Rêverie
2011
“Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.”1
“We are human beings because we are outbound (en partance), disposed towards a departure about which we can and must know that no definitive arrival is possible or promised. It is in this impulse (elan), in the obligation of departure, since we cannot do otherwise, and in this risk-taking (prise du risque), in the wager of departure, that we can live a life worth living.”2
“Philosophy begins in wonder (thaumazein).”3
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If philosophy begins in wonder, then it must be a thaumaturgical practice: a matter of conjuring and wonder-working, a form of theatre in which beholding and monstration take place. Concepts emerge in philosophy like theatrical characters and beings who advance into the open out of darkness and concealment. The thinker is a thaumaturge who concocts and advances ideas; and the architect, too, who has designs on the world, and who by design advances and projects, takes positions and makes propositions.
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Someone in the midst of reverie and suspended in delirium is a reveler, rover, rebel, improprietous rogue, robber, riotous vagabond, rabid straggler, madman, uproarious raver, rapine reaver, ravager, ravisher −− in short, a thinker, a designer; but one whose vitality and enthusiasm are geared not to the definitive but entirely to the provisional.
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There is an odd, eloquent conjunction, in French, of dreaming (rêver) and waking (réveiller) −− as if the apparent dichotomy is wholly delusional and radically disestablished in favor of a wavering, uncanny collusion. Réveiller: to awaken, to rouse, to be vigilant, to keep watch −− over what? Latin vigilare once meant devotional watching and observance during a festival eve. But `vigil’ is from the etymological root *WEG = to be lively, active, strong, virile, vigorous, fast, quick, alive. This is why reverie magnifies and increases the reveler and the revealed, raising both to a higher power that potentialises and fructifies.
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Daydreaming (French: rêverie éveillée, German: Tagtraum) is, etymologically speaking at least, traumatic. Every dream (Greek: oneiros) is a wound (Greek: trauma) caused by some kind of turning that bores and rubs raw. Yet reverie takes place in wakefulness not sleep. Is it an oneiric phantasm as Freud would have it; or something akin to cinema, which extends and amplifies a narrative by a kind of unfolding concatenating reverie −− in the same way that in dreams we realise for a moment the multiple beings we are and might have become?
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Reverie is not something that happens to us. Rather, we are captivated into it, we surrender to it and lose ourselves in it, we fall or plunge into its infinite folds and fluxions, we remain suspended in the interminable suspense of transit and transaction. For Flaubert reverie is riverine. In it we are, as it were, subject to a river’s currents, carried along wave by wave. Reverie unclenches rhythms of flows and associations, figures of thought and itineraries of speech. Such figures are never wholly erroneous; and if they are errant, delinquent or vagrant, it is only in so far as their efficacy is always yet to be mobilised:
"When the mind has a tendency to dream, it is a mistake to keep dreams away from it, to ration its dreams. So long as you distract your mind from its dreams, it will not know them for what they are; you will always be being taken in by the appearance of things, because you will not have grasped their true nature. If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.”4
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Thinking, philosophising, designing −− these practices are a matter of watching-out for what arises in reverie. To watch over is to guard and safeguard, to have regard for −− consequently to protect, warn and ward-off. Primarily an ethical disposition, it is matter of care and solicitude that enables the safeguarded to come into its own being. The one guarding −− the `solicitor’ −− does not slumber but wakes and waits for, or heeds and expects a coming or a going, an arrival or departure. Like the Irish wakeman who `sits up all night with the corpse,’ or the vigilante who scour borders and frontiers that official law and order cannot reach, the solicitor must not only remain awake but also maintain a watch. This state is not the antithesis of sleep, or the inability to sleep −− a kind of nefarious insomnia, somnolence or torpor −− but a manner of staying in the wake of attentiveness. This wake has contours and topography, with its own inclinations, declinations and climes, its own aspects and prospects, virtualities and potentialities that thinking, philosophising and designing have the capacity to map and ravel.
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`Ravel’ means to unweave, untwist a woven texture −− but also to fray out, defray and entangle. The etymons are *REI = distill, flow; Latin: riuus = stream, river; run, rhythm; *REIP/B = tear down, fall in ruins, rive, rift, river; and *REUP/F = break, seize, pluck, rob; injure, spoil; rupture, reave, bereave −− in short, an unraveling that eventually mats and felts into matrices. The site of reverie must therefore be the interstice, the interval, the milieu −− all zones of indeterminate borderlines. Its proper ambiance must be suspension, dilation and deceleration. It must lie somewhere between theorea and praxis, psyche and soma, eros and thanatos, techné and phusis,5 abstract and concrete, compossible and incompossible, academy and profession, enablement and disablement, efficacy and paralysis.
