Cicilie among the Parisians

Anthropology is just one way among many fields that try to make sense of and represent social life. A post ago I stated that it probably isn’t even the most superior at it. Funnily, in the days after I wrote that post, I read in the papers several similar comments made by other social scientists.

“The best novelists and playwrights are – almost by definition – those who understand human nature better than others” (the social and political theorist Jon Elster quoted by the ditto theorist Rune Slagstad in Morgenbladet 19-25, 2010. Jon Elster is interested in the role emotions play in relations to knowledge and behaviour. And no social scientist gets as deep into these intricacies as authors.

The gender researcher and novelist Wencke Müleisen has provided some fine social science inspired analyses of Knausgård’s writing earlier, and some days ago in a feminist column in Klassekampen she, too, ended her comment by singing the praise of novels:

A friend told me that while reading volume three [about childhood], she realised for the first time that her mother had behaved similarly [passive] in relation to her father’s aggressive behaviour. … It is hard to understand how this passive feminine violence seeps so invisibly into a kind of cultural gender pattern that one simply just doesn’t see it. In that respect, it is telling that in Knaugsård’s novel, [the mother’s deceit] is staged [“iscenesatt”] as absence and silence. Much seem to indicate that more readers get activated unpleasant memories of fathers’ aggression and mothers’ betrayals. The visibility of masculine violence makes us blind of the feminine passive acceptance. Language at work [“språkarbeid”] is needed. Novels can do that. (KK 22.02.2010, my translation)

Why is that? How do novelists do that? Does it have anything to say that the versimilitude (truthlikeness) of their depiction of the world within and around us resonate with the reader’s experience, rather than hinge on the logics of scientific methodology? Or is it a function of the literary language compared to concise concepts?

Souleymane Diamanka at Café Culturel in Saint Denis in the suburbs outside Paris

Haven’t I claim that French slam poetry can be seen as a commentary on and/or a representation of French society? Yes, certainly I have. From my very first slam session, I’ve felt that there was a strong connection between scene and society. And then, when I was exploring further the relations between anthropology and literature I wrote about in the previous post (and which I’ll come back to soon), I made a giant step forward in getting to grips with the relationship. Suddenly, I saw a clear connection between the slam scene in the years 2006-2007 and the riots in the autumn 2005 and the deepest oppositions in French society. All thanks to the ritual and performance theorist who for a long time has been looming in the background, or rather in the middle of the heaps of books I’m building my project upon. This is not to reduce the artistic element of the slam phenomenon. On the contrary, good ol’ Victor Turner conjoins the two – theatre and social drama – on a deeper level and shows how the two actually feed off each other.

The reason why I became an anthropologist is that anthropology can include anything. Early in my studies, when I still aimed in an other direction, a professor told me that until her MPhil she had had a very broad field of interests, including reading French novels in their original language. But in order to reach her position, she had had to forsake much of that. Talking to her, made me realise that I wasn’t ready to give up on all my different interests in pursuing a career. So, if my future job wouldn’t spare me time to immerse myself in social and political issues, travel, film, literature and other things that interested me, I would have to take all that with me into my future job. And if I wasn’t a hundred percent sure when I started with anthropology, I certainly was after reading just a few pages of the introductory text Small places, Large issues. Anyway, the title says it all, doesn’t it?

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Another presentation which I blatantly will fail to give (see this post), were to take place at a conference in Oxford in about one week’s time, Encounters and Intersections: Religion, Diaspora and Ethnicities.

The problematics of this paper give me the opportunity to look at two other aspect of the space created during a slam session: the particular quality of the encounters taking place. While only a very few of the participants talked explicitly about the political and subversive character of the slam phenomenon (see previous post), many more will describe it as a quite unique place for encounters. This is thus more of a native’s point of view than what is treated in the previous post. The ways many people describe the soirées echoes in my opinion important values of the French Republic. This is the next aspect I’ll introduce in the analysis of the space created during a session. In the previous post, I looked in the direction of connections between the local socio-political environment of the city and the soirées, in this it’s the connections between the soirées and the Republic herself I postulate. These problematics will go into chapter 2 and Chapter 5 (see the outline at the end of this post). Here’s my abstract for the conference:

Parisian performance poetry: a republican space for encounters?
Cicilie Fagerlid

In this paper, I will explore the space for encounters created during Parisian slam poetry sessions. Many participants characterise this performance poetry scene as a medium for rencontres (encounters) of people of different backgrounds. The sessions are among the most mixed events one can find in France, in terms of social and ethnic background as well as age and gender. It can thus be seen as an arch expression of the French republican ideal of mixité sociale and the value of vivre ensemble (“living together” – a term with similarities to the British notion of “community cohesion”).
The performances treat a vide variety of issues, expressed with a variety of different artistic styles, from rap to French traditional poetry via experimental theatre. However, seen from a British multiculturally inspired paradigm, the issues of collective religious or ethnic identities are conspicuously absent.
I will place the poetry sessions within the socio-political geography of East Paris (a popular, bohemian and increasingly gentrified area shaped by immigration) and the French republican paradigm of social integration. The paper is based on 16 months of fieldwork in East Paris. In addition, I will draw on my previous research project on British Asians in London.

