Zone d'obsolescence concertée

31/01/2011

A light bulb is switched on.

Somewhere something is resisting, something is insisting. A light bulb has been discreetly lighting up the dusty depths of a place dedicated to all emergencies for more than a century: the fire-fighting station in the city of Livermore in California. But oddly enough, it is not in its amazing longevity that the light bulb shows up its uniqueness; solitary and ironic, its fate is a mistake and its creation an oversight... An incongruous leftover and ironic, its fate is a mistake and its creation an oversight... An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, this light bulb is an escapee: a survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society. With its weak effect this fragile glow of an aborted fate highlights the perversity of a mechanism that today, like a subtext, seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

This global enterprise to industrialize the fate of objects, because it knowingly goes backwards up the slope of technical progress and concentrates its efforts on programming deterioration, insidiously reveals the fixed future outlook of a society that constantly updates its products as well as its hopes, caught in the phantasm of a mechanism deliberately outside of time, with no other trajectory possible than that of a self-referential loop running on empty.

Given this prospect, it has to be admitted that our relationship to time, the apprehension with which we today regard the present, is considerably disrupted by it. It melts in a crucible, or rather a black hole, where the permanent cancellation of all possible reversibility makes the flattening of reality complete. And in this senseless maelstrom, there is no longer any distance that would allow any apprehension of reality whatsoever...

A society in which knowledge and the progress of skills and techniques were moving towards a deciphering of the world through the elaboration of interpretive perspectives the laws of which everyone was capable of appropriating has been succeeded by a society in which perpetual encrypting ruins every vague impulse to make sense in the stagnation and inevitability of the immediate interpretation of an impossible meaning.

So how can we inhabit that entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)?

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light: is that not enough to illuminate us?

14/02/2011

A light bulb is switched on.

Somewhere something is resisting, something is insisting. A light bulb has been discreetly lighting up the dusty depths of a place dedicated to all emergencies for more than a century: the fire-fighting station in the city of Livermore in California. At the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, every evening a stage manager places on the bare stage something referred to as a “Servante” in the technical jargon of the theatre, a kind of prop: a light bulb firmly screwed to the top of a slender pole. The halo of light it sheds, with restraint but no less conviction, on the darkened auditorium is intended to keep watch over the unlit stage sets that the theatre night, that silent interlude between the two banks of play and oblivion, petrifies into a temporary suspension. What this “Servante” guarantees, beyond the night over which it keeps vigil so that the next performance will come along, has to do with the symbolic continuity of a relay of presences that it maintains through its weak effect, rather like the flames kept alight in ancient shrines perpetuated presence. Through its humbleness and apparent insignificance, this anachronistic vestal guardian preserves a crucial spark in the seats of our dreams: the thousand-year-old spark that relays the miracle of our presence on that other stage which is the world.

Unlike the latter it is not in its amazing longevity that its American counterpart: shows up its uniqueness; solitary and ironic, its fate is a mistake and its creation an oversight... An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, this light bulb is an escapee: a survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society. With its weak effect this fragile glow of an aborted fate highlights the perversity of a mechanism that today, like a subtext, seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

This global enterprise to industrialize the fate of objects, because it knowingly goes backwards up the slope of technical progress and concentrates its efforts on programming deterioration, insidiously reveals the fixed future outlook of a society that constantly doesn't reuse but updates its products and spaces as well as its hopes, caught in the phantasm of a mechanism deliberately outside of time, with no other trajectory possible than that of a self-referential loop running on empty.

Western economic thinking has taken hold of this mechanistic model and postulated the infinite reiteration of production and consumption in a closed, self-sufficient system. The development follows its course while neglecting the lesson of the second law of thermodynamics: any process converting energy from one form to another entails a loss in the form of heat, causing the quantity of unusable energy to grow. Economic activities are an entropic agent that accelerates the dissipation of energy and exhausts non-renewable resources, so shattering human Promethean ambitions with regard to a materiality human beings thought they were harnessing. Development at all costs, tirelessly producing its ejecta, is involuntarily embarking on a march towards the final flattening into the amorphous and undifferentiated.

Given this prospect, it has to be admitted that our relationship to time, the apprehension with which we today regard the present, is considerably disrupted by it. Can time be considered as a dimension created by man existing only in a universe apprehended by his consciousness? Or reversing the proposition, could it be accorded a role as a “creator” of complex structures and possibilities that inscribes man into a movement of irreversibility that transcends him and of which he is one of the present culminations? It melts in a crucible, or rather a black hole, where the permanent cancellation of all possible reversibility makes the flattening of reality complete. And in this senseless maelstrom, there is no longer any distance that would allow any apprehension of reality whatsoever...

Reflecting on the notion of time as a linear entity, one can conceive it of being an irreversible process that must continue and not look back to that which was before. Planned obsolescence is similar, rendering any object or concept a limited life with its fate destined to become obsolete. The definition of obsolete relates its relevance to a consumer and capitalistic society, giving rise to the concern of culture as disposable through the practice of accumulation and waste to a level so high that no reversal process is possible. The glaciologist, Claude Lorius, quite convincingly states that we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, where the environment is no longer evolving at its own natural pace but rather at an artificially accelerated pace. The changes occurring whether culturally or geographically (I refrain from using the word "natural" here) are a result of cyclical bottom-up and top-down processes. In an article by Bernard London, 1932, he argues that the only way in which the United States could render a solution to the Great Depression would be to create a "limited life on products", consequently creating an uprise in consumption.

When it comes down to it, these gaps in the real that belong to us all are today blurred though latent. It is only by assuming the effect that this simulacrum has on the real that we will succeed in reappropriating them. Personal emancipation demands the collective filter and mirror of a society by means of which it would be possible to envisage, calling on the ideas of Georges Sorel, that “personal revolution” categorically necessitated the creation of the phantasm of something better to build towards, and for which we could all fight together. Here we could be inspired by Michel de Certeau and his attempt to revalue the everyday by revealing the hidden potential of all declaratory acts in order so to confront, through actions at a personal level, the biopolitics of the contemporary West.

