20210701. The shape of a bird’s beak punctures the observer’s space.
Out of the blue, from the forest of signs, trees, animals, and human beings, emerges a feral other, one that has its own ways and that plays its own style.
The forest is what inscribes the exotic other in the reader’s consciousness, the unchanging voice of the wilderness, the anonymous other of the city. 20210701. A black television anchored by a yellow background. A white line ran through it, drawing its power from the veins of the cable line and, alternately, producing a kaleidoscopic display of images (comprehending both space and time) and obscurities (darkness was supposed to be the limit, the horizon).
As its name suggested, this kaleidoscopic display was intended primarily for children, the adults being drawn toward the television screen to see what they could not replicate. The resulting sensation was one of displacement: everyone went to sleep, except for the child, who woke up from his slumbers almost simultaneously with the news report.
The television lit up the interior of the house and created flickering light in each window, as seen from the outside. 20210701. The word “unknown” on the illuminated screen of the city. This ocular landmark, an exoticism or narrowness, an “apparition” whose presence from too far away causes a break or discontinuity between the side of the buildings, creates a gap in the spatial continuum. Here, the aesthetic or manual activities of passers-by, or the solitary wandering of individuals, are described. Transformed into a term that is specific, unwanted and absolute, this theatre of errors is not content with diminishing marginality or centrality. It is the complete self, with its own tangibility and pivot, endowed with a singular character and expression, characterized by its “usage of the word” and its tendency to “turn the other cheek” in the most diabolical and sublime of places.
There is something pitiless about this use of language: it is the equivalent of throwing oneself down, as one would expect an artist to do when confronted with an inability to make himself the master of a universe. 20210701. In the white empty space, a statue of a clock strikes the eye. The metamorphosis of time into a monster. The beast begins anew.
The solitary mechanical arm slowly but surely immerses itself in the hours, and at the same time it disturbs the rhythm of the day.
For the rest of the day, the immobility of the arm in its daylight subterranean activity, and the perfected and unrestrained speed of the machinery, are sufficient to evoke the passenger’s uneasy acquiescence to the hours of the day. 20210701. A large television screen in the corner of the living room showed a movie about a car crashing into a wall. The screen went black the moment the film was over. There was a static soundtrack.
Until the very last detail, the point at which the story takes an absurd and murderous form, the television viewer cannot help but feel that they are being regularly bombarded by images of violence, of lost lives, of ruined cities.
Yet, in destroying the meaning, it causes a diversion within the spectator’s field of vision and causes a break or discontinuity between the spectator’s position in the story. The gap, or gap between the spectator’s position and the violence they are about to experience, is thus a kind of screen-space heterotopia. 20210701. The brown branches and grass at the bottom of the tree trunk often served as hiding places for small creatures, who ran amuck in the garden. These places of refuge had long-forgotten names, and their acacia-paneled roofs hid the bodies beneath the branches. These underground gardens existed only by virtue of a contract, respect for which was ensured by various rituals. In them the dead returned, not from within, but from without. Their mourning supplied the continuous murmuring of a subterranean language. 20210701. A black and white corridor is a visual echo of the reality from which it extends. It is an illusion, a composite, a distortion. It creates the perception of a distance. It is a fiction. The space of the past is erased from the page where it belongs. The space of the near is also a fiction, but different in that the space of the near is created by a process of elimination and absorption, and not by the erasure of everything that surrounds it, including the past. Because of this, the space of the near is not merely a place: it is a partial precondition of the utopia that surrounds it. 20210701. The door to the left is open.
The door to the right is closed.
To the left, there is a void.
To the right, actions.
These are oppositions that have been positively defined, for example between private space and public space.
Between family space and social space.
Between aesthetic and metaphysical space.
Between the space of leisure and that of work.
Between cultural space and useful space. 20210701. This wooden hole in the trunk of a tree is a representation of the habitus. We see a disc representing the body of a god on one side and the deceptive qualities of a goddess on the other.
In this combination of flesh and myth, of feminine and masculine characteristics, a fiction is created within the observer's own discourse that shapes his or her own image of the world and distinguishes him or her from others. This is a double reversal that is characteristic of either the religiousness or the modernity that I referred to above. 20210711. Two people sitting on a bench look through a window with white blinds. This is the mirror. It protects the innocent looking into the eyes of the architect’s schemes. It protects the inquisitor's complicities. It ensures that in constructing the objects of desire, the spectator's gaze will never stray from the limits which it sets on itself and that it will always remain within the place which it sets as a template. The spectator’s activities are thus directed toward justifying the constructions whose language they have learned to make their own. 20210709. A small potted plant on a wooden dresser represents the division of the inside and the outside. On the interior, the ensemble comprises the house, the bedroom, the couch, the bed, mirror, etc. On the other hand, the outside is a territory, an abstraction.
