Alain Corbin

Alain Corbin, Histoire du silence. De la Renaissance à nos jours, Paris, Albin Michel, 2016, 204 p. Que le silence ait une histoire, aucun lecteur un peu familier de l'oeuvre d'Alain Corbin n'en sera vraiment surpris puisque, depuis trente ans, il n'a cessé de montrer, avec une inventivité rare, que l'ouïe, l'odorat, la vue, le corps, le plaisir sexuel en avaient une. Le livre constitue un peu, de ce point de vue, la suite des Cloches de la terre (1994) qui portait sur l'histoire du paysage sonore des campagnes du XIX e siècle. Mais autant et peut-être plus qu'un livre d'histoire, l'ouvrage est une sorte d'hymne au silence à travers les âges dans lequel sont convoqués tour à tour, pour en illustrer les textures et la parole paradoxale, la littérature profane et spirituelle, le cinéma, la peinture et les souvenirs personnels. Dans son Art de se taire (1771), l'abbé Dinouart ne distinguait-il pas jusqu'à onze sortes différentes de silence ? Le but paraît moins être ici d'expliquer que de ressusciter un monde perdu dont ne resterait plus autour de nous que des traces éparses et menacées. Car c'est bien la rupture contemporaine, survenue vers 1960, qui constitue rétrospectivement ce continuum historique dans lequel Platon, Bossuet et Zola sont peu ou prou des contemporains. Elle tient moins à l'accentuation du tapage urbain qu'à la connexion généralisée de la culture contemporaine. « Déconnectez-vous » semble ainsi vouloir nous dire Alain Corbin, après Alain Finkielkraut, dans cette oeuvre légèrement crépusculaire qui ne cache pas ses inquiétudes devant les conséquences anthropologiques d'une telle incapacité collective à « faire silence » et à « être soi ».

Cultural historical research has deliberately challenged “historical realism,” the view that history is comprised entirely of observable actions that actually occurred, and instead has emphasized the historical significance of thoughts, emotions, and representations; it has also focused on the invisible, the momentary, and the perishable. These latter elements introduce the notion of the possible in history. This article examines the ways in which cultural history has approached the notion of the possible, as well as the methodological and theoretical implications of this approach. Its chief claim is that the idea of possibility is fundamental for the concept of culture and ineliminable from its historical study.

The question of possibility is present in multiple ways in the study of history; it is important to distinguish among different levels of possibility. The possible may mean, for instance, what it is possible for historians to know about the past, or the possibilities open to historical agents themselves, or, indeed, the possibilities they perceived themselves as having even if these seem impossible from the point of view of the historian. The article starts with the first aspect and moves on toward the possibilities that existed in the past world either in fact or in the minds of those in the past.

The article argues that the study of past cultures always entails the mapping of past possibilities. The first strand of the essay builds on the metaphor of the black hole and intends to solve one of the central problems faced by cultural historians, namely, how to access the horizon of the people of the past, their experience of their own time, especially when the sources remain silent. The second, more speculative strand builds on the notion of plenitude and is designed to open up avenues for further discussion about the concept of culture in particular.

The article looks at changing hair care practices in the late 19th - early 20th century - a time which saw a significant shift in perceptions of dirt and cleanliness. Due in part to technological innovation and the popularization of new scientific knowledge, this change was also brought about by evolving social relationships and the symbolic structures underlying them. In the late 19C, the main hair care products were grease pomades, which were also used to clean the hair. Another, less frequently used method of dry-cleaning the hair involved powder. Hair powder usually reappeared during periods of revival of 18th-century styles - at other times, its use was frowned upon. Up until the early 20C, hair was always dry-cleaned before combing, whereas washing the hair was often considered harmful. With advances in microbiology, however, ideas of cleanliness evolved, and hair-washing gradually became more widespread. The fusion and mutual influence of medical and aesthetic considerations, which brought about such changes in hair care practices, are crucial to understanding the history of body practices in the 20C.

