Table Of Contentlionel ruffel
brouhaha
worlds of the contemporary
translated by raymond n. mackenzie a univocal book
Brouhaha
A Univocal Book
Drew Burk, Consulting Editor
Univocal Publishing was founded by Jason Wagner and Drew Burk as an
independent publishing house specializing in artisanal editions and trans-
lations of texts spanning the areas of cultural theory, media archaeology,
continental philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, and more. In May 2017,
Univocal ceased operations as an independent publishing house and became
a series with its publishing partner, the University of Minnesota Press.
Univocal authors include:
Miguel Abensour David Link
Judith Balso Sylvère Lotringer
Jean Baudrillard Jean Malaurie
Philippe Beck Michael Marder
Simon Critchley Quentin Meillassoux
Fernand Deligny Friedrich Nietzsche
Jacques Derrida Peter Pál Pelbart
Vinciane Despret Jacques Rancière
Georges Didi- Huberman Lionel Ruffel
Jean Epstein Michel Serres
Vilém Flusser Gilbert Simondon
Barbara Glowczewski Étienne Souriau
Evelyne Grossman Isabelle Stengers
Félix Guattari Eugene Thacker
David Lapoujade Siegfried Zielinski
François Laruelle
Brouhaha
Worlds of the Contemporary
Lionel Ruffel
Translated by
Raymond N. MacKenzie
A Univocal Book
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis · London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges financial
support for the publication of this book from le Centre national du livre.
The University of Minnesota Press acknowledges the contribution of
Jason Wagner, Univocal’s publisher, in making this volume possible.
Originally published in French as Brouhaha in 2016; copyright 2016 by
Éditions Verdier.
Copyright 2018 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the
prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-1-5179-0488-3
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and
employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction 1
First Series: Exposition 27
Second Series: Media 49
Third Series: Publication 71
Fourth Series: Controversy 95
Fifth Series: Institutions 119
Sixth Series: Archaeology 147
Conclusion:
Locations of the Contemporary 173
Acknowledgments 187
Notes 189
Index 205
Introduction
What is the contemporary? For about ten years now, this question
has traveled and traversed a number of cultures and languages. First,
in 2004, it emerged in the form “¿Qué es lo contemporaneo?” as a
series of articles published in the Argentinian magazine Zum, from
the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas de Rosario. Then the
question popped up again in Venice, with Giorgio Agamben asking,
Che cos’è il contemporaneo? After that, twice in France: in Rouen,
several architects explored the question, followed by literary schol-
ars and philosophers in Pantin. The question of the contemporary
then found its way back to Italy, associated with a performing arts
event; then we find it again, in 2011, in Santiago, Chile, in a book
that brought together historians, philosophers, and cultural studies
specialists; and then in Brussels, within the elegant interdisciplinary
journal Pylône. Once Agamben’s book was translated, the question
appeared in English, and in 2012, Stanford University asked in three
languages, “O que é contemporaneo?” “Qué es lo contemporaneo?”
and “What is the contemporary?” Not until 2014, way up north at
St. Andrews in Scotland, was the question posed in English alone.
In the meantime—f rom 2009 to 2012—t his apparent preoccupation
of an era went through a number of variations, most notably in the
form of a questionnaire titled “The Contemporary,” which traveled
1
2 INTRODUCTION
throughout the entire art world and was taken up again and again,
revised, augmented, and attacked from New York to Hong Kong,
while passing through Berlin to New Delhi. And most recently, a
journal issue dedicated to “Contemporâneo Hoje” kept the debate
alive in São Paulo.1
A great diversity of worlds found themselves reflected, sepa-
rately and mutually, through this word that seems to denote, if not
the formation of a historical identity (something diversity no longer
really permits), then at least a common preoccupation with ideas,
however conflicting, about time, history, and space regarding how
to live within them and how to form both subjectivities and com-
munities, and ideas about representations, technologies, and imagi-
naries. Many other words have had the same fate, becoming key
signifiers for how a community will designate itself. The fact that
the word contemporary has joined the majestic list of historical–
aesthetic categories (like Modernity, Renaissance, Enlightenment)
ought to attract our attention, especially since the word is used—
even more than its shiny precursors—a s a self-d esignated category
in all the domains of our common life and in every field of (media,
domestic, professional, disciplinary, political, and artistic) dis-
course, and also—t his is a first—t o refer to the entirety of the planet.
This totalization raises some questions. It arises, no doubt, from
the primary sense of the word contemporary (“of or belonging to the
same time”), which is transitive or, rather, relational (“belonging to
the same time as . . .”). To share the same time assumes (in whatever
forms) to share a space, an imaginary, a history—t o form a common
body. Carrying no meanings beyond the relational one (unlike, say,
Renaissance), the word contemporary is doubly a historical marker,
a word by which groups refer to themselves and by which they see
themselves as groups. In this sense, it overspills its “epoch,” “our
epoch,” to refer to any process of constituting a collective based
on a shared space- time. It’s a doubly significant key word, then,
but also a meta- word belonging to historical consciousness that,
INTRODUCTION 3
for that reason, can hold contradictory meanings as well as open
up a significant moment for reflection.
For a decade or so now, we’ve been experimenting with this
reflection that, for the second time, has changed the grammatical
and semantic nature of the word. For several centuries, contem-
porary simply meant co- presence in a passing moment of time,
condemned to transience, to signifying nothing more than a present
moment reduced to the ephemeral; after the Second World War,
the term began to be used to designate the era, though discreetly
and usually as an adjective, set aside from noisier debates (such
as discussions on the postmodern). It has only been very recently
that the word has become a substantive and, consequently, has
increased in substance to become the contemporary, charged with
multiple meanings. And the more it became the contemporary, in
the singular, the more those meanings proliferated.
Having observed this substantivation, this deployment as a
noun, in various localized forms over several years, what strikes
me is this combination of unity and diversity: the unity of the
designation itself and the diversity of its meanings. And instead
of collapsing under the hailstorm of so many meanings, the word
is even more consistently applied, as if it received its full meaning
only through endless disputes. So one can understand the logic
behind why a meta- word such as the contemporary imposes itself
as a marker for our era. Sharing doesn’t mean agreement or consen-
sus, at least not always. Sharing means taking part, participating.
My hypothesis is that this meta- word of sharing and relation has
become so prevalent because those who do take part or share in
this same era have never been so numerous and so diverse (and,
more importantly, so conscious of being so), and they have probably
never been less in agreement. Each inhabits his or her own era,
his or her own conception of the era, his or her own temporality.
So much so that “being of the same time” seems more like a syn-
chronization of multiple temporalities, a kind of co- temporality.
