anachronistic french ( late summer and early autumn )

[Aliette Guibert]

A long time ago there were Daft Punk
in tourism
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The critical clone at the masked ball
(of the birds of Bourges)


    Do you know of the "Massachussets Institute of Technology" -in Bourges?
The only town in the world where swallows were such a sure sign of the
Spring that they eventually gave it its name: the Spring of Bourges. Each
year a musical festival of international fame celebrates the event.

Once upon the times there was originality. They said "to make oneself
distinct", which didn't demand any distinction. A thousand ways were
acceptable. The teen-ager had the knack for deviate the ideas inspired by
the Haute Couture, the allure in canvas or ticking which could distort the
mossy elegance it was acceptable distinguish oneself in, for the two high
schools balls -the girls' and the boys', the ideal Sapphic elegance to shock
more than to charm the grandson of a Russian Prince, a refugee in central
France, in the dark French departments of Cher and Indre, the birthplaces of
witchcraft. She remembers.

A proximity with the Loire chateaux already prepared her for her future
career as a post-modern diplomat, when the surrounding ghost of George Sand
was still an inspiration for the second sex, to wear a man's hat with
uniform blouses open to show the roots of budding breasts or worn inside
out, unbuttoned in the back, and to smoke the pipe or the cigar between
girls, in the small coffee-house at the corner of the street. Little
insolent.

She remembers that she started designing and cutting eccentric dresses, as
different as each of her friends that she so characterised to go out
together, the dog-collars with customised colours and medals that, on these
occasions only, they wore at their necks or around their finest waists, the
small stainless steel chains she herself adorned her ankles with. Such
decorations sharply contrasted with the sobriety of the lay uniform they had
to behave in during the week, you'd think it spurred in them desires of
useless fancies. These offensive accessories, obvious cuirasses whose
seduction wasn't meant for an exchange but for a refusal, decoys for
frustration and not signals for action, she precisely remembers them as she
views the only girl whose heterosexual escapades were to be protected for
solidarity's sake, helping her to safely go out through the second-floor
window to flee on the dormitory terrace, two nights a week - and to wait for
her return. In an androgen country the first who got her periods kept
shamefully hidden under a bed for a whole night. Then their philosophy
teacher, a young agrégé, who had graduated from the famous Ecole Normale
Superieure, and whom they made dream during these times of abstinence
committed suicide.

She sees him again, leaning against the rail of the open window over the
Parisian street where one year after high school graduation he joined her
off guard. He was smoking and chatting her up as she never could have dreamt
of: she was the woman of his life without whom he couldn't live any longer,
he was the only man who could suit her, not the lout whose presence in the
same room was unbearable to him -not intellectually refined enough for her.
Later she learned that many of the former pupils, elsewhere, had had the
same visit before the drama.

After the Algeria and the Vietnam wars were over and the revolution through
the dialectic of the class fight considered ended for ever it was time to
enter socialbarbary.

The bunch of keys hanging laterally from the belt to call a sado or maso
partner, the brim of the cap tipped on the back, on the right or on the
left, to immediately identify one's gang or the otherness enemy to be
instantly eliminated, the sport costume as a socio-generic comfortable wear,
or the mythological ritualisation of fashions in order to perpetuate them
(piercing for example), are not causes but messages of the uniformity and
conformity, yet linked to the useful information of community or sexual
singularities in post-modern then trans-modern times. Except that the money
symptom will always recognise its own - sometimes in a way hardly
perceptible for the others, such signs are anticipating the cloning of the
body norms and of the ages by way of hormones and plastic surgery, just like
bureaucracy is developing itself through an identical image of the media
pattern. Etc. Could it exist an antidote, some critical clone, just like
there exists a critical mass in the exchange of body energy in
thermo-dynamic?

Some photographic portraits, Focus of top models in shop windows, through
their bright realism are overcoming their archetypes of living references.
Luckily, in the present time of critical mass, we have a critical mask.

The masks conceals the actuality of faces without any symbolic quality. It
presents the enigma of what it actually erases, which it substitutes for the
social priority of the questioning of truth. It signifies the uncertainty of
identity and puts in place the ambiguous topology of the beautiful and the
ugly, whose chances to be respectively revealed it considers equal. If it
can either fascinate or frighten it is without deception. It claims the show
of embodied singularity and of its accessories to be obsolete, in opposing
its material strangeness, exclusive and anonymous, then collective as it is
though without denying the individual, whom it thus paradoxically signifies,
an impresciptible power. It secretly announces all the possible tomorrows.

Dual volte-face of the mask either on the side of difference or of
indifference : in hiding the public face it shows the private or symbolic
face which it protects or whose actuality it reserves and at the same time
in this secret it announces the possible spirituality, like the void in an
hypothesis.

