Please send your submission (300 words maximum) before 15 October to the session organizer(s) with copy to efficacite08@gmail.com.
1. THEORIES OF EFFICACY
1. Mimesis/Imitatio The issue of figuration in 16th and 17th century emblematic literature
Ralph Dekoninck & Agnès Guiderdoni-Bruslé (U de Louvain), dekoninck@arke.ucl.ac.be, Guiderdoni@rom.ucl.ac.be
This panel intends to explore the relationship between the ancient mimesis and the Christian imitatio as it underpins the image theory used in 16th and 17th emblematic literature. Efficiency is key to understand the artistic and symbolic line that runs from the imitation of nature - motto of the Renaissance art theory - to the imitation of Christ - credo of the modern devotion. In this context, the artist and poet, imitating / miming the Creation, and what he/she has represented are supposed to have an effective action on reality (the soul of the reader/beholder). This action, being of information or rather conformation to a perfect and divine image, always presumes a figuration of some sort, from the conception to the reception of the image. We would like to examine how sacred emblematics sought to set in motion this figurative dynamics which goal is the inner transformation of the beholder in order to convert him/her and make him act accordingly.
2. Le mythe social de Georges Sorel : un modèle d'efficacité ?
Eric Michaud (EHESS), eric.michaud1@free.fr
Le "mythe social", théorisé par Georges Sorel dans ses Réflexions sur la violence (1908), devait s'opposer à l'utopie socialiste comme au conservatisme libéral par la capacité de ses "images motrices" à "agir sur le présent" plus efficacement que ne pourraient le faire de simples mots. Traduites l'année suivante en italien avec une introduction de Benedetto Croce, les Réflexions sur la violence furent décisives pour le futurisme de Marinetti, mais aussi pour Mussolini ; lorsqu'elle furent traduites en anglais dès 1914 par Thomas E. Hulme, Wyndham Lewis vit en Sorel "la clé de toute la pensée politique contemporaine"; en Allemagne, les Réflexions fascinèrent Walter Benjamin autant que Carl Schmitt . On se propose d'interroger la puissance heuristique de ce modèle pour comprendre les nouvelles formes des images publicitaires, de la propagande et des avant-gardes entre les deux guerres.
3. Image and Pedagogy
Annie Renonciat (U Paris 7, INRP/Musée national de l'éducation, Rouen), annie.renonciat@wanadoo.fr
On the premise that image was a more efficient means of communication than language, particularly towards "simple" people, European ecclesiastical and laic institutions began developing educational uses of image as early as the 16th Century, making the most of its mnemonic and didactic functions as well as its emotional impact. With the help of appropriate teaching aids - engravings, illustrations, wall boards, slides, educational movies - and specific rhetorical forms, they contributed to the spreading of morals and the transmission of scientific and practical knowledge.
We will examine these practices with a particular focus on the founding and promoting discourses of the educational power of image: philosophical and religious doctrine, psychological theories, discourse and controversy on the uses, means, forms and publics of image as a teaching aid.
4. Telling by showing, showing by telling : two modes of communicative efficacy
Jean-Marie Schaeffer (CNRS-EHESS), jean-marie.schaeffer@wanadoo.fr
Telling and showing are two very efficient tools of communicational persuasion. In fact we "spontaneously" believe what we are told or shown - be it the stories of the morning paper or the images of photography and television. This efficacy seems to be multiplied when the two representational modalities exchange their roles, when the story transforms itself into a way of showing and when the image sets out to tell a story. This session proposes to explore the multiple (historical and cultural) modalities of this semiotic interplay, to study the mental resources it exploits and to retrace its effects in terms of production of subjective adherence and induction of shared beliefs.
