The game space

The movement at work is presented as an assembly of texts interspersed with drawings – most of them by the author. This strange collage gives the feeling that Anne Boissière, through this work, delivers her thoughts in the form of pieces of broken mirrors: the elements, appearing at first sight scattered, gradually find their links, reflecting each other through encounters and oblique paths. The guiding thread? The notion of “acoustic space”, which Anne Boissière forged from her reading of Erwin Straus and presented in previous works, creates a resonance box with rhythm in Maldiney, play in Winnicott, Designor the colors of Aloïse Corbaz. Thus, The movement at work firstly bears witness to a thought in motion, forming and transforming itself according to conceptual encounters.

Acoustic space in motion

To take the measure of this movement at play in the work of A. Boissière, we must start from the beginning: the notion of “acoustic space”, which the author already presented in 2014 in Music movementcomes from a real break with the use of the notion of space in the field of sound. The “spatial” dimension of music, as found in current musicological studies, designates on the one hand the mode of diffusion of sound in a concert hall; and on the other hand the writing process in Western music, which has undergone a real upheaval during the history of classical music. While notation was long considered as an “aide-mémoire” whose role was only to transcribe and transmit a musical work already conceived beforehand; the writing process, following the destiny of modern classical music, today participates in the creation and conceptualization of the musical work. But this transformation of the role of writing, which A. Boissière calls the “spatial becoming” of Western classical music, implies at the same time a phenomenon of rationalization of music:

The spatial turn of music, at least of the learned music in question here, is thus to be put down to an internal evolution in composition, which goes hand in hand with an increased or even now exclusive privilege of sight, and an ever greater hegemony of calculation in the mastery of writing. (p. 38).

Such a conception of the spatial becoming of music, as exciting as it may be, nevertheless seems to have the consequence of letting the fundamentally living and spontaneous dimension of music escape. It is therefore to respond to this dissatisfaction that A. Boissière, based on his reading of the psychologist and phenomenologist E. Straus, invites us to rethink acoustic space as movement. What movement is in question here? A. Boissière warns: the notion of movement “is open to misunderstanding because of the privilege of optics that implicitly organizes many of our conceptions; movement would thus be what we perceive of a body that moves” (p. 42). Acoustic space seeks to account for a movement that is not only physical or biological, but which rather corresponds to the “presential movement” of E. Straus in The forms of space. The present movement describes a way of “being seized” in and by the experience of listening, a seizure which engages not only the listener’s body, but even more so his experience, his way of being in the world:

“The acoustic space is that opened by music, insofar as it captures and configures the whole relationship to the world from the angle of a new vitality.” (p. 46-47).

This “new vitality”, as we will have understood, designates a way of being affected in and by listening. But, in order not to confine this question of affectivity to the theoretical horizon of rationality, A. Boissière, following E. Straus, prefers to speak of “pathic” – a term that allows him to focus his research on the resonance of listening, and not its reason :

It is also to this extent that (E. Straus) renounces the terms of sensitivity and emotion belonging to a theoretical horizon where the shadow of the reason. (…) With the acoustic space, the reflection is oriented towards a resonateaccording to an understanding of resonance and acoustics that is not linked to the science or physics of sounds. (p. 33.)

When acoustic space discovers rhythm

The acoustic space, a “living space, whose life has nothing biological about it” (p. 49), will come to meet the notion of rhythm, which appears as one of the keystones of the Movement at work. At the crossroads of Henri Maldiney and Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, the notion of rhythm retained by A. Boissière allows us to rediscover a sensitive relationship with music, with “a music that is experienced rather than intellectually dominated” (p. 39). We can therefore see that the notion of rhythm will hardly be restricted to the musical domain, quite the contrary: according to A. Boissière, it appears as an opportunity to make acoustic space coincide with spontaneous movement, the playing space, the completed – but not finalized – form of the Design. It is in this sense that rhythm could constitute a “common source” between the arts (p. 54), by allowing us to describe the primitive experience at the foundation of the artistic experience. If A. Boissière never gives a real definition of what she means by “rhythm”, she does however give several examples, such as the rhythm of the hand, when the latter lets itself go with the curves of spontaneous drawing:

With the hand, a space of its own unfolds; a time inseparably so too. If the hand goes too fast, the line closes and stiffens; if on the contrary it goes too slowly, the dynamic is lost. Intensity is at the price of a tempo – a pace – which combines space and time. This tempo depends on the conditions of the here and now; it cannot be decreed. Such is rhythm. (p. 123).

