Category Archives: theory

French theory: the Annales School

Ernst Bloch-Thomas_MunsterThe Annales School is a school of historical writing named after the French scholarly journal Annales d’histoire économique et sociale (first published in 1929 by Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre) where it was first expounded. Annales school history is best known for its approach to history diametrically opposed to various great man theories, incorporating social scientific methods into history resulting in one of the first currents in social history. The Annales school critics influenced later thinkers like Michel Foucault, who, in turn, influenced other Annales thinkers such as American cultural historian Robert Darnton (The Literary Underground of the Old Regime) and the best-known exponent of this school: Fernand Braudel.

Lucien Febvre-Incroyance The Annalistes, especially Lucien Febvre, advocated a histoire totale, or histoire tout court, a complete study of a historic problem. While several authors continue to carry the Annales banner, today the Annales approach has been less distinctive as more and more historians do work in cultural history and economic history.

The images shown (Thomas Müntzer als Theologe der Revolution, 1921 in a French 10/18 translation and Le Problème de l’incroyance au XVIe siècle. La religion de Rabelais, 1942) are only tangentially related to the Annales School and were sourced at the enigmatic page La Passion des Anabaptistes by Belgian comic book creators Ambre and David Vandermeulen.

I can’t help but wondering what – if there was one – the relation of the Annalistes was to Georges Bataille, who started his journal Documents in the same year as Annales d’histoire économique et sociale. Perhaps Valter “Surreal Documents” knows?

Mad love

On double coding, guilty pleasures and Roland Kaiser‘s “Santa Maria.”YouTube

Guilty pleasures is about liking things you shouldn’t be liking,  Roland Kaiser‘s “Santa Maria.”YouTube for example.

You shouldn’t like “Santa Maria” because it is in “poor taste”.

Another example of guilty pleasure would be a man who watches television shows marketed towards women such as Sex and the City. This is considered a guilty pleasure because it violates most western ideas what society views as masculine. For this reason the man in question may watch this show in secret because other members of the society may react negatively to a man watching a feminine television show.

The postmodern age is gentle towards guilty pleasures.

Double coding

Yet, I don’t agree with Umberto Eco when he says that in a postmodern world you can no longer say: “I love you madly”.

It’s is too Barbara Cartland-ish, say Eco. I don’t agree. Long live mad love. Although I don’t agree, Eco formulated his point beautifully, in a way that captures the voice of compatriot Alberto Moravia. Here is the quote:

“I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” —Umberto Eco

Marquis de Sade @268

Today is Marquis de Sade‘s 268th birthday. Was he our first postmodernist? The man who showed us that words are not necessarily representations of reality. That one can construct limits of text only. The first modernist too: by transgressing all rules, showed us that there are rules. Above all the Marquis has proven a tough act to follow. One can divide modernity in pre- and post-Sadean. Anyone wishing to transgress (in words, not in deeds) has only one reference, the Marquis himself. The only possible answer to his antics are incorporating his sensibility without following his monomania.

David Locher writes[1] in “Postmodernism as Neo-Dada”

“At the heart of postmodernism lies the assumption that most of the things that we take for granted are, in fact, simply illusions. Reality is not reflected within text, only text is reflected within text. There is no Truth beyond the experience of the text, and meaning is created every time the text is experienced. An author does not place meaning in the text, and his/her interpretation of the text is no more valid than any other (Baudrillard 1981; 1988; Connor 1989; Lyotard 1984). In other words, meaning is arbitrary, relative, and subjective. Language is, in its own way, reality. What we refer to as reality is not knowable, and we live in the illusion that we are in touch with it. The age in which concepts have a relation to reality is over (Baudrillard and Debrix 1995). Knowledge is only validated when it is referred to by second-level discourse (Lyotard 1984).”

Every woman adores a fascist

Or, in praise of difficult women

In my never relenting quest for the stereotypes of modern culture, I’ve mentioned the “difficult man”[1] and the “sexually frustrated woman”[2]. Today, let’s have a look at another archetype: the “difficult woman.” But before we go on I would like mention that I want to include in my definition of “difficult” the connotation “complicated.” Many difficult people are difficult because they are complex personalities, often torn apart by conflicting inner desires.

The archetypical difficult women in world literature are Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, who both had a quixotic lust for fiction and who both committed suicide. Many difficult women are also strong women and that is why we men love them and at the same time have a complicated relationship with them. We love them and hate them.

Many “difficult” people lead unhappy lives, and many commit suicide. Easy-going people don’t.