5. Louis Marin: the being and efficacy of the image
Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Hamburg U) & Nigel Saint (Leeds U), schglass@uni-hamburg.de, N.W.Saint@leeds.ac.uk
This session will focus on a set of key late texts by Louis Marin in which he investigated the being and efficacy of images. Cutting across the previously privileged concepts of transparency and opacity, Marin converted his semiotic concerns into the study of the virtuality and pathos of religious and political imagery. Pictorial and textual representations of relics were of particular interest to him in this work, as well as visual and textual political portraits, areas of study that he extended into his readings of the scriptural and literary images of God and absolute power in Des Pouvoirs de l'image. One question to pursue in his work on efficacy is the way he positions his ideas in relation to the debate between the aesthetic and the anthropological poles of the nature of images, an issue that the introduction to Des Pouvoirs de l'image opens up. A second issue would be some of the philosophical frameworks being arranged in his argument about the being of the image.
6. Images' effectiveness: Erotic images, erotic of the image
Bernard Vouilloux (U de Bordeaux), bernard.vouilloux@numericable.fr
This session proposes to cross semiotic, phenomenological and pragmatic approaches to address, within the framework of a historical anthropology of images, the conditions under which these act upon us, in particular those in which the erotic is concerned. To appreciate this efficacy, one should pay particular attention to the relations between different domains (interferences of the erotic with the religious, the politic, the economic, etc), how the aim is conceived (whether it is done with a positive or, as in the caricature, negative goal) and the effects (to be distinguished from the aims: an image can completely or partially fail in its aims). We may wonder then if the formal characteristics that are usually noted constitute a language suitable for the research of the efficacy, and if it is possible to distinguish transhistorical invariants or variables that can be adjusted according to areas and contexts. At the same time, one should take into account the incidence of the contexts of demonstration, including in their verbal dimension (various inscriptions).
7. Word & Images in religious missions (16th and 17th c.): efficacy / inefficacy
Massimo Leone (Turin U), massimo.leone@unito.it
During the religious expansion of Europe, especially from the first half of the 16th Century on, missionaries willing to spread their religious beliefs in Africa, America and Asia were confronted for the first time with the challenge of transmitting these beliefs to people with whom verbal communication was very difficult or even impossible. On the one hand, missionaries were encouraged to develop some new linguistic tools (dictionaries, grammars, translations); on the other hand, they were pushed to reconsider the communicative power of images.
The session aims at dealing with the following questions:
In which historical and cultural contexts were images used alongside with words as devices of missionary communication? What was the efficacy/inefficacy of words and images in the "anthropological" experience of missionaries? What did modern European culture learn from this experience, and how did it influence the use of images within Europe (for example in the so called "internal missions of Europe")? How can the relationship between words and images in missionary contexts be reconsidered from the point of view of semiotics, cultural studies, post-colonial studies?
2. RITUAL ACTIONS
8. Artwork and ritual action. Analysis of forms and analysis of practices
Giovanni Careri (EHESS) & Carlo Severi (CNRS-EHESS), giovanni.careri@ehess.fr, carlo.severi@ehess.fr
In the last ten years art historians have started studying the ritual contexts of artworks that, until then, had been considered only for their formal qualities. Anthropologists studied artworks not only as the expression of a specific aesthetic, but also as material indices of social, ritualized relationships. Artworks are objects different from others because of the subjectivity with which they are imbued. How can we conceive of the relationship between the visual efficacy of an artwork and his participation to a ritual action?
9. Powers of the Image, Powers of Writing : The Efficacy of the Sacred in the Far East
Claire-Akiko Brisset (U Paris 7, Groupe de recherches sur le Japon en Sciences humaines, et Centre d'étude de l'écriture et de l'image) & Marianne Simon-Oikawa (Tokyo U, GreJa, et CEEI), msoikawa@yahoo.fr, claire.brisset@univ-paris-diderot.fr
In the Far East, the objects meant to be seen and to be read that are transmitted by the different traditions cast a unique light on the relations between representation, practice, and belief within the religious sphere (buddhism, esoteric teachings, popular religions) but also more widely in the field of thought (taoism) or in practices that oppose the profane and the sacred (the pure and the impure, etc): the form, the commission, the execution, the uses, even the conservation of sacred objects testify to the specific powers that were attached to them, and the hope that people placed in them.
