PLASTIC SEMIOTICS AND MUSICAL PRACTICE AT THE RISK OF PLASTICITY
Frederic MATHEVET is a researcher associated to the ACT (UMR 8218) at Paris I (National Center for Scientific Research). Doctor in arts, he is co-editor-in-chief of the on-line magazine “The other Music » and of the laboratory of the same name which mix researchers and practitioners in a freed and expanding creative act. Plastician and poetician open to any polymorphism, to any mutability, he defines himself as a ‘handyman’ muddling the media (digital, pictorial or sound), as the vector of an intractable ‘plastic’ language, in other words which “resists to the apprenticeship) of the signs and puts non-stop the arbitrarity and the disparity of the signs which build the reality ». Making it, he defines ceaselessly new plastic forms, refuses any dogmatism which affects the matter, the semiotics or “the inconvenient narratologies built by the society ». We see there at once the position of the artist and the researcher who privileges the open places – his ‘shoemaker’s workshop‘ – and thresholds, the undermining which consists in cleaning out memories, in marrying the bodies which he assimilates in the « ultimate place of a poaching of the sensitive « , to grind the forms, to give them a new space of thought. Frederic Mathevet is thus a plastician in the meaning where we understand it: that of an transdisciplinary quest of the experience per se. He published in particular two textbooks of plastic arts, the second number of which is dedicated to the particular case of the music and participated to several exhibitions in Paris, Montreuil, Toulouse and London. There are several concerts including multimedia Make skin 2 for bodhràn (Nice, Paris, Noisiel), Rec-u-Aime for cello, mezzo-soprano and a knitter (The farm bush), Mechanical tightrope for baritone saxophone (Petit Bain, Divan du monde). The essay he published in PLASTIR perfectly reflects this polymorphic and poly-artistic activity, clinging « to stochastic games of musical composition » before rebounding in the universe between categories inspired by Morton Feldman. This interstitial work calls for Pierre Boulez, John Cage and David Thoreau. It confirms the need for strengthening the role of new thinking of plasticity, the only way to realize the dynamic genesis of form, and hence the sensible world around us. As expressed in the first movement and in the successive mutations of Modern Art, it joined our understanding of plasticity that assimiles the matter-form as the only alternative to a complete description of reality from the informed. And the author to describe these nodal activities as follows: « This update is as temporary work that we have taken the habit of nothing « œ » to denote the node that is the precipitate in the chemical sense of term correlations », finding there resonances on the « ontological structural realism ». We do more than we lulled by these trans-artistic and regenerated works that inscribes in our cyber world a proven post-modern plasticity.
THOM’S DYNAMYC AND MODELLING COMPARED TO COMPARTMENTAL ANALYSIS
Abdelkader BACHTA is epistemologist and professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis. He has published several books on scientific rationality, enlightenment or Kantian idealism, as well as numerous articles in the journal of epistemology DOGMA. Readers will discover in the summaries of previous issues of PLASTIR he contributed, the first dealing with the Kuhnian paradigm (PLASTIR n°26, 03/2012) and the second the relations of the mathematician René Thom with cognitive science and cybernetics (PLASTIR 27, 06/2012). It’s the same Thom he wished to talk here, not so much in terms of information theory, but to address the field of dynamic forms so important for the topologist. This field will face compartmental thinking in biology that Thom is disinterested because of his geometric-topological analysis. Indeed, according to Bachta, Thom assimilates dynamic classicism to determinism and morphogenesis to a modeling being necessarily beyond quantification. Hence its appeal to a mathematical qualitative structural description causing the topological attractors, basins and surfaces of separation sign catastrophe theory. Thom does not reject provided quantitative analysis, but will restitutes them, stating that « any quantitative model presupposes a qualitative division of reality », the qualitative philosophically based more on knowledge that « localized or particularized what is universal « , unlike quantitative whose purpose is the location and the universal result. Science and philosophy intersect here, as the author indicates, insofar the global joined singularity, the nuance being limited to fundamental physics where the overall regulation of space-time is possible unlike science of bios. Atkins show Atkins, quantification integrates qualitative operations, including differentiation, introducing a controversy in the thomian mathematization that will be resolved in the hermeneutic proposals and the anti-experimental dimension of Thom’s modelling showing its limits when it is interpreted strictly in philosophical terms. The two men confront both the procedures and theory with experience. It shows a convergence on the ontological nature of reality that deviates from the logico-cognitive model and differences in procedures and attitudes towards realism. For one, Atkins, the geometrization is not a panacea, and it is necessary to quantify any compartmental analysis; for the other, Thom, only a treatment of real phenomena in qualitative and topologocical terms can led to an accurate description of the dynamic of forms.