The perpetual and repeated consumption of an instant that paradoxically deteriorates at the very time it arrives, gestures that by extension punctuate our apprehension of the real, seem to sweep along like a disturbing echo the trace of a relationship to the world from which reciprocity has disappeared for good. This constant deflagration of appreciation of the present summons up, like a crucial spring, an exponential speed resulting from an acceleration of time that turns out to be strategic, if account is taken of the considerations raised by Paul Virilio in his theory of “dromologie”. In the direction opened up by such a prospect, it does not seem totally improbable to imagine a paradoxical reversal of the course of things, of the linear direction which hitherto legitimized history. And what if we were dependent not on the past but on the future? Is not the reality we experience as a perpetually deferred promise, to pick up on the title of a book by Pierre Bayard, plagiarism by anticipation? One thing is certain: reality plagiarizes fiction. Oscar Wilde taught us that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, as had been postulated for centuries by the western artistic tradition starting from the authority of the concept of mimesis. If we follow this line of descent, is it not logical that the world would benefit from stopping every 4 minutes 33 seconds to reserve an interlude for silence? The gestures as well as the tales we construct very convincingly ape a story that seems already to have been written. But what tale in orbit does our present commemorate the memory of?

However, entropy, that law of thermodynamics, reveals that time establishes a one-way trajectory that makes the processes of the transformation of energy irreversible. It actually imposes a natural irreversibility on the gradual deterioration of each system. Whereas the effect that time inevitably leaves within the development of all things inspired Robert Smithson to write works closely associated with the (de)evolution of the surroundings in which they took place. The flooding of ‘newer’ and ‘better’ products brings forth the constant accumulation of goods where planned obsolescence is seen inherent within consumerist cultures, practices implicated within capitalism, becoming its own entropic system incapable of escaping the evolution that the preceding markers have put into place. This series of systemic processes lends itself to what Robert Smithson defined as entropy. The mechanism of generalized planned expiry now forbids any such forecasting of the future. Perhaps because it takes account of an artificial process that constantly defers, by the eternal return of the “same”, the falling due of our confrontation with the Other, the world, and by extension the natural evolutionary cycle of the things whose course we fix.

The artificial arrow of uncontrolled growth, deriving its effectiveness from this programmed obsolescence, builds around us a universe of ever more miniaturized technologies and a forest of objects that are imperishable because they can always be updated with perfected versions, which fortifies us in our dissimulated aspirations for eternal life and extols the mirage of a sublimation in the inconsistency of information. Death is ousted because it is illogical and life is pushed outside the cycle of decline, expiry and regeneration. While we would like to purge life of its own finitude, we do not stop denying its movement of exchange with the natural world by enclosing it in a self-referential narcissism that strips it of any symbolic horizon.

The overproduction of objects and the almost impossible management of the waste produced by our consumer society offers the unbearable giddiness of a consumerism bordering on its own asphyxia. The breaches and cracks that can be infiltrated in order to be able detach it from this machinery are becoming ever fewer and in many respects offer the image of an irrevocable fatalism. For strategic purposes, the spectre of no longer being able to retro-act within this mechanism is palpable. The ecologically aware citizen contracts out of his responsibility to firms treating his detritus. The refuse is sent abroad for commercial purposes, so removing even the perception of the expiry of our compulsions for a fetishised and material real. The requestioning of issues that the utopias of the 1960s decade stirred up to deconstruct the hegemony of western society today seem outdated and impossible to reactivate; nevertheless, alternatives linger on and are being built up to develop projects outside the system.

“Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”: the prospect opened up by Lavoisier in the Age of Enlightenment, reflecting the perpetual incompatibility that is generalized by the marketing of software the functioning of which each time requires the renewal of its reading support, today constitutes an obsolete version that no medium now allows us to update, or worse still, to recognize. A society in which knowledge and the progress of skills and techniques were moving towards a deciphering of the world through the elaboration of interpretive perspectives the laws of which everyone was capable of appropriating has been succeeded by a society in which perpetual encrypting ruins every vague impulse to make sense in the stagnation and inevitability of the immediate interpretation of an impossible meaning.

So how can we inhabit that entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)? The first crack might perhaps begin with the personal reappropriation of the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with those around them would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures.

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light: is that not enough to illuminate us?

28/02/2011

A light bulb is switched on.

On the face of it, nothing seems to link the existence of these two rather outmoded light sources unless it is the same darkness that they do not cease to frustrate by a prolonged vigil. For as it might be thought, it is not in its amazing longevity that the centennial light bulb shows up its uniqueness; solitary and ironic, its fate is a mistake and its creation an oversight... An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, this light bulb is an escapee: a survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society. With its weak effect this fragile glow of an aborted fate highlights the perversity of a mechanism that today, like a subtext, seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

This global enterprise to industrialize the fate of objects, because it knowingly goes backwards up the slope of technical progress and concentrates its efforts on programming deterioration, insidiously reveals the fixed future outlook of a society that constantly doesn't reuse but updates its products and spaces as well as its hopes, caught in the phantasm of a mechanism deliberately outside of time, with no other trajectory possible than that of a self-referential loop running on empty.

Western economic thinking has taken hold of this mechanistic model and postulated the infinite reiteration of production and consumption in a closed, self-sufficient system. The development follows its course while neglecting the lesson of the second law of thermodynamics: any process converting energy from one form to another entails a loss in the form of heat, causing the quantity of unusable energy to grow. Economic activities are an entropic agent that accelerates the dissipation of energy and exhausts non-renewable resources, so shattering human Promethean ambitions with regard to a materiality human beings thought they were harnessing. The space we live in has finite dimensions, and its capacities to be exploited and to absorb our own impact are likewise finite. The race to achieve progress at all costs, tirelessly producing its ejecta, is involuntarily embarking on a march towards the final flattening into the amorphous and undifferentiated.

