Paris is surely a bit above the best when it comes to fostering and presenting creative, innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance, including circus. But, what with Paris lately as hot and dry as Sana’a, Yemen, I have been a little slow to act on getting True Dance News out to the English-speaking world.
I’ve been wanting to put up a series of short, sweet articles on watch-for performers and performances such as Catherine Diverrès’ remarkable Jour et nuit, her latest piece, which I discovered during the Faits d’Hiver Winter 2019 festival. A reprise of a later work, equally smashing stuff, Blow the bloody doors off… figured at the Théâtre Nationale (Palais) de Chaillot in Spring…
In between, there was work by Liz Santoro, Sylvère Lamotte, Nina Santes, Nathalie Béasse, Vincent Thomasset, Mats Ek and many others at Atelier de Paris’ June Events and Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales… Diverrès, among others, is a veteran of the scene but there are scads of accessible, practicing newer talents, too, such as Marie Desoubeaux, to mention only one, who debuted her fine dance-performance Rester (Stay) in April at Le Regard du Cygne, a devotedly contemporary dance performance theater in Belleville.
So, there’s plenty of movement art to write about.
Stillness
But even innovative, art-quality, live dance and performance suffer from This weather!
Like most ordinary Parisians, like most ordinary Sana’a-ites, I expect, I have no air conditioning. The cost-benefit ratio has never added up for me or them. With actual waves of killing-heat, though, the ratio might change, ‘though maybe we can all just go stand under those giant white windmills that seem to run along the national tollways. That couldn’t be expensive, could it?
While we’re all calculating, however, the trick with a heat wave, in French called a canicule, just as in Sana’a, is to keep still in a shuttered-up apartment. The word for keeping still like this is se terrer – “go to ground” – like rabbits or scorpions or slugs.
Close the shutters a few minutes before the sun pokes its angry mug over the horizon. Don’t open them again till that mug has slunk well under it. Take only body-temperature liquids (‘though lovemaking is obviously out of the question at these temperatures). Keep quiet. Move slow, mon lapin, lentement, shhh!
Stillness, anger
Unlike typing or lovemaking, moderate reading or listening to the radio, in principle, doesn’t generate (much) heat, so I’ve been listening in the silence.
The big news has been public philosopher Michel Onfray’s snarling ad girlem against Greta Thunberg, a latter-day incarnation of the unsinkable Pipi Longstocking, a school kid from Sweden who has instigated the school-strike-for-climate-initiative. She goes around, Pipi Longstocking-style, free as a bird, stirring up fuss and bother about human extinction and suchlike.
Although Michel Onfray has otherwise often had interesting things to say, the other day he called Thunberg a “Swedish cyborg” whose knowledge base is only what has bled into her head from the bedside chats her well-meaningly deluded parents. Thunberg’s decided taste for the intellectually empty, ignorance, over rational enlightenment, he suggests, is amply demonstrated by a proven contempt for school.
However, in the end, it’s not Thunberg’s Swedishness, her borrowed “ideas”, her preference for the comforting ignorance of her parents received ideas, or her human-machine physical mix, as you might think, but her “lack of emotion” that really gets to Onfray. Gloomily, he concludes that Thunberg’s supposed robot-like un-seductiveness will be the trademark that all future humans, also ignorant, presumably, and obscurantist, too.
Onfray’s ad girlem – I use this play on ad hominem because I don’t think Onfray would have blamed a boy for a lack of “seductiveness” – on this earnest Cassandra from the North at first seems as inexplicable as it is shocking.
However, through the subtle indirection of a personal attack on the victim of the same attack, Onfray may be cleverly objecting to the “Children’s Crusade” framing of Greta Thunberg as she goes forward with her campaign. Jesus himself said something about suffering little children to come unto… didn’t he? And children battling for Right – the emperor has no clothes! – does fit neatly into a certain moralistic model of liberal social expression, expression usually as utterly ineffective as it is cathartic for the pack of slippery real-politikers who will vote, regretfully, even sadly, for the petroleum-plastic-forks subsidy later the same day…
Indeed, as Onfray’s attack on Thunberg unfolded, she was coming unto… speaking at the Assemblée nationale (following on an earlier address to the European Parliament) so that, even as Onfray was snarling and frothing, députés were writhing under the delicious stings of the good, young Pipi’s call to action.
So, while the ad girlem of it is shocking, the attack is not entirely inexplicable.
But I don’t think it’s this.
I think the real reason – and the reason it’s an ad girlem rather than a polemic against a public position – is that it really is about the girl Greta Thunberg and, just as Onfray suggests, the future that she represents, Thunberg’s hers.
With a little sifted Epicureanism from Julien Offray de la Mettrie, abstracted libertinism from Sade and his own particular attention to emotion thrown in, Michel Onfray is a true child of the liberal Enlightenment. He, like most intellectual French people, styles himself a successor of Descartes, who was both philosopher and mathematician.