HEURESTHESY – For a common matricial and dynamic topology of the physic universe, the senses and the mind –
Vincent MIGNEROT has in his career as much preferred the intellect than the call of the senses. After a master’s degree in clinical psychology, he surveyed mountain peaks, becoming cordist technician to link/unlink man, placing to harshness, the naked truth of the rope symbolizing alone what would become one of the working assumptions of the author of the Assay on the reason for any (deconflictualized model of evolution systemic and holistic-minded). This book starts from the observation that existing means be different, that the same is not possible and that it is the link between the objects that permits them to exist as binding objects. It appears that the object is the link iself, which implies a lack of freedom and solitude. An object unrelated to others, he said, is a single object – « The object is not freedom, freedom is not existence. There is no free object. The unbound is impossible », loneliness is therefore impossible… That shows the author’s philosophical quest – why objects they gather and they build links? – and how to respond, using a grid of both heuristic and transdisciplinary event-causation. Vincent Mignerot is so undoubtedly an artist who, remarkably, achieved by cross roads to join us, in that his findings are consistent with one of the key steps of the ‘Complex of Plasticity’: the active or dynamic binding between matter and form or between experience and consciousness PLASTIR n°18, 03/2010. He is currently a consultant researcher for the Project Synestheory whose objective is « the study of synesthesia and their contributions in historical and contemporary art, philosophy and science ». The concept of heuresthesy we present here attached the root of the word to the aisthesis radical, that according to what the author designates « the permanence of the being who, by entremission and coordination of the senses and beyond his own will reaches the essence of the world to recognize the unique and absolute existential definition ». It is therefore an aesthetic first degree experience being echoed in a structured production. This experience is both a matrix topological approach having thomian accents and a joint appeal of the senses and the spirit perfectly translated by the synesthesic experiences of a Mozart or a Tammet, perfectly expressed by Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, from which Vincent Mignerot tells us the secret weapon.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ANATOLE FRANCE – The figure of the scholar surrounded by old books and the thoughtlessness of the storyteller –
Claude BERNIOLLES is a poet and a philosopher. Having a law degree, he followed assiduously courses and seminars of Yves Bonnefoy and Jacques Bouveresse at the Collège de France. He published in our journal since 2010, covering the literary field, including three original articles on Wittgenstein (PLASTIR 20, 09/2010, PLASTIR 23, 06/2011, PLASTIR 25, 06/2011) and this issue starts with a sharp eye on the steps of Anatole France. In fact, what is known of the duality between the origins and scholarship of the authors, about his lucidity and contradictions? What do we hold concerning the man, the humanist, his literature transposed to the era of computerization? Many questions that the author discusses in terms of an investigation bluntly after reading an article in The literary Figaro devoted to the writer by P. Marcabru in 2000 AD. What it said to us, otherwise that the ‘French letters monster sacred’ die on the eve of the birth of Surrealism (1924) is now forgotten. And it is an understatement to speak of today, since the facts date back to the birth of the literary movements that followed his death, Anatole France being rapidly assimilated to a henchman of the French bourgeoisie and in particular violated by Aragon. However, once again, the society in depth mutations are clearly responsible for this oversight as that of many writers symbolizing a reign or a century. Claude Berniolles will then focus on describing the course of the child Anatole France, including readings that mark him as the Legend of Gutemberg or Les Noces Corinthiennes to us pointing the finger at both his neoclassicism and the poetry with proustian perfume of his first novels. Follow a description of the different ‘Anatole France’, from the storyteller to the « The figure of the scholar surrounded by books”. Each time, we are transported into the heart of the story – about the “Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard” –and we are going into details about the construction almost analytical of the novel. Many extractas or pages of anthology annotated open us to discover real gems of writing, the subtlety and relevance of stories, all the archaeological or historical researches conducted, to the genesis of the characters and their staging. Many riches that are found from the storyteller Anatole France – about the Conte de Balthazar and the Lilith ’s daughter or the Conte Thaïs-, well showing how the revered scholar does not divest his childish soul, how he also be able to share it (the story of the Thaïs courtesan being performed at the Opera). And the author to side with the opinion of the excellent analyst Marie-Claire Bancquart talking about this subject of « microcosmic imaginations » or « figures of compensation. » The same about the Epicurean Anatole France emulates of Pyrrho, the sceptic one, the scholar one, the close of the Enlightenment with his illuminati novels or the dreyfusian Anatole France after 1900. Many other works (such as The Queen Pedauque rotisserie) or excerpts from novels traverse this story, inviting us to rediscover the great writer, but also this relativistic thinker and philosopher that was Anatole France.