In this one-way road towards maximum entropy, nature proves to be capable of creating ever more complex organized structures, of which man is one of the most remarkable culminations. Although we proudly claim our elevated position on a pyramid of progressively expanding complexity, we are probably not its ultimate, unsurpassable summit. Confronted with the precariousness of a mode of existence which would seem to be only one of the momentary conformations of life, our anthropocentric pride wavers, especially as we appear to be setting up mechanisms capable of accelerating our own decease. To transport us into a future that witnesses our presence, we must of course look elsewhere in search of alternatives and viable models.

Given this prospect, it has to be admitted that our relationship to time, the apprehension with which we today regard the present, is considerably disrupted by it. Can time be considered as a dimension created by man existing only in a universe apprehended by his consciousness? Or reversing the proposition, could it be accorded a role as a "creator" of complex structures and possibilities, as postulated by the physicist Ilya Prigogine, that inscribes man into a movement of irreversibility that transcends him and of which he is one of the present culminations? It melts in a crucible, or rather a black hole, where the permanent cancellation of all possible reversibility makes the flattening of reality complete.

And in this absence of relief, a no less important notion flits over this undreamt-of geology: How does space fare in a geography activated by communication networks? It can easily be assimilated to a kind of mesh floating on the surface, with us being called on to go from one point of that mesh to another (the ontology of travel can today be summed up as that) without ever really inscribing anywhere the memory of any itinerary, or any crossing; yet in this constellation with the seemingly interchangeable coordinates there persist places that appeal, which commonly separates the tangible effect of utopia; these places in the margin, defined by Michel Foucault as "heterotopias", turn out to be crucial for all communities in that they catalyse all the relations that are constructed daily at the heart of social space. Whether they neutralize, suspend, contradict or invert the effect of these common relationships, these thresholds invite us to observe a crucial distance with regard to the hierarchically arranged spaces of our cultural architectures where place is often reduced to a question of "room". These other spaces that have time as their location are improvised from makeshift boxes in theatres, museums, cemeteries... Always spaces to pass through, their anchor cast in the heart of the town, but their ferryman remaining on the other side of the mirror, as if suspended. A place of vertigo and vertigo of place: from the theatre of memory devised by Giulio Camillo in the Renaissance of which no trace remains, down to the Library of Babel in whose shelves Borges no doubt happily immersed himself, the phantasm of a Place where all knowledge, all experience would finally run aground, reveals the wish to give memory a body. A body that merges indistinguishably into that unpredictable current that Charon’s oar churns up every night, the foam of which randomly splashes the inescapable horizon of our certainties.

The glaciologist, Claude Lorius, quite convincingly states that we have entered a new era, the Anthropocene, where the environment is no longer evolving at its own natural pace but rather at an artificially accelerated pace. The changes occurring whether culturally or geographically – is it still possible to talk of the “natural” order? – are a result of cyclical bottom-up and top-down processes.

Post-modern public space inspired Rem Koolhaas with his concept of Junkspace. Basing his ideas on consumer architecture, and particularly on the emblematic voids it leaves in reserve, he describes non-places according to a point of view that is more anthropological and ethnological than architectural. Anthropological places could be described at those places where man can recognize himself. In contrast, non-places are spaces dictated solely from the outlook of progress, sanitization and social acceleration, where Michel de Certeau‘s everyday has been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is individual and anonymous. Thus, as in an everlasting shopping centre, the everyday connivance of these pseudo-individual actions virtualises the real.

The overload of information and data conveyed to us by ever more dematerialized media are today part of a strategy to make news uniform. Exploiting the non-stop accumulation to make us overlook the univocity that allows it to gain acceptance from collective belief, this strategy contributes to what Jean Baudrillard meant by “the disappearance of the real”. In her essay “The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein talks about the overflow of information and the loss of landmarks, the worsening of our apprehension of the real and the impairment of our perception by means of a mediatized state-of-emergency strategy. This control of the corporatism of Government and Business generates a new form of capitalism employing the tactic of disaster, so markedly accelerating the neo-liberal changes the economic system needs for its own preservation, exploiting the image as an electric shock in order to control the masses. This uninhabitable constellation where any chink, any space for confrontation, dialogue or contradiction is intentionally impossible superimposes the undisputed authority of its simulacrum on our perception of the real. These gaps in the real that belong to us all are today blurred though latent. It is only by assuming the effect that this simulacrum has on the real that we will succeed in reappropriating them.

Assertion of individual responsibility for reformulating the social space is crucial: Above all it is incumbent on each person to become aware of the logical arguments that tame him, and to effect, to use terminology borrowed from the economist Serge Latouche, a "decolonization of the imaginary", which would be the first step towards the construction of an alternative to the race towards accumulation. Personal emancipation demands the filter and collective mirror of a society which categorically necessitates the creation of the phantasm of something better to build towards, and for which we could all fight together. Here we could be inspired by Michel de Certeau and his attempt to revalue the everyday by revealing the hidden potential of all declaratory acts in order so to confront, through actions at a personal level, the biopolitics of the contemporary West.

One thing is certain: reality plagiarizes fiction. Oscar Wilde taught us that “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, as had been postulated for centuries by the western artistic tradition starting from the authority of the concept of mimesis. If we follow this line of descent, is it not logical that the world would benefit from stopping every 4 minutes 33 seconds to reserve an interlude for silence? The gestures as well as the tales we construct very convincingly ape a story that seems already to have been written. But what tale in orbit does our present commemorate the memory of?

The mechanism of generalized planned expiry now takes account of an artificial process that constantly defers, by the eternal return of the “same”, the falling due of our confrontation with the Other, the world, and by extension the natural evolutionary cycle of the things whose course we fix. The artificial arrow of uncontrolled growth, deriving its effectiveness from this programmed obsolescence, builds around us a universe of ever more miniaturized technologies and a forest of objects that are imperishable because they can always be updated with perfected versions, which fortifies us in our dissimulated aspirations for eternal life and extols the mirage of a sublimation in the inconsistency of information. Death is ousted because it is illogical and life is pushed outside the cycle of decline, expiry and regeneration. While we would like to purge life of its own finitude, we do not stop denying its movement of exchange with the natural world by enclosing it in a self-referential narcissism that strips it of any symbolic horizon.

