This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘Unstable states, mutable conditions’.La vidéo présente les contributions thématiques sur « États instables, conditions en mutation »

Crowley, Cornelius

OpenEdition

 
Angles
New Perspectives on the Anglophone World 
4 | 2017
Unstable States, Mutable Conditions
Video introduction to issue 4
Cornelius Crowley
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1356
DOI: 10.4000/angles.1356
ISSN: 2274-2042
Publisher
Société des Anglicistes de l'Enseignement Supérieur
 
Electronic reference
Cornelius Crowley, « Video introduction to issue 4 », Angles [Online], 4 | 2017, Online since 01 April
2017, connection on 24 September 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/angles/1356  ; DOI :
https://doi.org/10.4000/angles.1356 
This text was automatically generated on 24 September 2020.
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International.
Video introduction to issue 4
Cornelius Crowley
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journals.openedition.org/angles/1356
Transcript:
1 The Anglophone world is an area of study and an area in the world we presume to be in
an “unstable state”.
2 (Gresset and Mazodier could analyse the instability of this last proposition. Does the
relative clause refer to “Anglophone world” or to “the world” or to “area of study”? All
three, no doubt. Instability is now everywhere). 
3 Consultation  of  the  OED  suggests that  “states”  and  “conditions”  are  virtually
synonymous:
state, n. Senses relating to a condition or manner of existing.
4 As for condition, there is the following OED quotation: 
1817 S.T. Coleridge: “The air I breathe, is the condition of my life, not its cause.”
5 Coleridge presumably believed that “the air I breathe”…“the condition of my life” is
immune to human agency. Or as Roland Barthes noted, quoted by Marie Olivier in her
article on Louise Glück: “the sky the one thing that cannot be marked.” 
6 But if human agency now conditions the state of the air that I breathe, then the state of
the world is now decipherable against our anthropecene backscreen: the writing is in
the sky.
7 This  takes  us  into  an unstable  territory,  one  we’d  read about  in  dystopian science
fiction,  while  believing  ourselves  to  be  safely  tucked  up  in  a  domestic  or  readerly
“comfort zone”.
8 Jean-Daniel Collomb reads the writings of Baird Callicott in order to apprehend the
changes which such man-made ecological mutation will now require of us.
9 The demarcations between village and jungle in Leonard Woolf’s novel The Village in the
Jungle (1913), pointed to by Leila Haghshenas, seem porous and reversible. She quotes
Video introduction to issue 4
Angles, 4 | 2017
1
Jacques Derrida about the reappraisal of the conditions of the human: our participation
in a  trans-species  animality,  now apprehended more precisely  than in  19th century
premonitions,  no longer feared as the puncturing of a veneer of civility that might
liberate  an  underlying  “beastliness”.  Reading  Leila  Haghshenas,  one  senses  it  is
through the relocation of the human within the sustaining condition of its common
“animality”  that  anxieties  manifest  in  the  gothic  fantasies  of  the  beastly  and  the
romantic aspirations to the angelic might be overcome. 
10 For the reader of literature, the challenge of “unstable states” is not the same as for a
student of political systems. Zach Bastick examines the malfunctioning of the American
political  “machine”.  He  proposes  remedies,  revisits  the  discussions  about
“representation”. For Richard Anker, the intention is to decipher Don DeLillo’s take on
time and on the intoxication with eternity. He writes of “an opposition […] between an
essentially poetic self-awareness born of the experience of  finitude and a heroic or
titanic drive to permanence and unity of being.”
11 I take this to mean that it is the metaphysical pursuit of permanence has got human
agency  into  a  “historical  impasse”,  through  the  abuse  of  the  “titanic  drive  to
permanence  and  unity  of  being.”  Which  implies  that  the  challenge  posed  by  any
“unstable state” is the challenge of keeping upright by way of a precarious balancing
conditional upon precious little, more like riding a bicycle than like cruising the streets
in the stretch limo seen in the David Cronenberg adaptation of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis.
12 In that direction lie possibilities for a certain levity, less “national-epic” perhaps than
