Singularities series
This unexpected break, this singularity, is the irruption of the politics in the policymaking, this emergence of the political fact beyond the monotonous government management. It's the Gilets jaunes, the strike movements, the citizen mobilisations, the struggles for the climate, against racism, the feminist movements, and so on. If " human beings are political animals", as Aristotle said, then it is in these events that they realise themselves. This unusual break is a symbol of this, similar but unique each time.
Today's policymaking, and more generally today's society, far from prolonging man's natural inclination to be a sociable and social individual, i.e. political, has detached itself from what drives us and tends to mould us to its own needs, not ours, malleable, individualistic beings, incapable of resisting it, of organising ourselves outside it. Divide and conquer is the motto, but its injections of the norm are always and always met with the unexpected. History is full of singularities and, without them, we wouldn't have got very far. Policymaking systematically and unsurprisingly fails in the face of a nature that seems indomitable. This is what the broken rubber band symbolises, failure, a botched attempt to contain the whole, to normalise singularity, by force. But time takes its toll, the rubber band weakens and eventually breaks.
And even if time were to do nothing about it, i.e. if the elastic didn't break, the break would remain clearly visible.
As for the use of wine glasses or beer mugs, it's towards the supposed conviviality of these tools for sharing, creating links and discussing that we should be looking (and it's no coincidence that I've decided to publish this work now, when the boots of the far right are impatiently pounding the hot tarmac, 2024-06-20).