From the agglutinating of the informed but atomatically free audience, a
tense but playful mass according to the unstable meetings of the first
Free-parties in urban periphery, following in a drift the Techno music
stars, devils with their face hidden behind their scarves ( robbers of the
right to gather under the nose of the policemen ) who resist with their
machines against Technocracies, to its totalitarian opposite: the secret
meetings of the initiated social elite in an expensive game of pleasure,
when it merges through the mask at the margin of the people it is in charge
of - so the lethal voluptuousness of the sex of power in Eyes Wide Shut,
Stanley Kubrick's last film, -or the radical indetermination of public or
sexual exchange feats turning back, the individual hole at sex level in a
wall just like the obscurity surrounding the sexual ballet being the
ultimate mask -theoretically- available for the experimentation of each
conscience, and whose achieved dangerous and violent antecedents were not as
harmless nor glorious ( during wartime for example ): we know the precarity
of the mask and its determining arbitrary and its social derision being
considered the surprising verso of its paradox, unavoidable for anybody.

The mask as an alias equal to the travestite behaviour immediately claim the
game and the rule beyond their use. They are not only what is preventively
worn to escape the pursuits after having compromised oneself in acting in
risky ceremonies, be they strictly jubilatory, dubious or forbidden -sex,
drugs, cash, violence, offensive criticism, illegal activities or forbidden
gatherings- or to escape one's own fans who are able to recognise their
idol at any time, or to hide the judgement or the intimate feelings betrayed
by the expression of the face, behind a ( parodic ) plasticity in a mobile
artefact, when on top of being unrecognised one should prevent society from
a possible monstrosity ( in the case of a failed plastic surgery, for
example ). It is not only the access to a deliberately amplified production,
a genius' marketing or advertisement coup, a loss of freedom in the identity
adhesion or in view of a statutory consensus. Quite on the contrary. A
radical principle not because of the alternative fact but because of its
potential chaotic energy. A prefiguration of the political risk in itself, a
permanent coup de force where everybody finds its own way. The dualism of
the mask is supposedly well-known but strangely enough we perceive that here
still it chooses its side.

Arrived we do not remember how beyond originality and moral freedom, to hear
the institutional, democratic or republican, concept of freedom, just like
the cicada of the fable we wouldn't be reduced to sing but against any
expectation: to dance.

Let's dance. Daft Punk in a few years of instrumental transgression: who
says best? Full success along the line. To everybody his/her mask without
any resemblance because they come at two. A synchronous orchestra duet. This
evokes distinct but interdependent accomplices, comrades, fellows, brothers,
sisters: friends, partners, lovers, spouses, clans in all the states of the
individual hetero- or homosexual difference of the couple, of the group or
of blends, not to say of generations, until the combinations of possible or
impossible orgies or incests ( here Ectasy more as a form of orgy in itself
at the time of Rave parties of House Music, which launched the fashion ) to
presume the uncertainty of their masks whose graphics is not only fancyless
but also useless or austere. But never twins. By the way public rumour
leaves them alone because they never appear on TV nor in the magazines. Does
it matter ? For the people that is linked with it in time and better than a
naturalist metaphor Daft Punk realises a critical concept of the marching
Majorities ( could they be the masses in a state of traces in the politician
fossil heads? ), through the amateurs who represent themselves behind it.
Except the communication and the signs of its creators: who says that this
kind of iconoclastic at war is made of two? It is not God -the One, that's
obvious. Two personalities fidegeting behind their respective masks can be
about one or two more, even more, even many more in a professional shift at
the samplers to give such a long show in one place, carrying on days and
nights, or the other way round in several places at the same time under
other aliases, their unmasked faces indulging in other musical genres, to
enjoy good time in turn. Ubiquity. Now is this just a matter of cash ?
Answering the question will not solve the problem. Daft Punk's concept of
the mask is much numerous than itself or its audience because it is multiple
and plural -just like the whole world.

Neither a star nor a sect. Let's make a summary. Contrary to the clone in
exponential progression in John Malkovitch's skin, or of the cloned
understudy of the female singer in The Unique, a film directed by Jérôme
Diamant-Berger a while ago, Daft Punk live is not the event of the same in
the group, nor the merging of the individual in the community but a risky
return of the mass singularity in the full possibility of the enigma of the
mask. In one word: it's you, it's me.
It is us.


A.G. Translation Isabelle Cordonnier

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extracted from www.criticalsecret.com/n2
(edito)



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Malcolm Osborne (the birds of Bourges)
http://www.modjourn.brown.edu/mjp/Image/Osborne/Osborne.htm


Le printemps de Bourges (musical Spring festival, 2005)
http://www.bourges.fr/anglais/culture/html/pdb.htm


Bourges
http://www.bourges.fr/anglais/index.htm


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