Contact details:
Cicilie Fagerlid
Department of Social Anthropology/Cultural Complexity in the New Norway
Postboks 1091 Blindern
N-0317 Oslo
Norway

Cicilie Fagerlid is working on her PhD thesis with the preliminary title Society in the Making: Post Colonial Paris and the Slam Poetry Scene. She is employed at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Complexity in the New Norway, strategic research programme, both at the University of Oslo.

The most recent paper I failed to give (see previous post) was looking at the slam poetry phenomenon from the perspective of where it is situated, – socio-politically as well as geographically. I wanted to explore the connection between the slam scene’s geographical position in the North and East (and to some extent the 13th Arrondissement in the South) and the socio-political characteristics of these parts of the city. Here’s the abstract for the presentation:

Parisian slam poetry – a space of resistance?
Cicilie Fagerlid, PhD fellow at Cultural Complexity in the New Norway (strategic research programme at the University of Oslo)

In this paper, I will explore the relationship between the Parisian slam (performance) poetry scene and the socio-political landscape of North and East Paris, where the scene is situated. This part of the city is historically popular and left-wing with an important influence of bohemians and artists, and an equally long history of regional and international immigration.

I will argue that what is created during an evening of poetry performances, is to some extent a space of biopolitical resistance. Similar forms of resistance to standardisations of everyday life and/or governmental politics overflow the urban space of the northern and eastern Parisian neighbourhoods – in terms of streetart, political and artistic posters and stickers, low-cost and “alternative” film and music festivals, readings and talks in bookshops and cultural centers, a plethora of demonstrations filling the streets with colours and noise and a general, unruly everyday streetlife. I will situate the slam poetry within this landscape and discuss to what extent Antonio Negri’s notion of a (bio)space “in-between” power relations can be a helpful analytical perspective:

“Where is exodus at home? Where is the space for those who want to go into exodus from power and its domination?” For me, exodus sometimes requires force. And this is, paradoxically, an exodus that does not seek an “outside” of power, but which affirms the refusal of power, freedom in the face of power, in the hollow of its meshes (Negri, Petcou, Petrescu and Querrien 2008).

Negri,Toni, Constantin Petcou, Doina Petrescu and Anne Querrien 2008: “What makes a biopolitical space? A discussion with Toni Negri” in Eurozine at http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-01-21-negri-en.html (accessed 02.05.2008)

I’ve decided to continue working on the problematics of this paper during the summer, making it into the two first chapters of my thesis (see the end of this post for a preliminary outline). In the first chapter, I will describe and analyse some of the areas where the slam soirées take place (how I’m looking forward to wander the streets of Belleville and Ménilmontant in my imagination again!). In Chapter 2, I will ask how we can understand the particular space created during a slam – thus grasping the micro-dynamics of a soirée – and secondly, making a connection to chapter 1, I will look at what might be the relations between the slam phenomenon and the particular environment of the city where it is situated.

For some reason, the summer Oslo mood certainly inspires a delve back into my memory of Parisians streets and cafés…

Last week the amount of empirical data and loose ends unsettled me in my intentions to get on writing. I asked everybody I met if they could recommend me a technique to sort the data and how and where to start writing. The second best advice I got was to start listening through the interviews and jot down central themes and get inspired from that. It’s a good idea and I think the conversations and individuals were my point of departure for my Master thesis. But this time I doubt that the interviews are anywhere near my peak performance as a fieldworker. First, they were conducted in French. Second, and most importantly; my slammer acquaintances aka interviewees knew I’d not be able to anonymize them donc what they told me are mostly bland and well-groomed versions closer to what anyone can find on the internet than what one can see and hear on and around a slam session. On the other hand, the interviews certainly give me background information providing context for the individuals and their relationship to the slam… or whatever… I don’t know yet. I just know I felt ok about them but nothing more. They weren’t eye-opening enlightenments like most of the interviews I did in London.

“Start right in the middle, with the core of the issue,” a friend casually remarked during a conversation mostly about other things when I met her last week. Yes, of course, that’s obvious, I suddenly realised. I had started in the other end, in the margins, trying to track my own route of discovery from the beginning of my stay in Paris. I thought it would be an interesting journey to re-travel: Where and when and how did I come across certain topics and reach particular understandings? I realise now that first I have to determine for sure which are the important topics and understandings that need to be pinpointed – thus I have to start from the core…

And the core is… the soirées of course! I’ll go through them one by one, focusing on the different venues and events, starting with the four soirées I attended and filmed at L’Atelier du Plateau (already mentioned in this post). I don’t know yet what exactly will come out of this, but I’ll for sure get an overview of the variety of persons attending and the themes they approach. What a relief to find a way out of the empirical maze!

After I mapped out an outline two and a half months ago, my project has appeared amazingly ordered and under control. Perhaps it’s no wonder then, that I’ve postponed delving back into my fieldnotes for as long as I could, keeping myself busy with ordered and controllable intellectual activities like reading books for literature seminars and writing abstracts for upcoming workshops and conferences as well as even an article.

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I’ve got one year and six months pay left of my research grant and with the help of organised writing I hope it won’t be a problem to finish in time. But I realise that the writing must be organised this time, so no more writing 140 pages too much like I did with my previous thesis. For the sake of organising myself, I read Authoring a PhD last Christmas (on a black volcanic beach on La Gomera in the Atlantic ocean, so the book is full of dark grains of sand). (Thanks to Mary Stewart for recommending the book on her research blog here).

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