This example of the residues of consumption that we highlight and omit according to strategy points the finger at individual irresponsibility and its dilution within the collective, thus implicitly encouraging us to be unaware of our own impact. What this declaration likewise reveals is the virtual impossibility of large-scale management of the processing of this waste. Casting doubt on the economic logic that has implicitly brought about these changes, which from the 1930s to the 30 headlong post-war years were positive about exuberant consumerism and exhausted natural resources, must today be the focus of serious thinking against the backdrop of our everyday life in order to remedy that blindness. The demand that we must here latch on to is certainly that of making a start on individual emancipation in order to relay possible alternatives, and then inspire the community to follow them. The requestioning of issues that the utopias of the 1960s and 1970s decades stirred up to deconstruct the hegemony of western society today seem outdated and impossible to reactivate; nevertheless, alternatives linger on and are being built up to develop projects outside the system.

So how can we inhabit that entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)? We want to reaffirm the movement of life instead of denying it, using the model of the sustainability of natural ecosystems governed by cyclical processes. The physicist Fritjof Capra is inspired by them in his enumeration of the principles that communities should follow in order to show up irresponsible trends and ruinous dominant characteristics. The first crack might perhaps begin with the personal reappropriation of the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with those around them would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. Public space is more than public places: in absolute terms it is our potential relational gap. In our supermodernity, commercial capitalism and the policy of uniformity fuel individualism, and in this scenario where everything is allowed, the public space melts away. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures.

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

And the halo of light it sheds, with restraint but no less conviction, on the darkened auditorium is intended to keep watch over the unlit stage sets that the theatre night, that silent interlude between the two banks of play and oblivion, petrifies into a temporary suspension. What this “Servante” guarantees, beyond the night over which it keeps vigil so that the next performance will come along, has to do with the symbolic continuity of a relay of presences that it maintains through its weak effect, rather like the flames kept alight in ancient shrines perpetuated presence. Through its humbleness and apparent insignificance, this anachronistic vestal guardian preserves a crucial spark in the seats of our dreams: the thousand-year-old spark that relays the miracle of our presence on that other stage which is the world.

14/03/2011

A light bulb is switched on. Somewhere something is resisting, something is insisting. A light bulb has been discreetly lighting up for more than a century the fire-fighting station in the city of Livermore in California. On the other side of the Atlantic, at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, every evening a stage manager places on the bare stage a "Servante": a light bulb firmly screwed to the top of a slender pole.

On the face of it, nothing seems to link the existence of these two light sources unless it is the same darkness that they do not cease to frustrate by a prolonged vigil. An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, the centennial light bulb is an escapee: a survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society. With its weak effect it highlights the perversity of a mechanism that today seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

The global enterprise to industrialize the fate of objects reveals the fixed future outlook of a society that constantly doesn't reuse but updates its products and spaces as well as its hopes, caught in a mechanism deliberately outside of time, with no other trajectory possible than that of a loop running on empty.

Western economic thinking has taken hold of this mechanistic model and postulated the infinite reiteration of production and consumption in a closed, self-sufficient system. Economic activities are an entropic agent that accelerates the dissipation of energy and exhausts non-renewable resources, so shattering human Promethean ambitions with regard to a materiality human beings thought they were harnessing. The race to achieve progress at all costs, tirelessly producing its ejecta, is involuntarily embarking on a march towards the final flattening into the amorphous and undifferentiated.

Since the end of 18th century the increasing influence of human activities on the environment, in conjunction with the Industrial Revolution, has deflected the course of the climate and rapidly impaired the balance of an earth we have exploited with scant regard for its tolerance threshold. The anthropogenic impact on the earth’s surface as well as on its atmosphere, waters and ecosystems is comparable to that of the most powerful natural forces, capable of producing effects at a worldwide scale and accelerating the progression of the geological ages. In this connection, the glaciologist, Claude Lorius, states that we have left behind the 10,000 years of the Holocene epoch and entered a new era, the Anthropocene, where the environment is no longer evolving at its own natural pace but rather at an artificially accelerated pace.

Although we claim our elevated position on a pyramid of progressively expanding complexity, we are probably not its ultimate summit. Time inscribes man into a movement of irreversibility that transcends him and of which he is only one of the present culminations: thus our anthropocentric pride wavers, especially as we appear to be setting up mechanisms capable of accelerating our own decease. To transport us into a future that witnesses our presence, we must of course look elsewhere in search of alternatives and viable models.

The mechanism of generalized expiry takes account of an artificial process that constantly defers, by the eternal return of the “same”, the falling due of our confrontation with the Other, the world, and by extension the natural evolutionary cycle of the things whose course we fix. The artificial arrow of uncontrolled growth builds around us a universe of miniaturized technologies and a forest of objects that are imperishable because they can always be updated that fortify us in our ill-concealed aspirations to achieve perennial status. While we would like to purge life of its own finitude, we do not stop denying its movement of exchange with the natural world by enclosing it in a self-referential narcissism that strips it of any symbolic horizon.

And how does space fare in this absence of relief activated by communication networks? It can easily be assimilated to a kind of mesh floating on the surface, with us being called on to go from one point of that mesh to another without ever really inscribing anywhere the memory of any crossing; yet there persist places that appeal, which commonly separates the tangible effect of utopia: these places in the margin, defined by Michel Foucault as "heterotopias", turn out to be crucial for all communities. Whether they neutralize, suspend, contradict or invert the relationships that operate in social space, these thresholds invite us to observe a crucial distance with regard to the hierarchically arranged spaces of our cultural architectures. These other spaces that have time as their location are improvised from makeshift boxes in theatres, museums, cemeteries... always spaces to pass through. A place of vertigo and vertigo of place: from the theatre of memory down to the Library of Babel, the phantasm of a Place where all knowledge, all experience would finally run aground, reveals the wish to give memory a body. A body that merges indistinguishably into that unpredictable current that Charon’s oar churns up every night, the foam of which randomly splashes the inescapable horizon of our certainties.