On the one hand, the garden represents the idyllic experience of children invited to play outside: on the other, the delirious experience of adults who cannot escape from it any longer. These are two particularly fundamental types of heterotopia. 20210701. The arched windows of the large white building in which the institute was housed, where the glass divided the daylight from the darkness of the night. This made the city a spatial monument (a spatial acronym) while simultaneously presenting the public to the persecutory reflections of their own thoughts, while eliminating the advantages of darkness. Ultimately, the public was spared these effects and, in a place totally bereft of them, viewed the city as a repository of the perfect amount of light, a glowing ember.
This place was a hasty reconstruction of a lost paradise. 20210702. Through the large glass windows, a black and yellow sign advertises the privileged place of the media, advertising, and political representation. It beckons one to enter: enter, and you will be recognized instantly by the computer, and will not be able to escape from its terror. This is the utopia of solitary confinement in the most perfect liberty. Is this utopia exclusive? Does it exist only by itself? In a society as perfect as ours, in which every child is raised in the shadow of a mythical and conventional order, there will always be a limit to the achievements of individual minds. And there will always be a limit to the technocratic conquest of a society by eliminating the gap that separates the privileged places of order from the rest.
An essential theoretical question in the development of conjunctive and cumulative memory remains to be asked: how can memory be made to operate in these specific places? 20210717. The black blinds on the window separate the different parts of the night, the momentary brilliance of a solitary window, and the metallic mass of the nearby cities.
These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be - people want them to be - places of identity, of relations, and of history. The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of circumscribed and specific places that are determined by relations. 20210710. In the living room, the potted plants stand before the wooden walls. Beyond this scene vines swing across the paths, forming networks and corridors. In the middle of this swinging garden, a great solid space, like a forest, carrying on forever, perpetually moving, invisible but deadly, boundless in secret but univocal in its demands, perpetual warping and colonizing the place, always by its very silence. If you are patient enough and quiet enough, you may subject yourself to the solitary walk of a thought and feel free, in the mysteriousness of the night, to recognize yourself in it only when you have made yourself clear. 20210717. A small animal is looking into the camera through a steel fence. In this space between a utopia and a nightmare, it moves about, like a dancer, lost in its own action, one that is nothing but an indiscreet shadow, a stream of poetry, or a nervous excommunication.
What is it that we make stand in for it in this ironic and obsessive photographic mirror? Nothing. The mirror provides a backup for the eye and torments the body, without leaving anything in its own place. 20210718. Above the wooden desk, a picture on the wall gives the illusion of a thousand years of history. The image of a woman stretched out on her back, stretched out on a log overhanging the void, stretched out on a power pole, fixed like the parasol on which the civilized world writhes, dreams, slumbers, and knows nothing else but the darkness that spreads out before it. 20210714. The empty wine bottles scattered about make disturbing sounds in the wind. They are like the howling of a child running free in the garden. The laughing gasps of the city.
The windows are the mirrors of its secrets. Drawing its power from subterranean and mysterious fluids, they produce images in the city. Distorting it. 20210718. A bright picture of a tree is the only color in an otherwise dark office. The computer monitor directly in front of the wall where you scribble your theories on balance is a sort of mirror that reflects the theory’s impossibility. The mirror is a virtual philosopher’s stone! It allows the discourse to be enacted in space and time, in spite of the law that sets off balance in the form of disorder. This division, which is reflected in mathematical terms between “the good” and “the bad,” remains logically consistent throughout the difference between being “universal” and “territorial.” When one speaks of “the geography of the mind,” that is, between being “assigned” and being “educated,” the idea of time is composed of an infinity of possibilities, without any fixity or singularity. 20210828. A tall building with many windows on one side and a huge open plan on the other. It is a gallery of unequalled magnificence. The gallery could be to the eastward of a city like Lyon, or the northward of a great republic like that of Brazil. It opens onto an infinity of territory contrasting with the picture of the city, or the savanna to the south. The building is magnificently austere in its archaicness. It reminds me of the time that I, in my youth, used to dream of built cities rising up around me like the images at the backs of my brown eyes. 20210831. The potted plants and the pictures on the wall provide a systematic unity of a characteristic with a rectangular plan. They are vertical even though, from pole to pole, from window to window, they rotate along with the wall. They thus define an antistate. They are thus also voids. In the same way, the line dividing equals or exceeds the space by which its utilized; it is an "in-between space," the kind of "space" that Proust means when he writes that "space is wanton" between the "space" of a telos and the "space" of a god. 20210826. Piles of rocks and rubble situate a universe where nothing ever quite clicks or responds, except perhaps to the faint howl of the brokenhearted. And yet, in the midst of this universe, something is moving: the dynamism of the movement that punctuates the void, the brittleness of a thing that is lost in the process, the slow progress of a movement that is neither broken up nor elevated. What remains are remnants, the echoes of a fractured world and a measure of pain. The suffering of the ordinary man is compensated for by the anguish of the world. 20210803. People sitting along a brick sidewalk with buildings in the background.
They are the historians of the city.
They are also the prophets of time.