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Plato makes of madness −− divine or Dionysian −− a precondition of philosophy and art. Mania and exstasis, madness and ecstasy are incommensurably, perilously close. In delirium we are literally `out-of-the-furrow,’ off-track, perturbed in thought, disengaged and fundamentally riven. What are the symptoms? Paraphrenia, illusion, delusion, hallucination, paranoia, melancholia, mania, erotomania. Suspended between dreaming and wakefulness, recollection and amnesia −− on the one hand subject to the call to go and on the other the call to come-to (our senses) −− reverie activates worlds radically different in duration and opportunity from the circumambient everyday. Eclipsing diurnal and nocturnal in favor of slow crepuscular dusk and the gloaming, reverie revels in regions of irregularity and incommensurability that turn the incompossible into figures of potential. Something unravels there, something made (out) or raveled of untanglements, diffractions, explications and defrayments −− because raveling and unraveling are synonymous and antinomical, cognate and inimical to each other. Reverie takes place in this ambit of disturbance and turbulence, in the indeterminate contours of thought, in turbidity, deterrence and terrorism, errancy and straying, delinquency and relinquishment: that is, in letting-go or letting-be −− always in and around the limit and term, in the wavering of territory and terminology, in the interminable rhythms and partitions of departure and infinite recommencement. Likewise, design happens in the startle of renewed starting-over; in the strangeness of uncanny encounters; in the wonder that transit and transition make possible. The astonishment that breaches the quotidian, the familiar and habitual, releases architecture from aesthetics and representation into ethics and presence; from habitat and habit into habitus −− that is, into a manner of making and inhabiting the space of a world.
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The French might say “ravi de vous voir” (“pleased to see you”), because such pleasure transports, seizes and impels departure. Here we are in the gamut of the sublime, of the ravishing and ravishment. Why should the highest pleasure be synonymous with the greatest devastation, the greatest disaster, the most extreme degree of disorientation and dislocation?
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“Habere is not primarily to `have’ but to `behave’ (se tenir, comportment). Habitus means a manner of being, what we revealingly call the exterior aspect, the outside. To inhabit (habiter) is not to possess, to install, to protect oneself. It is on the contrary to expose oneself to the outside. More accurately, inhabitation is each time a proper mode of relating (delivering oneself over) to the outside. Before being ostentation (the façade), the essence of inhabitation is access, opening. To inhabit plays out the opposition between economic and aneconomic (l’économique et l’anéconomique), inside and outside. Inhabiting is not familiar, it is strangeness itself.”6
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With this exposure to `strangeness itself’ design is brought into proximity with the uncanny −− a simultaneous experience of the radical, constitutive unfamiliarity of the familiar. The willingness to abandon oneself to this strangeness, to the risk and danger of reverie, is precisely what liberates design to engage with wonder and the extraordinary:
“Not knowing the way out or the way in, wonder dwells in a between, between the most usual, beings, and their unusualness, their “is.” It is wonder that first liberates this between as the between and separates it out. Wonder −− understood transitively −− brings forth the showing of what is most usual in its unusualness. Not knowing the way out or the way in, between the usual and the unusual, is not helplessness, for wonder as such does not desire help but instead precisely opens up this between, which is impervious to any entrance or escape, and must constantly occupy it.”7
1. Charles Baudelaire, Prose Poem 30.
2. Jean-Luc Nancy, Partir – Le Depart. Montrouge: Bayard, 2011: 29-30.
3. Plato, Theatetus, 155d.
4. Marcel Proust, “Within a Budding Grove, Seascape with Frieze of Girls,” in Remembrance of Things Past, Chapter 2.
5. Theory and practice, mind and body, erotics and death, art and nature.
6. Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe, “Habiter,” in Epreuves d’ecritures, 1985: 81, cited in Benoît Goetz, L’Habitation: La Surprise: 26.
7. Martin Heidegger, Basic Questions of Philosophy. Selected “Problems” of “Logic,” translated by Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994: 145.