Cultural theory, inventive and hopeful.

I like French sociologist Michel de Certeau not only because his ideas and methodologies are fruitful for my research in many ways, but also and especially because he was a fascinating character.

He was a Jesuit, a traveller, someone who, instead of posing and being cocky, was hesitant and careful about the ideas he developed, someone who wrote in a tentative and searching, not in a polished and conclusive style, someone who preferred asking questions and opening pathways over claiming to establish rock-solid theories, someone who wasn’t afraid of thinking outside the box, someone who took an interdisciplinary approach without ever risking to end up a jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none.

Ben Highmore, in the introduction to his study Michel de Certeau: Analysing Culture, quotes a passage from a letter he received by an anonymous reviewer of one of his other pieces on de Certeau:

In a field [cultural studies] overly enamored of the contemporary, de Certeau offers the historian’s detailed appraisal of the past. In a field obsessed with the local, de Certeau offers itineraries to elsewheres. In a field where culture tends to be synonymous with the US model, de Certeau points to the other. In a field awash in the ordinary, de Certeau grasps the singular. In a field beset with nihilism, de Certeau evokes abiding faith in human history. In a field associated with celebrated stardom, de Certeau provides beguiling self-effacement.

I think that’s what attracted me to de Certeau’s writing (especially The Practice of Everyday Life and The Writing of History) from the start: he radiates attentiveness, substantiality, singularity and faith in an interdisciplinary field (and increasingly complex world) that is characterised by superficiality, randomness and arbitrariness.

Insect Poetics

Studio Ghibli’s bizarre but lovely Japanese anime Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind is set in a world 1000 years after the collapse of the ecosystem. Armies of gigantic insects inhabit a toxic forest and sort of reflect how the characters treat the earth: their eyes red with rage, they attack when harm is being caused, but they immediately calm down around the gentle, peace-loving Nausicaä.

Anyway, watching the movie reminded me of recommending and linking to the following recent publications on insects in relation to visual culture and science:

• Cabinet Magazine’s special issue on insects (‘Swarming Season’ Spring 2007)
• Antennae’s two special issues on insect poetics (Autumn 2007/1 and 2)
• Insect Poetics, edited by Eric C. Brown

The articles, essays and interviews, which cover several fields and centuries, largely focus on the insect as “the other” – the monstrous, invasive, menacing, disintegrating, alienating creature that, due to its boundary-threatening and boundary-crossing nature, forces us to reconsider issues of identity and order; but they also dwell on the insect’s mysterious attraction and beauty.

It’s pretty cool.

Mapping Surrealist icons.

From the maps-series by Manchester-based artist, writer and curator Heidi Schaefer.

Cornell’s other boxes.

Hans Namuth, Joseph Cornell’s Cellar Workshop at 3708 Utopia Parkway, New York, 1969, photograph.

a diary journal repository laboratory,
picture gallery, museum, sanctuary,
observatory, key… the core of a labyrinth,
a learning house for dreams and visions.

Joseph Cornell (not on the collection of found objects and materials in his basement but) on a file he kept on one of his finished boxes, quoted in Rikki Ducornet, The Monstrous and the Marvelous.