In history instances of the will to circumscribe, organize and control this absolute of space married to memory have been superabundant. And its phantasms even more numerous, sometimes mind-blowing. In Antiquity, the art of memory technique constituted one of the mandatory exercises of rhetoric and allowed those who practiced it to memorize a considerable (and potentially infinite) series of words and things thanks to the imaginary projection of their articulation into a mental walk through a space. Thus when the time came to summon up the order of a speech or a sequence of ideas, all that was necessary was to run through this sequence of places made familiar through the exercise in your imagination, and read them. The exhibition site shares similarities with that mental walk, with the inevitable portion of vertigo that sometimes undermines it with unexpected associations, false memories and impressions of déjà-vu. Visitors physically carry out a journey similar to that carried out mentally by the antique orator, with the difference that the works that appear at intervals in each room cease to be signs and become language.

Post-modern public space inspired Rem Koolhaas with his concept of Junkspace. Basing his ideas on the emblematic voids that consumer architecture leaves empty, he describes non-places according to an anthropological and ethnological point of view. These non-places are spaces dictated solely from the outlook of progress, sanitization and social acceleration. In this acceleration of the pace of life and social change, a negation of space is matched by a contraction of the present, in which the past dissolves at the same speed as its own validity and the future is at any moment (anxiously) forestalled. The present and the everyday have been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is now individual and anonymous. Public space is more than public places: our super-modernity fuels individualism and the public space melts away.

In recent decades State management of town planning has had a public health impact tending deliberately to make our towns uniform. By way of reaction, public art highlights our role as well as our obligations towards these spaces, in an attempt to restore to them their nature as anthropological places. Its impact is often conducive to social empowering, creating meeting spaces within urban ambiances deserted by the acceleration of time within our society. Different thinking centered on the notion of public space comes to light here. For public space, far from being confined to circumscribing only physical space, likewise involves all the space-time interstices that can justifiably be considered public. Daniel Andújar agrees with this when he highlights the sets of problems associated with the false democratization of information on the Internet and the sometimes improbable character that private property takes on.

The said thinking often echoes what has been called glocal, i.e. globalization seen through the prism of Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of universalization; according to him “acting” is contextualized, in all cases, at local level.

So how can we inhabit entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)? Instead of denying it, we make the decision to rehabilitate the movement of life, using the model of the sustainability of natural ecosystems governed by cyclical processes. The physicist Fritjof Capra is inspired by them in his enumeration of the principles that communities should follow in order to show up irresponsible trends and ruinous dominant characteristics. Interdependence, collaboration, flexibility, diversity: as if what was at issue was a collective initiative, the ecosystems are organized on the basis of these principles that are adopted in order to ensure the continuity of life and to support communities within which there is a proper balance between a “self-assertive” tendency leading each element to want to preserve its own separatist autonomy, and a complementary “integrative” tendency whereby the various parties agree to be integrated into a major system, and contribute towards constituting its framework.

The first crack can begin with the personal reappropriation of the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with those around them would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures.

Assertion of individual responsibility for reformulating the social space is crucial: it is incumbent on each person to become aware of the logical arguments that tame him, and to effect, to use terminology borrowed from the economist Serge Latouche, a "decolonization of the imaginary", which would be the first step towards the construction of an alternative to the race towards accumulation. Personal emancipation demands the filter and collective mirror of a society which categorically necessitates the creation of the phantasm of something better to build towards. Here we could be inspired by Michel de Certeau and his attempt to revalue the everyday by revealing the hidden potential of all declaratory acts.

The dematerialization of the object that emerged within a political period, over the course of two decades during which voices spoke up and minds asserted themselves, setting off an unprecedented liberation movement, infused artistic forms with new perspectives. For conceptual artists this new modality was an attempt to escape the market in order to establish new models for transmitting their works at the heart of a consumer society presiding over the fetishization of the object.

The overload of data are today part of a strategy to make news uniform. In her essay “The Shock Doctrine” Naomi Klein talks about the overflow of information and the loss of landmarks by means of mediatized state-of-emergency strategies. This control of the corporatism of Government and Business employing the tactic of disaster and the image as an electric shock, markedly accelerates the neo-liberal changes the economic system needs for its own preservation. This uninhabitable constellation where any chink, any space for confrontation, dialogue or contradiction is intentionally impossible superimposes the undisputed authority of its simulacrum on our perception of the real. It is only by assuming the effect that this simulacrum has on the real that we will succeed in reappropriating these chinks that are today latent.

The overproduction of objects and the almost impossible management of the waste produced by our society offers the unbearable giddiness of a consumerism bordering on its own asphyxia. For strategic purposes, the possibility of no longer being able to retro-act within this mechanism is palpable.

The residues of consumption that we highlight and omit according to strategy point the finger at individual irresponsibility, thus implicitly encouraging us to be unaware of our own impact. Casting doubt on the economic logic that has brought about these changes must be the focus of serious thinking against the backdrop of our everyday life in order to remedy that blindness as well as encourage an individual emancipation capable of relaying alternatives to within the community, then inspiring it to try them. The requestioning of issues that the utopias of the 1960s and 1970s decades stirred up to deconstruct the hegemony of western society seem impossible to reactivate; nevertheless, alternatives linger on and are being built up to develop projects outside the system.

One thing is certain: reality plagiarizes fiction. The gestures as well as the tales we construct very convincingly ape a story that seems already to have been written. And what if we were dependent not on the past but on the future? Is not the reality we experience as a perpetually deferred promise, to pick up on the title of a book by Pierre Bayard, plagiarism by anticipation? But what tale in orbit does our present commemorate the memory of?

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

Light is time, if we look at the horizon opened up by astrophysical considerations. And a body, whatever it may be, emits light only because it is in the process of being consumed, is in the process of disappearing. Light means that this disappearance is in progress. It makes visible what is in the process of no longer becoming so.

Yet, paradoxically, what the "Servante" guarantees has to do with the symbolic continuity of a relay of presences that it maintains through its weak effect, rather like the flames kept alight in ancient shrines perpetuated presence. This anachronistic vestal guardian preserves a crucial spark: the thousand-year-old spark that relays the miracle of our presence on that other stage which is the world.

