Fragment, savor, ambiance

2010

“`The greatest artist,’ says Andre Gide, `strives for banality.’” Francois Jullien, In Praise of Blandness, 139.

Michelangelo Antonioni, Zabriskie Point, 1970

Trace, fragment, catastrophe, disaster; pyrotechnics, explosion (*PLE), detritus, destruction, detonation, pulverisation, atomisation;

It might well be the problematic appropriation (by an established European filmmaker) of a problematic and simplistic dream (of an already lost generation): deconstitution of a world; atomisation of an ethos of capitalist appropriation and commodification; destruction of architecture as implicated in territorial appropriation; appropriation, commodification, privatisation and desolation of nature; death of the 60s; institutionalisation and neutralisation of the revolutionary project.....

But here, I’m taking the sequence as pure image, as pure materiality—not in terms of what it conveys, its meaning or its contents, but as pure production of sense.

fragment

“Fragments are written as unfinished separations. Their incompletion, their insufficiency, the disappointment at work in them, is their aimless drift, the indication that, neither unifiable nor consistent, they accommodate a certain array of marks—the marks with which thought (in decline and declining itself) represents the furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality. Not that thought ever stops, definitively fascinated, at the absence; always it is carried on, by the watch, the ever-uninterrupted wake. Whence the impossibility of saying there is an interval. For fragments, destined partly to the blank that separates them, finds in this gap not what ends them, but what prolongs them, or what makes them await their prolongation—what has already prolonged them, causing them to persist on account of their incompletion. And thus are they always ready to let themselves be worked upon by indefatigable reason, instead of remaining as fallen utterances, left aside, the secred void of mystery which no elaboration could ever fill.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 58.

We normally think of the fragment as a fragment-of something - a residue, a vestige of what was once whole, complete and perfect.  A bit without value.  Dregs.  Something fallen, something lesser.  Trash, waste.  Fragment, fracture, fracas.  Abject.  Abandoned.  But what if we instead thought of the fragment not as a fragment-of, but as a fragment-for.  For what?  For whatever it implies.  For whatever comes.  For whatever happens.  For the advent convened by an event of thinking for the fragment, and of re-thinking this -for as destiny, as future, as the for-the-sake-of what might be gathered by and as its own fractal production.  In existing for-the-sake-of, the fragment has a comportment, an ethical bearing, a disposition to care.  It is sacrificial.  It saves.  It attends the advent of a futural promise.[1]

Making for the sake of means making for the advent of the other in the midst of what is made, what is being made; for the sake (and for the salvation) of the made.  This would not be about recovering the fragment’s originary source and place within a totalized whole, but of enabling the unfolding of its potential to produce - in community, in a being-with - within and with a constellation of like and unlike fragments that constitute what Gilles Deleuze has called a plane of immanence.

savor

Savor: saveur and salve, savior and sauver, solve and save, solvent that melts, loosens, deconstitutes; what soap does: and its connection to sapience - knowledge, wisdom, insight, understanding; the ability to taste and perceive.

Circulation of fragments, of traces, residues— not a wasteland of destitute bits but a milieu, an ambiance, an atmosphere of pure latency, of pure combinational potential.

Consider the circulation of flavours (in gastronomy, in viticulture); the fluxion of savors in taste; the evanescence of volatiles; condensation and volatisation; liquefaction and vaporisation; the advance-retreat of memories; the play of traces.

And then the conjugation of flavours, coming into and out of combination; forming patterns; crystallising into shapes and discernable forms reminiscent of.... but never definitively, because always in withdrawal and retreat.

There is always something inappropriatable in flavour (always on the tip of the tongue; like a phrase or name, or like a dream on waking that we can’t quite recollect, even though we are certain of it, even into its details, even into its ambiance: the atmosphere of a turn of phrase, the ambiance of a person). Flavor is always suggestive, evocative, and allusive. Flavours suggest each other, slide into and out of each other; into and out of discernment and sense; into and out of each others’ ambits, frames and registers - their utterly indeterminate and indefinite presences; their withdrawal even as they advance into sensibility, into sapience, into knowledge.

