Eric Hazan: Scaling the Walls of Paris
‘By way of the d érive: it was not explicitly political, but in fact it was. It was, for them, le Continent Contrescarpe, it was almost what the Maoists might call a territoire lib ér é. But today, I think la flâneurie, the exploration of a Situationist-type cannot be done anymore inside Paris, you have to cross the boulevard p éripherique, because inside — the living Paris inside is not that large. It’s reduced to the northern, north-eastern part of the city, [the third and the twentieth arrondissements]. The others are transformed into a vast museum. For a Parisian, I mean; for a foreigner, it’s different. For a foreigner, of course, if you stand in front of the plate on which it’s written that here Balzac has written Le Chef-d’oeuvre inconnu and Picasso has done Guernica, well, it’s impressive.’
Karl Whitney talks to Eric Hazan
Throwing Shadows on a Wall: The Internet and Permanence
Like Mike Teavee, one day you wake up to find yourself dispersed all over the levitating cloud of the Internet: pieces of you are scattered all over the place. Whereas people once wrote and saved handwritten correspondences, in the near future, when we die, someone will print out and collate our dissolute online footprints. The new posthumous archive: social networking profiles, emails and saved electronic chats, message board posts, online journals, all the sorry detritus of embarrassing and petty lives. We seek ourselves out like amnesiacs, anxiously Googling in the void, hoping to pick up some clues of how we are perceived by others. We put ourselves out there for consumption, but it provides little relief from the all-consuming vanity.
By Aaron Lake Smith.