Brouhaha: Worlds of the Contemporary by Lionel Ruffel (review)

The term brouhaha, with which Lionel Ruffel, professor of comparative literature and creative writing at the University of Paris VIII, indicates the messiness that is the contemporary, is well chosen. Usable in both French and English, the term points to a certain noisiness. It has a sense of the comic, inviting laughter due to the "haha" at the end, but it also seems to be an onomatopoeia for a burst of laughter. Ruffel, however, does not talk of laughter, although laughter is an act that is very much "in the moment," and the contemporary escapes, or attempts to escape, any historicizing outside of that. Or at least it adheres to a "history [that] is no longer thought of in terms of epochs" (p. 10).

It is in that sense somewhat confusing that Ruffel discusses the contemporary in six "series"—"Exposition," "Media," "Publication," "Controversy," "Institutions" and "Archaeology"—combined with a solid introduction and a conclusion called "Locations of the Contemporary." In his discussion of the contemporary as replacement of the modern, Ruffel tries to avoid at all cost any chronology or analysis that might be seen as a modernist approach that neatly tries to box everything in. It would therefore maybe be better to talk of "strands" or "threads" instead of "series" that would tie in better with his observation that we clearly live no longer in a modernist, future-oriented society but in a contemporary one that is chaotic and messy in its multiplicity, being multidisciplinary and thus undisciplined, but therefore also extremely rich.

It is however hard to avoid any kind of order in an analysis of or an inquiry into a perceived phenomenon. Ruffel connects the contemporary in the first place with Exposition, as that is where we first became familiar with the term, in the sense of contemporary art. But typically for his approach Ruffel brings our attention in the first place to the fact that the question "What is the contemporary?" was first raised by the fanzine Zum, published by the Centro de Expresiones Contemporáneas in Rosario, Argentina, in 2004—far away, thus, from the Modernist center New York or the typically Western world in general, and before Giorgio Agamben would pose the same question a year later. It is an approach that Ruffel continues throughout his book. Although he references various famous "big" white males, he also constantly counteracts them with off-center and/or female voices such as Donna Haraway and her "Cyborg Manifesto" (1985) or Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988), which Ruffel recognizes as already pointing in the direction of things to come.

Reviews Panel: Fred Andersson, Jan Baetens, John F. Barber, Roy Behrens, K. Blassnigg, Catalin Brylla, Annick Bureaud, Chris Cobb, Giovanna Costantini, Edith Doove, Hannah Drayson, Phil Dyke, Ernest Edmonds, Amanda Egbe, Anthony Enns, Enzo Ferrara, Kathryn Francis, George Gessert, Allan Graubard, Dene Grigar, Rob Harle, Craig Harris, Craig J. Hilton, Jane Hutchinson, Amy Ione, Richard Kade, Valérie Lamontagne, Mike Leggett, Will Luers, Kieran Lyons, Roger Malina, Jacques Mandelbrojt, Florence Martellini, Elizabeth McCardell, Eduardo Miranda, Robert A. Mitchell, Michael Mosher, Sana Murrani, Frieder Nake, Maureen A. Nappi, Claudy Opdenkamp, Jack Ox, Luisa Paraguai, Jussi Parikka, Ellen Pearlman, Ana Peraica, Stephen Petersen, Michael Punt, Hannah Rogers, Lara Schrijver, Aparna Sharma, George K. Shortess, Brian Reffin Smith, Yvonne Spielmann, Eugenia Stamboliev, Paul Sternberg, Malgorzata Sugiera, James Sweeting, Charissa N. Terranova, Yvan Tina, Flutur Troshani, Ian Verstegen, John Vines, Claudia Westermann, Cecilia Wong, Martyn Woodward, Jonathan Zilberg

Ruffel admits that in his investigation of the contemporary he mainly follows in the footsteps of Bruno Latour, exclaiming at one point that if we never were modernists, we were always contemporaries. Where Latour "called modernity an illusion that was in the process of being unmasked" (p. 19), Ruffel places the contemporary, which he sees basically as the result of "the very large number"—of us and of our data. Interestingly, brouhaha in French refers to the confused noise...