The aim of this session is to analyze the different ways by which the efficacy of sacred images and texts makes itself perceptible, in a culture where writing itself, at least some of its forms, is considered as sacred and empowered with specific, even magical virtues. Scholars interested in the discussion of the above categories may focus on objects and perspectives relevant to their own field of research.
10. Magical objects: visual and ritual processes in the Ancient, Byzantine and Medieval Worlds
Marcello Carastro (E.H.E.S.S., Centre Louis Gernet, Paris), Marcello.Carastro@ehess.fr
For a long time, the so-called "magical" papyri, curse tablets, carved stones, phylacteries, charms, amulets or even anthropomorphic lead figurines have been neglected by historians. Produced within particular ritual contexts, these objects often entail a graphic space combining writing and various kinds of figuration. This session calls for analyses of the visual and ritual processes through which the efficiency these objects aim at is put into practice.
3. POLITICAL EFICACY OF WORD & IMAGE
11. Chinese writing and its political efficacy
Yolaine Escande (CNRS) et Aurélie Névot, (CNRS), yolesc@ehess.fr , aurelienevot@hotmail.com
In the Chinese tradition, stylistic changes - notably in the art of writing - also express political changes. Art is conceived as a way of self-development, but even more so as a vehicle of representation of social status and of power. Besides, it is theorised by an elite, the literati, who master writing and the knowledge of canonical books that writing allows to pass on. Nowadays, Chinese writing is invested with an identity value, with a nationalist colouring, and it remains strictly controlled by a well-thinking censorship.
The session will examine how writing as an art is instrumented by power, but also how writing still functions as an image, or even as an image of an image: as the instrumentation is not only one-way, this image of power and its political efficacy are even more efficient as they strengthen their actors.
12. Versailles and its Others: Efficacy and the Arts in the Absolutist Agenda
Eric Haskell (Scripps C), Ehaskell@ScrippsCollege.edu
At Versailles during the second half of the 17th century, Louis XIV perfected the use of art, architecture and landscape design as propaganda for his absolutist agenda. What inspired Sun King aesthetics and how they reflected the language of absolutism throughout the courts of Europe well into the 18th century are the focus of this session. As a complement to our conference's excursion to Versailles, the session will examine notions of prestige and gloire as it explores how they were codified in the built environment that eventually extended beyond the borders of France.
13. Attitudes of Power
Catriona MacLeod, (Pennsylvania U), cmacleod@sas.upenn.edu
By the mid nineteenth century, the tableau vivant had become a popular parlor entertainment for the middle classes. At the same time, it is no accident that Michel de Certeau turns to the image of the tableau vivant when he writes of the manner in which the law inscribes itself on the body. Historically based in victory or religious processions, performances of living pictures became a conspicuous element of public as well as private culture, in the form of festival commemorations, salon entertainments, and momentous political events such as the Congress of Vienna. In the twentieth century, both Communists and Fascists again took up the tableau vivant. This panel will explore the intersections between word, image and performance in public stagings of tableaux vivants, raising questions about their ideological deployment (or subversion) of power through and on the body. Submissions are invited on any aspect of the public history of the genre.
14. Pediments and frontispieces or how images and texts can have "the same" efficacy
Marie-Dominique Popelard (Paris 3) & B. Fraenkel (EHESS), popelard@free.fr
Being both an architectural and a typographical motif, the frontispiece on a building or at the beginning of a book often indicates a way to act or provides instructions for understanding, just as it can point to the state of mind people will need if they intend to enter the building or actually read the book. As an architectural element, the pediment of a public building sometimes comprises inscriptions that function in a similar fashion. Whether "Let no one but a geometer enter" or "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," inscriptions take on the role of written instructions acting as a set of principles, decorative motifs as well as rules of etiquette.
