Happenstance harvest after symposium

La situation de colloque, journée d’étude, ne s’était pas présentée depuis longtemps : le long régime de Covid était venu se placer pour moi après plusieurs phases inconfortables, incertaines, d’essayages de distance, détox, tortillages expérimentaux et désordonnés de désaliénation. JE Idex à Grenoble hier. Je suis intriguée, doucement curieuse, écoute flottante, à distance ironico-tendre mais aussi toujours curieuse d’épistémologie au près, par ce retour de situation. Et les nouveautés ou répétitions reproductions que je note, depuis mon parcours de ces deux ans, passés par la fantaisie saussurienne devenue OTSOG, càd un nouveau plateau social pour ma petite identité, professionnelle et confusément tout-le-reste. (Yes, writing this morning in between paragraphs of Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 2012, and caught willingly, listeningly, in the subtle plane of a sociology of self, individuality, intimacy.)

Science in action, and a loving attention to its grassroots, raw, infinitely and multifocally local dynamics. How individual scholars know, how they « share » the knowing, how they play within institutional probabilities, how culture and knowledge actually takes shape there, not necessarily in the ways one sees, we believe, they officialize. Récolte non-nulle, échanges d’énergie, et bien sûr de légitimité. Pleasing to find a comfortable vantage from a common & horizontal layer rather than an attempted « critical » eminence, exhausting and never-ending in aerophagic upmanship. A plateau of a professional, scholarly age, possibly. I’m interested.

I will note « happenstance », for the performative quality, and its ongoingness – the direct benefit being: a taste, conatus, of curiosity, and willing participation. The pleasing historicity of it. (And another bright boon: the deliciousness of international points of connection, Saugata B, Laura R with Matt too, new meetings and momentary steepings, German, British, people launching on, practicing, modest or structural international forays.)

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Would love to glean and materialize the myriad, of suggestions, reactions, formings of notions and views, during and after such exchanges & criss-cross performances. Possibly the not doing so – who has the time? Where the ressources for such exhaustive articulation, in the infinite lines of cultural practice (especially when multiplied by reflexivity, at least some), lignes de fuite ? So much, such, loss is part of the cultural process.

Things about fetish and literality in literary and cultural study. Enduring. Increvable. The naivety of it, innocence, and wonderous social existence, legitimacy, in this sense.

About the way institutions can host and lend shape, legitimacy, audibility even (and teaching licence) to cardboarded subjects as well as the small eccentricities and derailments of scholarly imagination in their trajectories – so much innocence mostly. Or is this a happenstance impression? Possibly one gleaning also: consensual spaces (alors les complaisances) and political ones, to be observed in relation, coupled by context. Hegemony.