June 21
Delta DTW > LHR [canceled]

Carla Harryman

What does it mean to travel? And what are the risks? You could hit an iceberg, for example. In this age of global devolution due to war, pandemic, climate change, and supply chain disruption, the risks are increasing. The magic “reward miles” that purchased at least one ticket were offset by ambiguous reentry requirements and increased insurance costs. Our awareness of global supply chain disruptions came with the brutal cancellation of our fully boarded flight. The air conditioning had heated up, needing to be replaced; the parts were in Atlanta, but no means to get them to Detroit; by the time they would arrive, crews had to rotate; no additional crews were available. By the time this was decided we had wandered the Detroit airport for some hours, only then to be automatically rebooked. The gap in expectations was predictive: this would be no easy trip, but still worth the attempt, we believed.

Tuesday, June 22
Delta DTW > IAD
Virgin IAD > LHR

Refreshed by an extra night of sleep before departure, we renewed the attempt. Now we are less concerned with global supply chains, as the aviation network is algorithmically rebooted to our advantage. Now it is a question of mask behavior and the algorithms of disease transmission. Universally, or in the metropole, the “unfulfilled democratic demands” for global travel had become a surge of pent-up consumerism; with the release from austerity, as a form of repression, off came the masks. They were no longer required to board a flight, nor were negative test results required for readmission, at least for passport holders. The politics of the New Normal are us. Willingly confined to our cubic meter of seating, we endured the deprivation of freedom as a contract with global mobility. One flight took us to the sterile, remodeled Dulles Airport, with many murals of JFK, and then onward to Heathrow, on an airline named for the “Virgin Queen” during the heydey of Thatcherism.

Wednesday, June 22
189 King’s Cross Road, London

“Surrealism Beyond Borders”
@ Tate Modern

Our trip was structured around several agendas: for me, catching up with global exhibitions, literary friends, and Berlin; for Carla additionally, a launch of Cloud Cantatas, published by Pamenar Press and delivered that very day in London. After presenting at last November’s virtual conference on surrealism, I had wanted to get to the New York version of the show before it closed in January at the Met, but omicron put an end to that. The Tate Modern was the next venue, the monumental showcase for New British Art responding to the global, decolonial imperative. To what extent this exhibition truly understood or could identify the theoretical horizons of the global dispersion of surrealism was, however, in doubt. Static art-historical orders of style and periodization remained in place, tending toward inadequately framed concepts of history and space. There were groups of painters in Mexico City or Cairo, for example, who carried on the tradition of group activity in surrealism. But what could be seen of the decolonial moment, precisely the moment of surrealism’s global dispersion through emigration and emulation after 1945? There was not nearly enough education on postcolonial liberation, not enough hard connection between the “inner” liberation of surrealism and the politics of liberation as a post-modernity. That said, there were many revisionist moments to be explored: the rise of an African-American “demotic” surrealism with Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman, for example; or the anti-Eurocentric contributions of second-wave women surrealists, from Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo to Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Ithell Colquhoun, not to mention Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning. But this was still surrealism as art history, alas. The lesson for global exhibitions is to radically contextualize the exemplary work in an unfolding horizon of global negativity—a globality that is not one thing.

… More

February 6, 2022

Entry 46: Invocation of Fourier


Fourier it’s all too depressing
     to see them emerging from one
     of the worst cess-pools in history
Infatuated with the maze that
     leads back to it
Impatient to start all over
     for a better jump

—André Breton,
     Ode to Charles Fourier

The image to the left is what now exists of the monument to Charles Fourier, located at the end of the Boulevard de Clichy before its leftward turn toward the Place de Clichy with its restaurants and skin trade, under the imagined shadow of the Montmartre Cemetery, site of pitched battles in the Paris Commune. This was the object of a pilgrimage I made in the company of Carla Harryman and Françoise de Laroque at the end of a rainy afternoon in November in the year 2021. The statue itself preserves the original plinth of the monument raised in 1899 in homage to the utopian socialist by supporters of his imagined utopia at the site of its historical suppression. After many historical turns, from the melting down of the statue of Fourier in 1945 to its reconstruction by Situationists in 1968, the base now presents a ludic apple inscribed with outlines of the globe and reflecting lights of the boulevard at night. As an homage to the theorist of the gastrosophic state and phanerogamous morals, it is a fully realized work of surrealist art. … More

November 16, 2021

Event 88: Correlations & Conversations

Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman
Correlations & Conversations in Poetics
24–25 November 2021

[NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]