28/03/2011

A light bulb is switched on. Somewhere something is resisting, something is insisting. A light bulb has been discreetly lighting up the fire-fighting station in the city of Livermore in California for more than a century. On the other side of the Atlantic, at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, a stage manager places a "Servante" on the bare stage every evening: a light bulb firmly screwed to the top of a slender pole.

The global enterprise to industrialize the fate of objects reveals the fixed future outlook of a society caught in the infinite reiteration of production and consumption, with no other trajectory possible than that of a loop running on empty. Economic activities are an entropic agent that accelerates the dissipation of energy and exhausts non-renewable resources, so shattering human Promethean ambitions with regard to a materiality human beings thought they were harnessing. The race to achieve progress at all costs, tirelessly producing its ejecta, engenders a flattening tending towards the amorphous and undifferentiated. Moreover, the increasing influence of human activities on the environment has rapidly impaired the balance of an earth we have exploited with scant regard for its tolerance threshold. The anthropogenic impact at a worldwide scale has speeded up the progression of the geological ages, to the point of taking us into a new era : the Anthropocene.

The artificial arrow of uncontrolled growth builds around us a universe of miniaturized technologies and a forest of objects that are imperishable because they can always be updated; these fortify us in our ill-concealed aspirations to achieve perennial status. While we would like to purge life of its finitude, we do not stop denying its movement of exchange with the natural world by enclosing it in a self-referential narcissism that strips it of any symbolic horizon.

In recent decades State management of town planning has had an impact tending deliberately towards uniformization. The emblematic voids that consumer architecture leaves unfilled are spaces dictated solely by considerations of progress, sanitization and social acceleration. In this acceleration of the pace of life and social change, a negation of space is matched by a contraction of the present, in which the past dissolves at the same speed as its own validity and the future is at any moment (anxiously) forestalled. The present and the everyday have been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is now individual and anonymous.

There are still places that appeal which commonly separates the tangible effect of utopia: these places in the margin, defined by Michel Foucault as "heterotopias", turn out to be crucial for all communities. These other spaces that have time as their location neutralize, suspend, contradict or invert the relationships that operate in social space.

So how can we inhabit entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)? The physicist Fritjof Capra lists the principles that communities should follow in order to show up irresponsible trends and ruinous dominant characteristics: interdependence, collaboration, flexibility, diversity. Following the example of natural ecosystems, the community should ensure a proper balance between a "self-assertive" tendency leading each individual to want to preserve his/her own separatist autonomy, and a complementary “integrative” tendency whereby the various individuals agree to be integrated into a major system, and contribute towards constituting its framework.

A first step would be for each of us to reappropriate the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with regard to their environment would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, drawing inspiration from Michel de Certeau and his attempt to revalue the everyday by revealing the hidden potential of all declaratory acts, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures. Assertion of individual responsibility for reformulating the social space is crucial: it is incumbent on each person to become aware of the logical arguments that tame him, and to effect, to use terminology borrowed from the economist Serge Latouche, a "decolonization of the imaginary", which would be the first step towards the construction of the phantasm of an alternative to strive for.

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

Light is time, if we look at the horizon opened up by astrophysical considerations. And a body emits light only because it is in the process of being consumed. Light means that this disappearance is in progress: it makes visible what is in the process of no longer becoming so.

11/04/2011

In recent decades State management of town planning has had an impact tending deliberately towards uniformisation. The emblematic voids that consumer architecture leaves unfilled are spaces dictated solely by considerations of progress, sanitization and social acceleration. Inversely proportional relations are established, and an extreme acceleration of time brings about an ultimate shrinkage of space. In this acceleration of the pace of life and social change, a negation of space is matched by a contraction of the present, in which the past dissolves at the same speed as its own validity and the future is at any moment (anxiously) forestalled. We are authors and actors in a staging of the present; in this scenario, a sustainable society (the term sustainable is used in a wider sense than the strictly economic one) does not seem achievable because of the fact that the everyday has been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is now individual and anonymous. A diaphanous fiction is set up, plunging us into unawareness of the repercussions we cause, and then the writing and effacement of history are accomplished at a single blow.

A first step would be for each of us to reappropriate the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with regard to their environment would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, drawing inspiration from Michel de Certeau and his attempt to revalue the everyday by revealing the hidden potential of all declaratory acts, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures. The world is a figure whose geometry is variable just as much as it is contained within parameters, and any alteration in one of those parameters has a direct impact on the whole. We establish its variables, just as we change the geometry by modifying them. That is why the assertion of individual responsibility for reformulating social space is crucial: it is incumbent on each person to become aware of the logical arguments that tame him, and to effect, to use terminology borrowed from the economist Serge Latouche, a "decolonization of the imaginary", which would be the first step towards the construction of the phantasm of an alternative to strive for.

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

Yet, paradoxically, all things as they disappear unfailingly illuminate their own intrinsic vitality: Their imminent extinction reveals a process of transformation at work, and bears witness to an essential movement of renewal, albeit at the cost of destruction. Real death is located where sterile fixity condemns existence to pure reiteration of identicalness, in which monosemy prevents any slippage or variation. That is how the future can become obsolete, almost unnecessary, superfluous.

"Matter is blind” in association with equilibrium, Prigogine writes; it is incapable of perceiving what is contiguous to it, and consequently resembles it. Caught in a kind of frozen temporality, it finds itself unable to acquire new properties and try out novel configurations. It is instability, imbalance, fluctuations, with the unpredictability inherent to them, that allow unaccustomed and eminently creative correlations, by adding extrinsic and fecund noise to a system that was previously closed in its determinism.

Matter is blind, and so is our gaze, all the more so as not only what is visible exists: Astrophysics confirms that the visible is no more than the diaphanous head of foam on what exists. The human eye is in fact receptive to only an infinitesimal range of electromagnetic radiation’s tonalities. The majority of matter is invisible. What is visible, in negative, is only the shadow cast by the transformation of things. “Dark” matter that absorbs all light, from which 99% of the entirety of our universe is believed to be constituted, remains indiscernible and impossible to measure: Its presence is revealed only through the gravitational pull it exerts on the visible matter of stars and galaxies.