To say that Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a difficult rather than an easy-going woman is a platitude, she is only one of the talented but tortured people who left our planet voluntarily prematurely. She famously said that “Every woman adores a fascist,” in a poem dedicated to the memory of her father. I would like to add to her words that “every man adores a femme fatale, bad girl or difficult woman,” and would like to conclude with Sylvia Plath reading from her own poem “Daddy“. If you want to head straight to the “fascist” quote, scrub to 2:14.

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hHjctqSBwM&]

IoEA #25: man’s most honest organ

“Sensitive but resilient, equally available during the day or night with a minimum of coaxing, it has performed purposefully if not always skillfully for an eternity of centuries, endlessly searching, sensing, expanding, probing, penetrating, throbbing, wilting, and wanting more. Never concealing its prurient interest, it is man’s most honest organ.” —Thy Neighbor’s Wife, (1981), Gay Talese.

It’s time for the 25th installment in our series of mini-articles on icons of erotic art. Today’s item is an unabashed tribute to man’s most honest organ, that wonderful extension to the human male’s groin, the wondrous complex of bulging blood vessels, the source of pride of alpha through zeta males: the penis. Here represented by Le Dieu Priape[1] (ca. 1779 – 1795) by French visionary architect and draughtsman Jean-Jacques Lequeu, it shows a large, elegant and powerful phallus. Calling it a phallus, makes it clear that the penis is erect, because let’s face it, in a flaccid state our pride is pretty preposterous.

Staying on the subject of penises, most recently Trevor Brown showed eyeing[2][3] instances of the male and female anatomy by the 21st century fantaste Paul Rumsey.

P.S. The quote of Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese came my way via a Dutch translation of Louise Kaplan’s recently acquired Female Perversions, from the first cursory reading, a very good study of female sexual behavior and its representation in psychoanalytic theory and western literature and Emma Bovary in particular.

She knows

Girl with a cup (1850), by Danish painter Constantin Hansen

It’s one of those paintings one finds on the web, they talk to you, you find them 2 weeks ago, they compel you to write about them two weeks later.

A little of Vermeer, Chirico and Balthus in this painting of a girl drinking from a cup. Her gaze is half interrogation and half wonder, but a defiant gaze nevertheless, as if she knows more than she’s willing to admit, and more too, than you would expect her to. There is quite a bit of sadness too, sadness not so much of a girl, but of a grown woman trapped in the body of a girl. As with many interesting 19th century works, it’s hard to tell, is it a kitschy guilty pleasure or just a good painting?

I love abecedaria

I love abecedaria and I’ve wikified the following abecedarium by  Peter Wollen: “An Alphabet of Cinema,” which was posted over at Girish‘s. Wollen delivered this piece as the Serge Daney memorial lecture at the Rotterdam film festival in 1998. It was then published in the New Left Review in 2001, and also appears in Wollen’s essay collection, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (2002).

“A is for Aristotle … the first theorist of film”; “B is not for Brecht, although of course it could be. Or even for B-movies, much as I always loved them. It is for Bambi”; C for Cinephilia; “D must certainly be for Daney, but it is also for Dance—Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly”; E for Eisenstein, a “ruined filmmaker, an image-maker ‘haunted by writing’ (Daney’s phrase), by the shot as ideogram, obsessed with the synchronization of sound, movement and image”; F for film festival; G for Godard, “for anti-tradition”; “H is for Hitchcocko–Hawksianism—and a pathway towards avant-garde film”; I for Industry and Ince; J for Japan; “K is for Kane, the film maudit par excellence”; L for Lumière; M for Méliès; N for Narrative; O for Online; “P is personal—for The Passenger, a film directed by Antonioni, which I wrote with my script-writing partner Mark Peploe”; Q for Bazin’s Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?; R for Rossellini, Rome, Open City, Renoir, and Rules of the Game; S for Sternberg, Shanghai Gesture, and Surrealism; T for Telecinema, Third Dimension (3D), and Television; U for Underground film; V for Voyeurism; W for Snow’s Wavelength; “X stands for an unknown quantity—for the strange fascination that makes us remember a particular shot or a particular camera movement”; Y for Les Yeux sans Visage, Franju’s Eyes without a Face; Z for the final frame of the zoom shot, Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma, and for Zero.

Via An Alphabet of Cinema

May 1968 remembrance day

Paris May 1968 revolt, photo credit unidentified

Photo of Situationist Graffiti, Paris '68.

“Beneath the boardwalk, the beach.”

European media have started to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the May 1968 revolution which spread from Paris to the rest of Europe. Ironically, May 1968, coincided with the gradual demise of the Situationist International, the Marxist movement, an important precursor of May ’68.

Similar events took place two years later in the United States, with more tragic consequences.