“Cartesians” are to France what cracker-barrel philosophers (think of Will Rogers or Oprah Winfrey) are to the USA. They bear the intellectual ideal of their respective nations: the one seeks combative, rationally crystalline intellectual rigor, the other a sort of distracting common sense militant. Onfray has done his duty to France admirably for, what, has it been 15 years? since I first heard him? or 10?
Onfray is as complex and nuanced as the next public philosopher, but as with a lot of the rest of the thinking West, there are two basic Enlightenment principles that he defends in whatever he may be momentarily arguing.
First, there’s Cogito, ergo sum - je pense, donc je suis - I think, therefore I am: a human is a sovereign individual. Then, it follows that against Cogito sum there is no higher power. We think, therefore we are the sole and unique measure of the world around (and to greater or lesser degrees, the creators/constructors of it, too). Reason and Knowledge are the tools humans have to help them measure and judge the best path “forward”.
What makes Onfray, or any other French person of any philosophy or none at all, “Cartesian” is a method, or at least a rhetoric, or inquiry that appears, to themself or an audience, as rigorously limpid as a quadratic equation built upon knowledge as materially solid as that stone Samuel Johnson kicked to refute Bishop Berkeley.
Stillness, agony
Onfray could say out loud, of course, that he thinks Thunberg and her backers are trampling liberal philosophy, but nobody would believe him.
Who wants to believe that elite young people skipping school in a good-tempered “Extinction Rebellion” are the equivalent of jeunesse dorée, fascist goons or ISIS suicide soldiers?
Besides, anything other than an attack ad girlem would make Greta Thunberg seem serious; personal attack avoids discussion of the weakness of liberal philosophy in the face of the planetary ecological evolution in course.
The weakness is this: liberal philosophy is fundamentally anthropocentric and Thunberg - the future she represents - is not. Thunberg does not assume that humans are wrecking the Earth, she assumes that humans are driving themselves to extinction on Earth. It follows that there is, effectively, a higher power: a dynamically complex ecology that is and may remain unknowable in any sense we can traditionally know it (and this higher power may be its own measure).
Thunberg and hers believe, in short, that a philosophy has to be about the human place in the environment and its role in the ecology. As tools for knowing a world that is fixing to leave humans out in the cold (or heat), traditional notions of reason and knowledge don’t have the adequate tolerances.
For Onfray, traditional liberal philosophy is rightly anthropocentric, a bastion for human liberty that is equipped with sharp and sturdy tools. And, as far as Onfray’s concerned, that’s the problem with Thunberg and hers' assumptions: they don't believe humans are at the center of the universe, they think the world has been mis-measured because traditional notions of reason and knowledge aren't good at working on the incertitude of dynamic complexity.
Stillness, death
When Thunberg opens her cat box, then, Descartes is always dead as a kipper – her paradigm is changed. And that’s all she and her generation have really done, isn’t it, opened the cat box? They haven’t argued any of it through. That outrages Onfray the Cartesian, for whom, as we have seen, reason, knowledge, and for Onfray personally, emotion, supposed so lacking in Greta Thunberg, are so important. Thunberg and hers can’t just let all that stuff drop. Can they?
How does a Cartesian engage with somebody whose cat box opens on a dead Descartes, that is, with somebody who sees nothing to argue about?
Frustratingly, Thunberg is not even hostile to traditional philosophy – on the contrary, she’s the very daughter of reason and liberal enlightenment, the cumulative result of the interaction of enlightenment with a dynamic world. For her, what follows Cogito ergo sum is: What is this? Where do I fit in? How do I do fit in?
So, in the end, Onfray’s ad girlem is meant, at best, to get her attention, or, at worst, to put off the work of himself coming to grips with the questions Thunberg and hers need to answer.
Stillness, fear
To understand, is not understanding, however. Onfray surely knows in his heart that his ad girlem is all insulting nonsense. Greta Thunberg isn’t responsible for her appeal to Onfray’s senses, her parents’ beliefs, the society she was born into, the models that society proposes her to work within, the anthropocentricity of traditional liberal philosophy, the inadequacies of traditional notions of reason and knowledge, the existence of an ecology that is the repository of itself, or the fact that when she opened her cat box, Descartes was dead or that Michel Onfray was among the mourners and sorely grieved.
All the same, Onfray does stoop, calling Thunberg a “Swedish cyborg”, a truly low form of thug-style rhetoric. We associate such stuff with frightened political paranoids more often than with liberal philosophers. But, given that Onfray hasn’t, as far as I know, crossed the road, he must be scared.
Fear’s an emotion to respect. What’s he scared of? Thunberg as a phenomenon suggests that the world has already changed and we aren’t up to the dynamic incertitude that now characterizes the world. This certainly scares me and I’m not making any money off philosophizing about the current structure, so it must simply petrify Onfray.
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