15. Placing the Image, placing the Power
Jean-Claude Schmitt (EHESS), jcschmit@ehess.fr
Since political discourses and images are today transmitted through medias that are both immaterial and universal, they seem to be deprived of any defined localization: TV or News, as well as propaganda on line are carrying out the same messages, no matter where they are coming from and where they are going to. Places of power have become virtual, or better to say: our TV sets, personal computers and multi medias cell phones became the new places of power! Actually, it seems that the previous places of power (the king's palace, the cathedral, the government main building, etc.) do not exist anymore or at least have lost their effective and symbolical values. Historians have therefore to think about such a recent transformation and conversely to analyze all kinds of images - monumental sculptures, wall paintings, posters, photographs in the newspapers, etc. - as well as the uses of them (propaganda, rituals, etc.) that used to represent the places of political, economic or religious powers and that were used by them as efficient means of exercising and strengthening their domination over groups and individuals.
16. Word, Image and Censorship
Lauren Weingarden (Florida State U), Karen Carter (U of North Florida), Nathalie Roelens (Universités d'Anvers et de Nimègue), lweingar@mailer.fsu.edu
These sessions seek papers that examine texts or images that have been accused, prosecuted or prohibited for moral or political reasons from the seventeenth century to the present. Papers may examine topics within a specific historical, religious or political context or analyze theories and shifting definitions of morality or propaganda. Papers might consider the following questions: How did artists and writers confront, subvert or negotiate legal restrictions that defined the illicit or transgressive? What was the interaction between censored material distributed in the popular domain and uncensored works considered literature and fine art? Papers might also address how texts and images challenged the efficacy of legal definitions, while the law, in turn, made more vivid the efficacy of the subversive and forbidden.
4. CREATIVE PROCESSES
17. Storyboards
Daniel Ferrer (ENS), daniel.ferrer@ens.fr
Film storyboards may look like comic strips, but they are something essentially different. They are not works of art in their own right, but tools in the making of films. What matters is their efficiency for the production of a film. (See Morgan Lefeuvre, « Le storyboard : un outil au service de la création cinématographique » Genesis 28 [Special film issue], 2007.) Storyboards sometimes bear verbal or numerical indications and sometimes don't, but they are always meant to interact with textual and graphic documents. This panel will study the efficacy of such interactions, their productivity as well as the irrecoverable remainder.
18. Genesis in literary manuscripts and visual arts (19th-20th c.): does the notion of "graphic efficiency" apply to draft material?
Claire Bustarret (ITEM, CNRS) & Marianne Jakobi (INHA), claire.bustarret@orange.fr
May the notion of graphic efficiency become a criterium for description, evaluation or analysis of creative practices in the modern era? In both literary and visual art-works, the processes of creation are described by genetic criticism in terms of operations whose efficiency relies rather on a chronological perspective than on a spatial one. Hence a tendency, in the studies of text production, to consider drawings as symptoms of inefficiency, excess or entertainment, whereas they may depend on yet unexplored spatial efficiency modalities. For some visual artists, writing appears as a mean to showcase the artistic work, and may even become the very substance of the art piece: the graphic dimension thus exceeds by far its mere effects on the genetic process. The speakers will be invited to evaluate the relevance of the notion of graphic efficiency applied to literary drafts bearing drawings, doodles or including images (photographs, engravings, etc.) or to written material taking part in the genetic processes of visual art work (title of the piece, working notebooks, studio notes, etc.).
19. Reading act, Body and Musical performance
Jacques Cheyronnaud (CNRS-EHESS), jacques.cheyronnaud@univmed.fr
In what regards the "rhetorical component" of musical action (making music: playing, singing), we shall focus on the visual aspect of a successful public audition - audition as the last moment in the communication of a musical work - such as: (a) the expressive dimension of a musician's physical presence, as far as the normative conditions of satisfaction into a spatio-visual deployment (perhaps in relation with a certain musical genre); (b) the global aspect of a vocal or instrumental performance using various resources to succeed (score and other support or format of inscription, corporal positions, procedural memory, etc.).
