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Marcell Mars 2024-11-18 10:00:11 +01:00
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@ -56,8 +56,6 @@ As Christian Salmon aptly noted, “Modern storytelling practices are not
This was also an experiment in glitching the model of public talk that is predominant in cultural, artistic, and academic spheres alike, while at the same time offering some scaffolding to hold space for meaningful conversations to take place even in the short span of a self-contained event (however hosted by milieus traversed by long-standing relations). The stories selected for the bonfires referred to different modes of lying, cheating, and stealing that reflect a spectrum of class positions, from undocumented migrants to unemployed folks, from benefit recipients to exhausted workers. Given the predominant discourse that pushes subjectivities in identifying with a glorified hustle culture of endless productivity, the discussion of cheating techniques across class lines reveals a potential for solidarity based on strategies of refusal of labour, of exclusion, and of humiliation.
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Moreover, given the criminalized, transgressive, or quasi-illegal nature of many of the strategies taught by the FIO stories, we wanted to avoid putting contributors in a confessional mode. We are aware that stigma and personal shame can be associated with such survival techniques, as not everyone sees them as a reflection of a capacity for resistance against systemic failures. The invitation to read others stories therefore functioned as a simple dispositive to enact, collectively, a minor ethical gesture: by lending others voices to those stories that the protagonists cannot or should not be telling in the first person, we wished to open up a space for positioned listeners and re-tellers to perform an act of entrustment and custodianship of such knowledges.
A final po-ethic dispositive that was key in shaping the bonfire storytellings has been the laughter. Henri Bergsons seminal work on laughter saw it as a mechanism for making a space of collectivity “[o]ur laughter is always the laughter of a group”. Moreover, he proposed that it serves as a social corrective, a means of revealing the absurdity of hierarchical and strict social structures.[^14] In our context, laughter operates not merely as a response but as an active engagement with power dynamics, embodying a subversive pleasure in exposing and circumventing systemic injustices. While Bergson viewed laughter as a collective social corrective, Franco Berardis reflections on cynicism and irony suggest another layer to this dynamic: Neither the cynic nor the ironist “believes in the true foundation of law,” yet each navigates this disbelief differently: “the cynical person bends to the law while mocking its false and pretentious values, while the ironic person escapes the law altogether, creating a linguistic space where law has no effectiveness.”[^15] If the whys behind the anecdotes are often tragic as they reveal the systemic injustices that shape impossible conditions of living, the hows often evoke a giggle that positions the participants vis-a-vis power structures: the affect of joy felt when hearing about a way to escape an unjust system reveals lines of partisanship that might not even be known to those laughing before the event. Such moments of shared chuckles during storytelling undermined the isolating effects that the power structures have on acts usually performed in secret and deemed illegal.