the elation of William Carlos Williams, insofar as the argument against our being able
now  to  endorse  Coleridge’s  sense  of  the  immunity  of  air  also  distances  us  from
Williams’s confident claim to a new American language and to a new continent. Our
inability to share the confidence audible in Williams’s voice is also conditioned by our
exposure to the two counterpoint discourses of Australia, territory, water, placed side by
side by Camille Roulière.
13 Anna Aublet, drawing on Williams, refers to language’s driving of a wedge that opens
the world.  The caesura between the event and its appropriation in discourse is  the
condition Toby Auböck highlights in his reading of two narratives, by an officer and an
ordinary seaman, of their captivity after the American frigate Philadelphia ran aground
off the shores of Tripoli in 1803.
14 Cécile  Doustaly  examines  the  “exhibitionary  complex”  of  the  Victorian  era,  here
envisaged as a component in a project of “State Stability”. The latter is the corollary of
social stability and social discipline. This raises a question of methodological instability
or, at the least, duality. For if the “exhibitionary complex” is analyzable in relation to
the exercise of power, and if as readers of Michel Foucault we can now decipher the
discipline  operative  in  cultural  designs,  Doustaly  shows  how  the  “exhibitionary
complex” is also, inevitably, an act of municipal self-affirmation and performance. In
other words,  the aura of  “illusio”,  to  use Bourdieu’s  term in Méditations  pascaliennes
(1997), is a necessary condition for the effective agency of social control. Even “state
stability” is conditional on a certain duality and instability in the social fact,  which
therefore requires a comparable heuristic lability on the part of the social historian.
15 To conclude with a question of colours. Richard Anker evokes the titanic pursuit of
permanence:  penetration  to  a  timeless  truth  to  end  all  truths.  Charlotte  Ribeyrol
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evokes a moment in high culture and useful industry, the late 19th century infatuation
with purple, violet, puce, mauve, indigo.
16 That the late Victorian colours could be forged through a chemical technology made
them suspect to those for whom an elevating art required the “naturalness”, or at least
craft-based origin, of the pigments through which the edifying motifs were depicted.
17 The Victorians repeated the anxieties of earlier societies, notably those of the Greeks.
The  more  conservative  and  colourless  Plato  was  indeed  extremely  wary  of  the
instability and ‘restless versatility’ conveyed by the idea of poikilia. (he) […] resorted to
this term associated with the changing scales of the serpent to compare the democratic
regime ‘to a shimmering coat that might appeal to women and children’.
18 The connotations of  Poikilia  are suspect:  flash,  bigarré,  the antithesis  of  a  presumed
classical sobriety. Poikilia could be the chromatic mode of a Victorian or a more recent
camp culture. As a modality of response to the visible world, in time and light, through
language or materiality of paint, colour is a component of both a camp culture and a
more  haughtily  sublime  high  modernism,  the  demarcation  between  the  two  best
regarded as itself unstable and porous.
19 In Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sea Surface Full of Clouds” (1931), “motley hue” is part of
the word palette rendering the play between light, ocean and air. It comes to mind as a
possible translation for “poikilia”. The unstable status of what is “motley” is a condition
of the rainbow performance. 
                                                The wind
Of green blooms turning crisped the motley hue
To clearing opalescence. Then the sea
And heaven rolled as one and from the two
Came fresh transfigurings of freshest blue. 
ABSTRACTS
This video introduces the thematic contributions on ‘Unstable states, mutable conditions’.
La vidéo présente les contributions thématiques sur « États instables, conditions en mutation ».
INDEX
Keywords: video, literature, history, law, language, politics, colours
Mots-clés: vidéo, langue, littérature, histoire, droit, politique, couleurs
AUTHOR
CORNELIUS CROWLEY
Guest editor of Issue 4. Professor at the Université Paris Nanterre.
Video introduction to issue 4
Angles, 4 | 2017
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Video introduction to issue 4

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Video introduction to issue 4

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