[wptpa id=”20″]<\/p>\n
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Once upon a time there was Banalysis<\/em>, a \u201ccritical and experimental movement created by Pierre Bazantay and Yves H\u00e9lias in the early 1980s\u201d.<\/p>\n Banalysis is an invented word that means \u201cdecomposing the banal\u201d.<\/p>\n An extremely discrete movement, it gave rise to the \u201cOrdinary Congress of Banalysis, an annual meeting held from 1982 to 1991 at Fades train station in Auvergne. The congress, at which nothing happened, was dedicated to observing the banal.\u201d Sound easy? Whenever it seems like nothing\u2019s happening, there are actually crucial questions about presence and encounter at play.<\/p>\n In \u00c9l\u00e9ments de Banalyse<\/em>1<\/a><\/sup>, published by \u00c9ditions Le jeu de la r\u00e8gle in 2015, authors H\u00e9lias and Bazantay explain 2<\/a><\/sup> : And why a train station in Fades? \u201cBecause it represented,\u201d explain H\u00e9lias and Bazantay, \u201ca complete and utter loss of irretrievable time in a world increasingly fascinated by profits.\u201d<\/p>\n Keeping with the Situationist International legacy, the Banalyst stance, flirt though it may with irony, nevertheless remains serious and politically engaged: \u201cAll signs point to finding ourselves in a disastrous situation that can be rather simply and narrowly analyzed. We were powerless because we were bad, we inept thinkers unable to assert ourselves, handicapped in the mind, occupying the place they deserve.<\/p>\n We have neither the panache nor the talent of the strong-willed, of those who deserve world recognition and power. We have to accept the cruel fact that we are not part of the elite. This radical frustration, aside from eliciting unpleasant pain, lifts a great burden. It suddenly makes us audacious and by promoting the Fades Congress, we intend to make it clear which side we are on.3<\/a><\/sup> \u201d<\/p>\n The key is in the banal person, a notion elaborated in-depth by H\u00e9lias and Bazantay, and which Austrian writer Robert Musil, famous for his Man Without Qualities<\/em>, would certainly have appreciated: \u201cThe banal person,\u201d write banalysts, \u201cis probably the most successful representative of our times.\u201d \u201cA slave to a routine out of his control that consists of repeated tasks lacking all depth, he relentlessly copies attitudes over which he no longer has any real command. The immense desert of modern acculturation is his residence. The places he inhabits all dissolve into the same nowhere<\/em>. Historical weightlessness is a destiny that is democratically reserved for him. From the banal man\u2019s burgeoning conscience, banalysis emerges4<\/a><\/sup>.\u201d<\/p>\n Today: With a piece entitled Une minute pour le temps<\/em> (A minute for time<\/em>), French artist Carol Cultot invites us to pause for a moment. On the communiqu\u00e9 that she has been distributing for years, often hand-written, she writes:<\/p>\n \u201cLet\u2019s make a kind of date. To calmly sit without doing anything. LET US SUSPEND ALL ACTIVITY FOR 1 MINUTE.\u201d<\/p>\n Take time. Opt for less. Recall what one important political ecology thinker, Ivan Illich, once said: \u201cFree people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle. 5<\/a><\/sup>\u201d<\/p>\n But let\u2019s get back to the \u201ccomplete and utter loss of irretrievable time,\u201d the Fades train station in Auvergne that banalysts call home in order to \u201cconsider, every year, real insignificance.\u201d<\/p>\n And to conclude this chronicle, let us examine more closely what this vapidity, this blandness is made of.<\/p>\n In the West, \u2018bland\u2019 is a problematic notion. Our immediate response would be to say that it embodies the absence of character, being soft or the \u201cartistic blur\u201d. French philosopher, Hellenist and Sinologist Fran\u00e7ois Jullien dismantles this a priori<\/em> point by point: Writing about Chinese culture in In Praise of Blandness<\/em>, published in French by Philippe Picquier in 1991, he writes that blandness \u201cis recognized as a positive quality–in a class, in fact, with the \u2018Center\u2019 and the \u2018Root\u2019.6<\/a><\/sup>\u201d And, explains Jullien, this applies particularly to the arts, as they are especially apt to render even more perceptible<\/em> this fundamental blandness\u2014\u201ctheir mission is to reveal blandness through sound, poetry, painting.\u201d<\/p>\n Only when we start to break through our ideological automatisms, claims the philosopher, surpassing our \u201ccultural conditioning\u201d to embrace a possible<\/em> positivity of blandness, \u201cwe will have entered China\u201d. The poem \u201cSeeing Off Canliao\u201d, written over a thousand years ago, says exactly the same thing: \u201cThe salty and sour mix with ordinary tastes, between them there is a perfect flavor that endures.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n THIS WAS: An interest in what is (seemingly) of little interest as subtraction.<\/strong><\/p>\n Translation by Maya Dalinsky<\/strong><\/p>\n Cover: \u00a9 Ana\u00efs Enjalbert<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [wptpa id=”20″] Once upon a time there was Banalysis, a \u201ccritical and experimental movement created by Pierre Bazantay and Yves H\u00e9lias in the early 1980s\u201d. Banalysis is an invented word that means \u201cdecomposing the banal\u201d. An extremely discrete movement, it gave rise to the \u201cOrdinary Congress of Banalysis, an annual meeting held from 1982<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":101027,"featured_media":15655,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1847],"tags":[1854],"corpus":[1179],"post_types":[1329],"associate_editors":[],"authors":[1627],"class_list":["post-14402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-counterculture","corpus-subtraction-chronicles","post_types-chronique-en","authors-jean-baptiste-farkas-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/101027"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14402"},{"taxonomy":"corpus","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/corpus?post=14402"},{"taxonomy":"post_types","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_types?post=14402"},{"taxonomy":"associate_editors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/associate_editors?post=14402"},{"taxonomy":"authors","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.switchonpaper.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/authors?post=14402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u201cFrom the outside, it is tempting to reduce this game to a practical joke or some belated surrealist revival. But in practice, we were actually surprised by what this confrontation with the absurd can do to our thinking.
\nWhat we call Banalysis<\/em> is a mental activity, still rather confusing, provoked by a rather irrational but rigorous experimentation with reality that is both pointless and thought-provoking. And yet we do not presume that the term encompasses any knowledge content: a banalyst is anyone who, having heard of the Fades Congress, felt a strong urge to join.\u201d<\/p>\n