While we can only welcome the meaning of this approach, which consists of going back beyond an often sterile categorization of the arts, we are nevertheless a little skeptical about the relevance of the notion of rhythm in this intention. What remains specific to this notion of rhythm when it is intended to embrace such a broad vocation? This question undoubtedly calls for a second, more general one: do not terms from the musical field tend to lose part of their specificity when they are called upon to describe the aesthetic experience in general? It seems, moreover, that this question already arises concerning certain writings of Maldiney, when he declares that the notion of rhythm is at the “foundation of all the arts” – while at the same time making rhythm lose part of its musical dimension. As Pierre Sauvanet shows, in the rare pages of Maldiney devoted to music, there is always a question of melody and harmony, but never of rhythm – which will lead him to conclude that “Maldiney’s artistic references are always ways of making rhythm live, of making it visible – but precisely, unless I am mistaken, never of making it audible”. But then, what should we think of the status of rhythm in A. Boissière’s philosophy? Is it condemned, in the same way, to lose its musical content when it is drawn into the movement at work? Let us first recall that A. Boissière is the author of a certain number of major works on music (Music movementManucius, Paris, 2014; Theodor W. Adorno’s Musical Thought, The Epic and Time, Beauchesne publisher, Paris, 2011; Adorno, the truth of modern musicPresses Universitaires du Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 1999): this is a sign of a musicality always present in his writings. And in a sense, we can consider that A. Boissière never stays far from the musical, which resurfaces as well in the pace of the hand of spontaneous movement (p.121 sq.), that in the tone of the world which is expressed in the colours of Van Gogh (p. 63 sq.), or finally in the resonance of the color of Aloïse Corbaz (p. 209 sq.).

Meeting the work in movement with the player

Let us finish with what appears to us to be the richest and most decisive exploratory discovery of the work: the game, or rather the playing (playing). Talk about playing, or even about playinginstead of the game does not constitute a simple coquetry on the part of A. Boissière, on the contrary something crucial is at stake there. What interests his argument is not to list and categorize the different existing games, but to understand the “intransitive meaning of “to play”, a verb that can be used alone without necessarily adding the notion of a game to specify the activity in question” (p. 77). It is therefore the activity of play as such that is concerned, and more precisely still the activity of the playingwhich only Anglo-Saxon languages ​​can distinguish from game (namely, the game strictly framed by rules, such as card games, chess, etc.). Thus A. Boissière, in the line of Donald W. Winnicott, uses the distinction between the play and the game to enhance the creative aspect of playingwhich designates a play activity without rules, such as is found for example among animals (a cat playing with a ball of wool), in early childhood (young children who divert an everyday object from its function to animate it with the whole life of a character), but also in the game of Elastophile, this fictional character who plays spontaneously and “quasi-mechanically” with an elastic band (p. 79). This creativity of the playinghighlighted by Winnicott, clearly tends towards art. However, for A. Boissière, it is the acoustic space, in that it refers to the pathic, to spontaneous movement and to feeling, which allows us to relate art and playing :

In the game, the movements belong to this layer of the pathetic: to engage in the game is above all to be taken or seized by sensitive qualities which immediately attract or repel, against a background of an overall experience marked by an intensity of life. » (p. 86.)

Which then allows him to establish his initial hypothesis:

Acoustic space, as I would hypothesize, belongs to the primary experience of the game, as it is alive. This is true for the lived experience. (p. 23.)

If this final encounter of acoustic space with the playing seems to us to be perfectly decisive, above all because it carries within it the promise of a new exploratory field of aesthetics, traced by the encounter of art and the activity of play. Art as a game by François Zourabichvili, published the same year as Movement at work. Between art and playappears in this sense as the additional sign of this need for aesthetics to turn towards play, a notion that has perhaps not yet delivered all its promises. Of course, the proposition “art as play” is probably not a new idea (we find various expressions of it in the philosophies of Plato, Kant, Gadamer and Fink). But as F. Zourabichvili and A. Boissière show, the question of play has long allowed itself to be tied to the theoretical horizon of knowledge and understanding – a horizon that is undoubtedly inadequate for thinking about the vitality and essentiality of art. So, it is perhaps time today to think about play in the light of the resonance (the reasoning) of art:

The experience of playing, in the pathic, is therefore not entirely commensurable with that which philosophy theorizes with the concept. (…) The experience “in playing”, thus, brings a knowledge that the concept does not directly attain.” (p. 11.)