Two Symposia at the Sorbonne
Michel Maffesoli still wears a classic bowtie. The Sorbonne’s old Salle Durkheim has acquired some lighting and a sound system but the banks of benches still rise in a steep pitch of undusted oak. Its still the intimate turf of the now global ‘tribus’ Maffesoli. His students and colleagues met to celebrate Maffesoli’s 60th birthday with nine roundtables on his work and a symposium marking ten years of the Centre d’Etudes sur l’Actuel et le Quotidien’s Group de Recherche sur la Technologie (GRETECH). Salle Durkheim is always a satisfying ‘bath’ in stimulating ideas and the most hospitable classroom in Paris.
Now urban planners, journalists, artists, social visionaries, academics and Maffesoli’s students continue to develop the potential of Maffesoli’s work for understanding the desires underlying social interaction and its forms. Significant were the shift away from the ‘neo-tribe’ (too reified) toward ‘tribality’ and a confirmation of interest in ambivalence, the symbolic and syncretic.
Agnes Yun’s outstanding presentation specified the steps defining her lab at SK Telecom’s project on ‘what sort of public space is constituted via mobile telephones?’ The answer - a ‘hip hop space’ of syncretic information characterized not by the search for specific information (’what is the…’) but the search for sociality (’where is he/she/they?’). What set this apart is the clarity of the definition, giving a logical structure to what many intuit, and the reinsertion of the project back into the imaginary via the metaphor of hip hop.
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