  • Poetry Reading / 24 November 19:00 / open to the public / notice of attendance requested / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Ecole normal supérieure (rue d’Ulm) / Bibliothèque des letters

World premiere of “Notzeit (After Hannah Höch)” / Barrett Watten
Reading from “Good Morning” and “Cloud Cantatas” / Carla Harryman

  • Seminar / 25 November 9:00–10:00 / by registration
    [NOTE CORRECTED SEMINAR START TIME!]
    ENS (rue d’Ulm) / salle Celan / open to students and doctoral students on prior registration / contact  Hélène Aji (below)

“Historicism and Presentism in Bad History and ‘The Annotated Plan B'”

  • Roundtable / 25 November 16:30–18:30 / open to the public / notice of attendance recommended / contact Hélène Aji (below)
    Université Paris Nanterre / salle de séminaire / 2 Max Weber

“Correlations & Conversations in Poetics”

Exchanges with Barrett Watten on Zone (Correlations, 1973–2021) and Carla Harryman on Poetics of Conversation
Discussants: Hélène Aji (ENS); Benoît Bondroit (U Paris Nanterre); Abigail Lang (U Paris); and Clément Oudart (Sorbonne U)

Policies, media, and contact

Due to COVID precautions in Paris institutions, attendance at events at ENS is limited to 30 (reading) and 35 (seminar). Please contact Hélène Aji to place yourself on the list for the reading or to register for the seminar (students and graduate students). Attendance for the roundtable at Paris Nanterre is limited 25; contact Hélène Aji to guarantee your place.

Present plans are to make high-quality videos of the reading and roundtable, to be edited and uploaded in the near future; interviews with Barrett and Carla will be made by the ENS library and uploaded to YouTube.

Hélène Aji helene.aji@ens.psi.eu
Benoît Bondroit benoit.bondroit@parisnanterre.fr
Naomi Toth ntoth.parisnanterre.fr
Barrett Watten barrett.watten@gmail.com

August 5, 2018

Event 85: Goodbye Paris Motel (I Met)

goodbye paris motel

Travels in France with Carla Harryman
(Languedoc, Burgundy, Paris, Brittany)
19 July–1 August 2018

Note: while my main purpose in making pages like these, often with a variation of the heading “I Met (after On Kawara),” is conceptual, indexical, linguistic—I am fascinated with the minimal representation of people, art, places, and events given simply by their names or locations or modes of transport—there is linked content as well, which awaits the visitor.

Thursday–Friday, July 19–20

Delta Airlines DTW > CDG
SNCF TGV > Nîmes
Service publique Occitaine transports/car > Valleraugue
Chez de Laroque / Hôtel Valleraugue

Carla Harryman
Françoise de Laroque
Juliette de Laroque
Mathieu Saunier

Saturday, July 21

Thomas Bouvrot
Eva-Léa Le Roux

Rive l’Hérault

Sunday, July 22

Rive l’Hérault

Car/Service publique Occitaine transports > Nîmes
Hôtel Amphitheatre, Nîmes

… More

May 14, 2017

Event 72: I Met I Saw (Paris)

Paris, 13–20 March 2017

Monday, March 13

DTW > CDG

Françoise de Laroque
Juliette de Laroque

Le Tagada Bar

Tuesday, March 14

Isakaya Issé

Abigail Lang

Wednesday, March 15

Lecture and reading @
Fondation des Etats-Unis
sponsored by Double Change
& Ecole normale supérieure

“Poetics as Value Thinking:
Transvaluations of Language Writing”

Reading of “Plan B” and translation

… More

August 16, 2011

Document 15: What Is Literature? (FR)

Two publications I brought back from France this summer, both of which I would like to consider (and question) as possible definitions of “the literary”—after a quote from Jacques Rancière (cited by Omar Berrada): “L’homme est un animal politique parce qu’il est un animal littéraire, qui se laisse détourner de sa destination ‘naturelle” par le pouvoir des mots.” At which I asked, “How broad is “literature” for Rancière? Why would he not say, simply, “language”—or language in a certain sense?” Let us imagine two versions of “the literary” are represented by the above works: one a critical history of the international avant-garde journal transition, by modernist literary historian Céline Mansanti, and the other the catalogue of a stunning exhibition of politics, culture, and literature under the Occupation and during the Resistance. My thesis is that the “literary” should include both options, and I would go so far as to speculate that the “literary” in the French postwar period takes its fundamental bearings from the condition of print culture during the period of “national” instability. Hence my question of Rancière: is this the “literary” in the sense of the quote (“un animal littéraire”), or is there a more encompassing usage—something like “language,” as I suggested.