If a scenario, whatever guarantee it may have, presides as things happen, it redraws its maps permanently. Meaning only hangs together at the very moment it escapes. And we have to start another round, rearrange the old maps, discarding some to welcome new ones. For the game is never-ending.

The immutable scenario of significance is constantly disrupted by a perpetual movement involving the reconstitution of its structural heterogeneousness. Thus through disappearance, reality can rekindle its own reinvention.

What the "Servante" guarantees therefore has to do with the symbolic continuity of a relay of presences that it maintains through its weak effect, rather like the flames kept alight in ancient shrines perpetuated presence. This anachronistic vestal guardian preserves a crucial spark: the thousand-year-old spark that relays the miracle of our presence on that other stage which is the world.

25/04/2011

On the face of it, nothing seems to link the existence of these two light sources unless it is the same darkness that they do not cease to frustrate by a prolonged vigil. An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, the centennial light bulb is an escapee: a survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society. With its weak effect it highlights a mechanism that today seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

The superabundance of information and the media manipulation that is a feature of the generation of images prevents us from distinguishing between the true and the false. In his book "La précession des simulacres", Baudrillard explains how the image of the real we create for ourselves displaces its own reality without people being aware of it. In the society of the simulacrum, the image, the copy, has supplanted the object. Reality is validated by an image, but can history be written with images? Moreover, this scenario leads to a lack of any criterion and appropriateness in our perception of the environment. Our appreciation of the real is not correct because it is out of scale; we could assimilate it to Heisenberg’s microscopic observation, which, like the Basilisk’s stare, is capable of misrepresenting or even killing what is observed, when focusing on the detail does not allow us to see the whole in its entirety.

Given this prospect, the apprehension with which we regard the present is considerably disrupted. It melts in a crucible, or rather a black hole, where the permanent cancellation of all possible reversibility makes the flattening of reality complete. Our present tries to crystallize itself into the here and now of an experience that is nonetheless invariably constantly updated; nothing seems able to settle in the precariousness of a transitory and fragmentary duration that preserves only a short-term memory of what is essential to us if we are to move forward, instant after instant.

And how does space fare in this absence of relief activated by communication networks? It is ever easier and ever quicker to move around, whether physically or metaphorically, with low-cost airlines or greater bandwidth. Space can easily be assimilated to a kind of mesh floating on the surface, with us being called on to go from one point of that mesh to another, without ever really inscribing the memory of any movement at any point.

Inversely proportional relations are established, and an extreme acceleration of time brings about an ultimate shrinkage of space. In the generalized acceleration of the pace of life and social change, a negation of space is matched by a contraction of the present, in which the past dissolves at the same speed as its own validity and the future is at any moment (anxiously) forestalled. We are authors and actors in a staging of the present; in this scenario, a sustainable society (the term sustainable is used in a wider sense than the strictly economic one) does not seem achievable because of the fact that the everyday has been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is now individual and anonymous. A diaphanous fiction is set up, plunging us into unawareness of the repercussions we cause, and then the writing and effacement of history are accomplished at a single blow.

So how can we inhabit entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)?

A first step would be for each of us to reappropriate the factors related to belonging to the collective. Then the emptiness human beings feel with regard to their environment would no longer be a wasteland, but would become the communication gap where social networks could be built. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures. Ineffable gestures that are sometimes not inscribed anywhere and are saved from oblivion only by the memory of a few. The oral tradition and all the vernacular cultures it runs through are today at the heart of a polemical debate centred on what UNESCO has called "the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage", for want of a more accurate description, and following the fortune of the antithesis that the Latin aphorism “Verba volant, scripta manent” (Words fly away, writing remains) engraves on the door of our tradition of thought like a performative inscription. Asking how we can archive what ontologically evades any means of conservation is ultimately a wrong question, authorized only by the ideology of heritage as it is conceived in the west.

Unlike the fixed text, whether it is engraved or written, orality maintains a quite different memory, a living memory transmitted and passed on from mouth to mouth like the metaphorical relay implied by the Olympic torch. Florence Dupont pertinently insists on the fact that orality is a language that is alien to writing and reveals that this ideological distinction, far from being innocent, deliberately opposes anything suggesting an "event-culture", or a "monument-culture". She thus says: "The event sets up a situation of enunciation, a celebration, a ritual of reception. The monument is an autonomous utterance that anyone can consume anywhere, at any time, anyhow, even alone". In writing there is no passing on, unless in the freedom of interpretation left to the reader, on which a fair number of semiologists are still constantly exhausting their own powers of interpretation. A work is open in this sense only when it is transformed: plagiarism, rewriting are all methods that respect such an intention.

This notwithstanding, one thing is certain: reality plagiarizes fiction. The gestures as well as the tales we construct very convincingly ape a story that seems already to have been written. And what if we were dependent not on the past but on the future? Is not the reality we experience as a perpetually deferred promise plagiarism by anticipation? But what tale in orbit does our present commemorate the memory of?

A light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

Yet, paradoxically, all things as they disappear unfailingly illuminate their own vitality: Their imminent extinction reveals a process of transformation at work, and bears witness to an essential movement of renewal, albeit at the cost of destruction. Real death is located where sterile fixity condemns existence to pure reiteration of identicalness, in which monosemy prevents any slippage or variation. That is how the future can become obsolete, almost unnecessary, superfluous.

"Matter is blind” in association with equilibrium; it is incapable of perceiving what is contiguous to it, and consequently resembles it. Caught in a frozen temporality, it finds itself unable to acquire new properties and try out novel configurations. It is instability, imbalance, fluctuations, with the unpredictability inherent to them, that allow unaccustomed and eminently creative correlations, by adding extrinsic and fecund noise to a system that was previously closed in its determinism.