In his book In Praise of Blandness, Francois Jullien notes that in Chinese thought, the bland is privileged. In the bland, flavour is not fixed within the confines of a particular definition, and can therefore metamorphose without end (23, 54); it eludes characterisation; it is the undifferentiated foundation of all things, which are in turn the indefinite combinations and conjugations of potentialities, open to transformation; allusive depth rather than explicit pattern:

“When no flavour is named, the value of savouring it is all the more intense for being impossible to categorise; and so it overflows the banks of its contingency and opens itself to transformation.” (42)

The ideal is to savor the flavourless, since only the bland allows the coexistence of the 5 flavors: sour, bitter, sweet, sharp, salty... The least pronounced flavour, the least seasoned dish is the highest degree of potential flavour (67); it defers consumption. In restraint, it defers closure and promotes indefinite combinations and conjugations.

Here, the lingering, the leftover, trace and remnant constitute the matter of an aesthetics of virtuality; of working to keep the virtual latent, not patently actual(ised); of practicing restraint in order to keep potentiality in reserve; not to betray – that is to take care of it. Blandness is the taste of the virtual, the power to evolve and to transform itself; and as such, it is inexhaustible. (123)

The art of savouring is to know when to stop in order to allow other flavour notes to reveal themselves; to recognise within one particular flavour the distinction between the fundamental taste that first imposes itself as such and such and its `beyond,’ which becomes apparent as it lingers. (121) This `beyond’ is the centre and margin of flavour, the inside and outside of taste, the included and excludes, the in-frame and the out-of-frame: and at the same time, the unframable, precisely because it eludes even as it alludes. (117)

In Buddhism: `the `common’ does not stand opposite to the `extraordinary’ or the `particular’ but encompasses it.’ (132)

Like blandness in poetry, blandness in painting bathes the landscape in absence: the various forms appear only to be withdrawn, opening upon distances that transcend them. The greatest representation is without particular form; it encompasses all possible concretisations; it is formless, toneless, flavorless, insipid. Consequently, the foundational flavour is water.

Savouring then refers to this interminable play of appearance-disappearance; of the forwarding-retreat or the advent-withdrawal of flavours.

ambiance

Consider now a space constituted in such a way. A place, an architecture: not as form, shape, pattern, configuration, geometry, materiality, structure, aspect, prospect and the like; but as pure milieu, ambiance and atmo-sphere (the vapour/spirit-sphere); as pure circum-stance (Greek: peristasis = surrounding conditions; what stands-around) and en-viron-ment  (that is, in-turning; in-veering; what turns about; what encircles).

Architecture that doesn’t frame but transforms the everyday: the constricting orthogonal registers of space; the normative homogenous pace and duration of chronological, mechanical time: not kronos but kairos – not `time’ but `opportunity’; and not topos, but threshold of enablement and occasion.

Architecture as the midst (both centre and margin) in which we experience the circulation of ambiance: of melancholia, abjection, oblivion, loss, grief, forgetfulness, intimacy, proximity, infinite distance; or, following Jullien’s reading of the bland, in which we might sense the insipid, spare, pale, limpid, effaced, faded, diluted, soft, wilted, hazy, unctious, visceral, languid, calm character of  a certain spatiality or temporality of detachment—might be an environment charged by light glancing the materiality of air (laden with sand, dust, oil, water, pollen, salt, sulphur...); might be the deconstituting light of an evanescent desert; might be a decelerating time that calms and slows; or an expanding dilating space that opens to inward reflection.

Or possibly place as a site for the circulation and fluxion of other places, codes, registers, dimensions, domains.

Fragmentary (not fragmented) architecture; architecture of the bland; of banality; architecture constituted by the interminable circulation and fluxion of ambient conditions; of atmosphere and circumstance, not limit and configuration.

To do this, architecture must engage temporality; a kind of materialisation of time or temporalisation of matter; of the matter of the world as much as of the matter of architecture—a kind of chorographic tectonics; temporalisation of space as a site of the passage and evanescence f the world; its pulse, rhythm and pace of advancing-withdrawal—but also making place for our experience of mourning and grief: of a melancholia that attends the disappearance and oblivion of memory, of the past, of what has been definitively, irrecoverably and irremediably lost.

Reiterating, finally, Blanchot:

“Fragmentation, the mark of a coherence all the firmer in that it has to come undone in order to be reached, and reached not through a dispersed system, or through dispersion as a system, for fragmentation is the pulling to pieces (the tearing) of that which never has pre-existed (really or ideally) as a whole, nor can it ever be reassembled in any future presence whatever. Fragmentation is the spacing, the separation effected by a temporalisation which can only be understood – fallaciously—as the absence of time.” Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, 60.

Notes

[1] See Martin Heidegger, `On the essence of ground’ (1929), in Pathways, 121ff.