Nouvelle date limite  : 15 septembre 2020. Nous accepterons toutefois les propositions jusqu'au 1er octobre.
Appel à communication pour le Congrès de l'ABSP et du Cospof - Avril 2021
8ème Congrès de l'Association Belge de Science politique
9ème Congrès des Associations Francophones de Science politique
Section thématique

International Conference at Amerikahaus Munich, 14-16 June, 2018

Keynote: Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

The beach has recently become the site of important transformations: understood in the context of mass tourism for many years, nowadays we perceive the beach as bearing witness to the arrival of refugees, to pollution and climate change (e.g. tsunamis, rising sea levels), and to a growing number of sociocultural conflicts (e.g. over dress codes as in the case of burkini / nudist debates). As an area of unregulated movement as well as an institutional / institutionalized border, the beach receives growing media interest, but still remains at the periphery of maritime studies in academia. To do justice to the complex spatial concepts, dynamics, practices, and aesthetics of the beach, the international conference ›Narrating and Constructing the Beach‹ views it as a (border) phenomenon in its own right and sets out to analyze it systematically and historically.

The (European) »invention of the beach«, which Alain Corbin situates approximately in the 18th century, is connected to a myriad of discourses and practices which crystallize at, and are projected onto, the beach. In this respect, the conference will trace the manifold, changing, and at times competing representations and experiences of the beach in artwork, culture, and society as well as the many cultural imaginaries of the beach in their global and historical diversity. One focal point will concern the techniques employed to narrate, construct, and reshape ›the beach‹: it is our cultural, artistic, and perceptual practices that produce the beach as an ever changing aesthetic, sociocultural, political, historical, and also geographic space. As such, the beach is at once liminal and multiple, determined by the juxtaposition of land, ocean and sky as well as the blurring of the lines that separate them. It can turn from a representational space to a living space, and is at times perceived as a non-place or a heterotopia.

From differing and decidedly interdisciplinary research perspectives, the conference also inquires into how ways of experiencing the beach interact with sociocultural body practices and markers of difference (such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, religion, class, age, dis/ability, etc.): locals and travelers alike can perceive the beach as a space of encounter with the – erotic or dangerous – other, leading to (transitory) loss or vehement demarcation of the self. Contributing practices include Grand Tours, medical / health retreats, beach pastimes (swimming, promenading, building sand castles, collecting seashells as well as flotsam and jetsam), (mass-)touristic colonization, gender specific productions of subspaces (e.g. through towels, gazes), or the artificial incorporation of beaches into cities. Contributions could investigate these and other aspects from the point of view of changing cultural, medial, or aesthetic forms.

But even when not thinking of such sociocultural ties, the beach remains a fluid and a non-localizable space which constitutes itself mainly via relations: for example, it is dependent on, yet also autonomous from, the sea and water, the harbor, urban structures, and other forms of the shore and the coast. The beach can be read in analogy or opposition to the harbor when representing the clandestine or the disturbances and disruptions in global systems of institutionalized trade currents and travel itineraries. To reach the beach might, thus, result from going astray, evading the harbor, or missing it – from being stranded. By analyzing the establishment of sanatoriums, the regulation of trade, tourism or migration, presentations could detail how processes of order and institutionalization remain (in)visible, how they (temporarily) establish structures, or even how they are in vain.

While the conference is interested in how these liminal and multiple border spaces are narrated and constructed by sociocultural practices, it also investigates how beaches are generated by literature, music, theater, performance, film, photography, and art as (aesthetic) spaces and in which ways ›the beach‹ shapes and transforms both poetics and aesthetics.

We thus invite contributions from all fields interested in cultural studies and pertaining to all epochs and places around the globe to analyze beaches as cultural artifacts or in cultural artifacts. Researchers can take into account the connections and interactions between the discursive conditions of the beach, its aesthetic dimensions, and its historical and cultural practices.