Matter is blind, and so is our gaze, all the more so as not only what is visible exists. The human eye is in fact receptive to only an infinitesimal range of electromagnetic radiation’s tonalities. The majority of matter is invisible. What is visible, in negative, is only the shadow cast by the transformation of things. “Dark” matter that absorbs all light, from which 99% of the entirety of our universe is believed to be constituted, remains indiscernible and impossible to measure: Its presence is revealed only through the gravitational pull it exerts on stars and galaxies.

If a scenario presides as things happen, it redraws its maps permanently. Condemned to being perpetually made and unmade, meaning only hangs together at the very moment it escapes. But the constant uncertainty in which this scenario remains, as well as the precarious balance inherent to what, in an attempt to pin it down, has been called the "present", then become the devices that trigger the creation of other tales, other possible stories and realities.

The open, permeable space of signification that envelops us does not suffer from the consequences of the law of entropy. “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”, and in that seething movement nothing is irreversibly degraded. Directly a new meaning has been worked out, real layers are ejected out of this space; however, they are not lost for ever, and one day could possibly be reoccupied. Borrowing the metaphor used by the semiotician Jurij Michajlovič Lotman, these latent strata are placed in the margins and form deposits of sediment that seem to have fallen into oblivion, and are awaiting their potential reactivation to burst on to the scene once again. This movement of exchange can neither be exhausted nor stopped, but only held back momentarily in temporarily stable configurations.

There is no container without content. However, it is possible for the container to recast its contours permanently. When the container becomes a vehicle for readings, tales, flights of imagination, and is embodied in the relationship to the Other outside the geography set by time and space, the content it conveys, far from disappearing, breeds random, infinite and anachronistic realities, and actualizes happenings that are just as uncertain. In this sense the only unique thing about a work of art is the multiple aspects it provokes: the links it makes, and upstream of which it subsequently surreptitiously fades away.

Thus through disappearances and losses, reality can at any time rekindle its own reinvention.

09/05/2011

A light bulb is switched on.

An incongruous leftover of the revolution ushered in by electricity, the light bulb lighting up the fire-fighting station in the city of Livermore in California for more than a century is an escapee. A survivor, ahead of its time, of the policy of programmed obsolescence that from the 1930s in the USA would place a mandatory expiry date on objects traded by the budding consumer society, it highlights a mechanism that today seems to govern a major part of our everyday activities.

Furthermore, the superabundance of information and the media manipulation that is a feature of the generation of images are today part of a strategy to make news uniform, preventing us from distinguishing what is true from what might be false. In the society of the simulacrum, the image – the copy – has supplanted the real. The economic system markedly accelerates the neo-liberal changes it needs for its own preservation, exploiting the image as an electric shock in order to control the masses.

Given this prospect, the apprehension with which we regard time is considerably disrupted. Our present tries to crystallize itself into the here and now of an experience that is nonetheless invariably constantly updated; nothing seems able to settle in the precariousness of a transitory and fragmentary duration that preserves only a short-term memory of what is essential to us if we are to move forward, instant after instant.

We are the authors as much as the actors in a staging of the present. In this scenario, a sustainable society does not seem achievable because of the fact that the everyday has been stripped of all meaning and the only possible activity is now individual and anonymous. A diaphanous fiction is set up, plunging us into unawareness of the repercussions we cause, and then the writing and effacement of history are accomplished at a single blow.

So how can we inhabit entropy other than by breaking into the closed dynamics maintained by the negation of everything that belongs to us (a certain future)? A first step would be for each of us to reappropriate the factors related to belonging to the collective. It really is at the heart of everyday life that we can start this exercise, since towns are made not only of products and buildings: "the true archives of the city" are gestures.

Ineffable gestures that are not inscribed anywhere and are saved from oblivion only by the memory of a few. The oral tradition and vernacular cultures are at the heart of a debate centered on what UNESCO has called "the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage". How can we archive what ontologically evades any means of conservation? Unlike writing, orality preserves a living memory transmitted and passed on from mouth to mouth. In the fixed text there is no passing on, unless in the freedom of interpretation left to the reader. A work is open in this sense only when it is transformed: plagiarism, rewriting are all methods that respect such an intention.

Reality sometimes takes pleasure in plagiarizing fiction. The gestures as well as the tales we construct very convincingly ape a story that seems already to have been written. And what if we were dependent not on the past but on the future? Is not the reality we experience as a perpetually deferred promise plagiarism by anticipation? But what tale in orbit does our present commemorate the memory of?

One thing is certain: if a scenario presides as things happen, it redraws its maps permanently. Condemned to being perpetually made and unmade, meaning only hangs together at the very moment it escapes. Nonetheless, the constant uncertainty in which this scenario remains, as well as the precarious balance inherent to what, in an attempt to pin it down, has been called the "present", become the devices that trigger the creation of other tales, other possible stories and realities.

The space of signification does not suffer from the consequences of the law of entropy. “Nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed”, and in that tumultuous movement nothing is irreversibly degraded. Directly a new meaning has been worked out, latent strata are placed in the margins and form deposits of sediment that seem to have fallen into oblivion, and are awaiting their potential reactivation to burst on to the scene once again. The inexhaustible exchange can be grasped only through temporarily stable configurations.

And yet a light bulb somewhere asserts the persistence of its light.

But a body emits light only because it is in the process of being consumed: Light makes visible what is in the process of no longer becoming so. Paradoxically, all things as they disappear unfailingly illuminate their vitality, their imminent extinction revealing by occurring a process of essential renewal, albeit at the cost of destruction. Real death is located where sterile fixity condemns existence to pure reiteration of identicalness, in which monosemy prevents any slippage. That is how the future can become obsolete, almost unnecessary, superfluous.

Thus through disappearances and losses, reality can rekindle its own reinvention.

In Paris, at the Théâtre de l'Odéon, a stage manager places a "Servante" on the bare stage every evening: a light bulb firmly screwed to the top of a slender pole. What this "Servante" guarantees has to do with the symbolic continuity of a relay of presences that it maintains through its weak effect, rather like the flames kept alight in ancient shrines used to perpetuate presence. This anachronistic vestal guardian preserves a crucial spark: the thousand-year-old spark that relays the miracle of our presence on that other stage which is the world.