20. White's Efficacy
Anne-Marie Christin (Centre d'étude de l'écriture et de l'image, U Paris 7), christin_am@club-internet.fr
Stéphane Mallarmé, as he tried to define the originality of Un Coup de dés, declared "the prints are the background." He added, "whites, indeed, are the most important element, they strike you first." Paul Valéry was perhaps the only one, with Odilon Redon, to truly understand the audacity of such a project. Unlike Roland Barthes, who evoked "Mallarmé's typographical agraphy" and concluded, "this art possesses suicide's very structure."
Such incomprehension can be understood in several ways. The most fundamental, I think, rests on a double unawareness by theory writers of the 1970s: that of the importance, whatever the civilization, of the 'white' in the visual arts, and that of its role in the genesis and the practice of writing and printing. This unawareness rests on a kind of graphocentrism typical of Western civilizations, one that consists in seeing writing solely as based on an alphabet.
The object of this (or these) session(s) will thus be to confront the uses and functions of white in the West and the Far East in two ways: on the one hand, by reflecting upon the image under all its possible forms (including gardens); on the other, by considering the different ways pages can be laid out, be them manuscript or printed pages, and their link to the type of writing that is used, alphabetical, ideographical, and/or syllabical.
5. EFFICACY OF GRAPHIC SET-UPS
21. Paper Museums: picturing archaeological objects and their effects (16th-19th c.)
François Lissarague (EHESS), flissa@ehess.fr
The rediscovery of the past is deeply rooted in the pictorial knowledge we have of it. Classical archaeology grew up with the graphic transcription, through drawings and engravings, of the objects it deals with. This panel aims to discuss the visual and intellectual effects produced by the accumulation of data, whether as drawing collections or printed books. Such graphic collections, whose structure and diffusion are significant, play in fact the role of virtual museums.
22. Texts & Images in the Histories of Art
Michel Melot (Ministère de la culture et de la communication), melotm@wanadoo.fr
In art history, the relationship between text and image offers a particular challenge. The distortion of reproductions, as well as their choice, their positioning within the page's layout, and the resulting connections between illustrations can all be a source of betrayals and misunderstandings. The question of images's efficacy to substantiate theories, inducing deceiving comparisons and artificial history has been debated between Gombrich and Malraux, but has also been central, among others, to considerations about Warburg's "atlas." It would be interesting to develop a historiography of art focused not on texts but on the "relative position" of words and images, from eighteenth-century galleries to modern art encyclopaedias and data bases, and show how the impact of images has modelled art history. Papers for this session can be monographic in scope and deal with great collections, or focus on art theory and on the conditions and consequences of illustrations.
23. The efficacious surplus
Véronique Plesch (Colby C), vbplesch@colby.edu
In his Libri Carolini, Theodulf of Orleans tells the story of a man whom an artist presented with two pictures of beautiful women. When the artist added captions to them, the one labeled "Virgin Mary" was venerated and the other, bearing the caption "Venus" was discarded. Commenting upon this anecdote, Rosamund McKitterick concludes: "it is the written word which gives the picture ... its identity, and its power." Could the same be said about images added to a text? This session will explore how the power of an image (or an object, one can think about labels affixed to relics) is created or enhanced by the addition of words, and conversely, how images inserted in a textual context can contribute to its efficacy.
24. Ideological Enclosures: Space and the Visual Depiction of Political Slogans in the 20th century
Maria Elena Versari (Scuola Normale Superiore), meversari@yahoo.it
This session invites papers devoted to the visual depictions of political slogans and their interrelations with artistic, architectural and linguistic experimentation in the 20th century.
Visual experiments in rendering citations and proclamations by political leaders expanded dramatically during the totalitarian regimes of 1930s Europe. However, these efforts were not limited to authoritarian states; even in countries with liberal and democratic governments, writers and artists during this time were recruited to devise new ways of transmitting politically charged messages to the masses.
