With Jeff, August 9, 2007 - August 12, 2007, in Steinbach Café, Strasbourg, France
Our friend Jean Bermon gave us this little statue when we were living on our barge Nephelidia in Strasbourg. You can see it in the background if you look carefully.
Susanna and Finley are making raspberry ink at Zola’s colonial-girl theme birthday party.s
Here’s a picture of Nephelidia from the outside.
When you live on a boat, you bring your house on vacation with you – which is a mixed blessing. I sometimes found myself envying the rental boaters who had nothing but a suitcase full of clothes on board and who could just call Locaboat if anything went wrong. I was never entirely free from the performance anxiety that comes of knowing that if anything broke, I was the one who had to fix it. And on a boat the age of a Model T Ford, things tend to go wrong.
We left Strasbourg on foot, with a long detour through the Alps, Cornwall, and Ireland, because we didn’t think we could stand the shock of moving straight back to the States after so many years abroad. By the end of our stay in France I considered myself as much a European as an American. (Not French, mind you, but European.) I was afraid of moving back because I didn’t want to lose my identity…
I’m in back Strasbourg for the week to winterize the boat. I walked past the Cathedral on the way from the train station. The Strasbourg Christmas Market was in full swing and the cathedral was lit up in the afternoon light as I went past. Just as I snapped this picture, I could have sworn I heard a passing tourist say “Es ist im kleinen Geschmack” (It’s in niggling taste.)
I don’t think she was talking about the Cathedral though. It was probably something in the Christmas market. Maybe it was the pre-fab chocolate faux-gingerbread house with plastic figurines and surplus halloween kitty.
(click on photo to enlarge)
My personal candidate for this week’s first prize in dubious taste goes to Galeries Lafayette and Frédéric Beigbeder for the use of Jean Baudrillard’s book ‘La société de consommation’ in their latest advertising blitz.
De l’ironie au cynisme, il n’y a qu’un pas.
Nowhere is the tendency to convert theory into a fashion accessory more pronounced than in France. (Though of course the tendency to accessorize opinion is extremely widespread.)
Of course I recognize that from a certain optic, opinion and identity are always and already indistinguishable – and that our relation to cognition is not less problematic than our relationship with our wardrobe. The French, with their cultural predisposition to centralize everything, from government to epistemology, are particularly astute theorists of both the ineluctability and the impossibility of such multi-level signifiers, not to mention the contradictions in our social imaginary of ‘signification’. The ‘fait social total’ of Marcel Mauss is at once a phantasm as impossible as Lacan’s ‘juissance de l’autre’, and an inescapable existential product of any signifier’s ‘Geworfenheit’. This is the sort of contradictory dynamic tension that French thinkers use to achieve a flow state. The conceptual equivalent of the destructive interference used in noise-cancelling headphones. I have no theoretical beef with either prong of the logical forked stick, but I do have some reservations, more pragmatic than puritanical, about the use of theory as costume (and vice versa).
Emile Durkheim
You have to start somewhere sufficiently far back that if feels like the beginning, so I’ll start with Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft (1887), though I might just as well have chosen Georg Simmel’s essays on ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’(1903) and ‘The Stranger’. Durkheim imported these distinctions to France as part of his project to justify the French concept of nation in scientific terms. He called them respectively ‘communauté’ and ‘société’. For Durkheim, the more loosely-coupled freedom of the natioon (society) was a definite advance over the enmeshed and constricting limitations of feudal life (community).
As an American, I found it startling – and liberating – to discover that the French deeply distrust ‘community’ for its claustrophobic and coercive effects on the individual.
Having digested that notion, it gradually occurred to me that there may be similar limitations to having an enmeshed identity. The more that the different aspects of our identity are coordinated (e.g. our clothing, our opinions, our taste in music, our choice of friends) we may find it increasingly difficult to change any one of them without a corresponding change in the others. The synchronic cohesiveness of our identity may lead to a diachronic stasis in which we are compelled to remain always identical to our selves. (They would probably toss me out of the Café de Flore if I gave up existentialism, but there is no chance of that because I can’t stop smoking Gauloises…)
The post-modern tendency to seek refuge in irony is an understandable response to the threat that sincerity poses to liberty, but I see it primarily as a strategy of evasion. It buys time, without slaying the dragon. And since it, too, is susceptible to accessorization (as the Galleries Lafayette ad illustrates) it leads to a stalemate every bit as limiting as the commitment it sought to avoid.
There is a social obligation to cohere inherent in the very term ‘individual’. It governs the rules of discourse and forms the basis of western conception of rationality. When we argue with someone, we try to show that they hold opinions that are mutually contradictory; and if we succeed, according to the rules of the game, they are expected to revise or adjust one opinion or another to eliminate the contradiction. We are trained in this social duty from an early age. (“How can you be for capital punishment and against abortion?”)
Similarly, we expect others, and they expect us, to behave consistently from one moment to the next, and not to drastically or erratically modify our opinions or values from one moment to the next. We are expected to be able to explain our actions in terms of conscious intentions that were supposedly present to use at the moment of action. (Our criminal justice system is based on this model of intentionality.) Similarly we are trained to conceive of ourselves as intentional beings from an early age. (“Why did you kick the cat, Johnny?” – as if Johnny knew why he kicked the cat.)
These social obligations form the basis of our conception of self, and are the glue that holds society together. The very concept of self is a normative concept: it describes how people ought to be. The only problem is that it, try as we may to mold ourselves in its image, it isn’t really all that accurate a description of the way things are.
Things get even stickier when we try to enforce our normative concept of coherence across different spheres and registers: when we try to achieve simultaneous sartorial, gastronomic, musical, political (etc.) alignment; when we try to make ourselves into living ornaments and our lives into works of art. (As the Galleries Lafayette ad suggests we might.)
So how do we escape this impasse, if not via irony? And what does this have to do with a little blue rolling model of the Strasbourg Cathedral?