Searching for new conduits for propaganda, artists transformed walls and public spaces, as well as knickknacks and small items of everyday use, into politicized objects. In doing so, they would bind political rhetoric to the development of modern advertising and graphic design.
Scholars from all disciplines are invited to submit proposals addressing the ways in which ideological slogans were presented and forcibly disseminated in modern society and the artistic, rhetorical and psychological strategies involved in this process.
6. MODELS AND USAGES OF EFFICACIOUS IMAGES
25. Bande dessinée et politique
Jacques Dürrenmatt (U de Toulouse) jdurrenmatt@neuf.fr
Avec le Mossieu Réac de Nadar, la bande dessinée a hérité de la caricature une efficacité polémique rare. Pour autant, peu nombreux sont les albums qui depuis se soient revendiqués comme fondamentalement politiques, sans doute du fait d'un certain nombre de contraintes éditoriales et de handicaps formels qu'il serait intéressant d'étudier. Les exemples récents, entre autres, de Squarzoni ou Neaud en France, de Sacco et Trudeau aux Etats-Unis, qui s'efforcent de mettre en images de vrais argumentaires politiques avec toutes les difficultés que cela représente dans le cadre d'une continuité iconique, montrent, quoi qu'il en soit, que la bande dessinée n'a pas à délaisser cette possibilité de démontrer son efficacité rhétorique.
On s'interrogera donc sur l'histoire et les évolutions possibles d'une forme en quête de reconnaissance.
26. After afterlives of character: from fiction to non-fiction
Brigitte Friant-Kessler (U Paul Valéry, Montpellier), b.friant@free.fr
As recently shown by David Brewer in The Afterlife of Character, it may be assumed that characters in fiction have an afterlife - often in illustrations or adaptations - which is something that satisfies what the critic calls the « desire for more ». This panel aims to explore the afterlives those characters are offered in non-fiction, that is to say when they are recontextualised in political cartoons, advertisements or state propaganda (whether on the page or the screen).
Efficacy could thus be addressed as part of reception. Papers could look at socio-political events as turning points for major changes in fiction, inquire into the impact of a political message, see if it is enhanced or diminished by the borrowing of a character in fiction. The session is also an opportunity to scrutinise the shifts in the initial word-image relation which are implied when characters glide from one medium to another, when they drift from one life to the next.
27. Caricature's imaginary museum
Ségolène Le Men & S. Rosenberg, segolene.lemen@free.fr
La caricature est l'image efficace par excellence : elle se moque de la cible, elle l'attaque en effigie, elle la transforme par le pouvoir du crayon... Elle est un instrument de communication, de publicité, de propagande, de dénonciation. Qu'en est-il lorsque la caricature se prend elle-même pour cible? lorsqu'elle s'adresse aux oeuvres d'art? lorsqu'elle investit le rapport entre les expressions et les autres arts, y compris la musique et la littérature? On s'intéressera, dans différentes cultures, à la façon dont la mise en livre ou en recueils, mais aussi la mise en exposition peuvent tenir le rôle dans l'efficacité (artistique, mais aussi politique et sociale) de la caricature.
C'est à cette poétique spécifique, liée au caractère d'image 'de seconde main' qui est propre, à la caricature, que s'adressera cette session, dont le titre est inspiré par la publication d'un Musée de la caricature, sous la direction de Jaime, en 1836, premier recueil de planches réunissant des pièces tirées du cabinet d'un collectionneur. A partir de cet ensemble exemplaire, se trouvait visuellement formulée toute une histoire de la caricature, depuis l'antiquité jusqu'aux années romantiques, avec un fort accent sur les caricatures révolutionnaires : un an après l'interdiction de la caricature politique, cette publication avait la portée d'un manifeste de liberté d'expression, et reconnaissait pour la première fois le statut d'un art à la caricature qui devenait objet de collection.
Ainsi, la session permettra de s'interroger sur tous les effets complexes d'une image, la caricature, qui brandit le rire comme arme, des muses au musée.
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