They have made it their specialty, as architects, engineers, social scientists, political or religious men.
They are charged with organizing the activity of men in power.
They thus privilege spatial relationships. At the very least they attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analytical attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organization of the movements resulting from successive operations. 20210808. Above the metal railing, rests a flag on a pole. The flag is an imperialist emblem waving in the wind, a message of unfindableness. The flag is an irresistible signifier that seduces, intrigues, and converts the passer-by into an accomplice of the law. The whistling of the storyteller, the recitation of a fable, accompanied by the murmur of a church bell, is an expeditionary tactic in the service of an unfindable law. 20210921. A picture on the wall above the wooden table shows the moment when Breton met his death. He was a great artist. He created a universe in a single sitting. He fell in step with the rhythms of his craft. He did not plan out his movements in advance. He simply made them.
He was also a great storyteller. The art of telling stories is a lifelong process of "making out of a word" an act of reading that transforms it into a fragment of a greater "saying." 20210821. At the end of the hallway, a wooden door leads into another world. It is a paradoxical presence that opens up onto the outside world only at the moment of breaking up the eye-beam of its reverie. The chiasm is produced by the doorway. Drawing its strength from the brokenness of the place in which it is quartered, it simultaneously creates a fractured and continuous space out of it. It is an "exit" that opens onto the outside world and carries away its shadows. 20210908. In the literature resting on the long wooden table, she punctuates the gaps with her "stories" and her diaries. She writes them in the names of facts and of laws:
"a warm body" (a narcotic)
"a magazine" (a stimulant)
"a future" (an ideal, a myth)
"a constitution" (a collective memory)
"a way of operating" (an accommodation of the operational framework)
"a rhetoric" (a cladical system composed of images)
"a lyric space" (anesthesia)
"a version" (a voice that changes the meaning of a word) 20210803. The large glass doors of the balcony lead to the abyss, the barren nothing. Beyond the window, an abyss of the present makes the beauties of the city disappear. It is the glass that makes everything else disappear. What can be seen through the windowpane is the island of the near and the far, the spires of judgment which, through the glass, makes the city a palimpsest. But that is only the beginning. 20210807. The bare walls above the bed were a sort of holographic mirror that made the sleepers dreamless, but did not kill them. These dreams were a sort of lubricant in which the body was simultaneously inactivated and active, a lubricant that was also a foreignness, an exoticness, that enjoyed occupying the body from side to side, from liquidness to hardness. This is no longer an accident that resulted from the action of a capriciousness and jealousies. 20210801. In a black and white photo, a single image occupies the privileged place reserved for expression of permanence. In this space the picture is already there, an identity document, a document late in life, the death document, which issues the individual with the right to resign his/herself and to be forgotten.
But paradoxically it is the writing machine that holds aloft the singular and mutates the plural. It is through this tool, by producing a certain kind of anonymous laughter a literature appropriates and perfects itself, becomes an ensemble of solitary initials, the development of a singular individual identity. 20210921. Below the black and white pictures, white words and monochromatic descriptions. The photographic plate glass by itself has the peculiarity that it can make anything appear; it can make someone else's dream come true, or make someone else's nightmare come true.
In these monochromatic texts, what appears in the glass is a radical departure from the models that have, as its corollary, substituted the artificial flavors of language for the natural ones. Here, we have substituted a visual vocabulary for the one composed entirely of sounds. 20210928. The clothes hanging on the rack imply an expectation (although an unexpected one) and thus makes the wearer assume a presence that is invisible but still there. Here, the term “Dressed to Kill” is properly applied. Not only that, but these clothes also have the function of making the absent man present, present at home, in the flesh, in a mutation of the space where he used to be. He is the equivalent of a tool, an instrument manipulated by its master. He is thus a metaphor for effective ways of operating. 20211114. Three tall windows separate the interior and exterior, a division that establishes the modalities of social space. We see, through these windows, that the differences between the inside and the outside are inverted. The exterior is considered as a totalizing and mysterious space. The interior space is a theater stage on which the flesh moves about. It is the space of a Cyberpunk future without lives, without dreams, and in which the only plurality is the virtual confinement of a cybernetic matrix. 20211112. The computer desk is a sort of monument within the living room. All the rest, that is the virtual space within the computer, is considered equal in importance. As for the space on the other side of the desk, that is, the work space, it is like entering into a cosmological dream. You are there, there where you are, in absolute peace and in total mystery. You are in the company of silence and reference. You are personally responsible for all that is good in the world and you make it your own. You make yourself the master of a space and you own it. No one else can do it. 20211204. The entire architecture is one large glass window, looking out upon a world that embodies the paradox of the body in its moment of lucidity, but it is the body that is dreaming through the windowpane. The dream that is arousing the sleeping subject is revealed to be but a simulacrum — a phantom of the reality that the instruments of the body has created. A phantom that constantly makes a body an object of illumination is aroused, edited, repaired, and put back into working. 20211002. The sign on the wall describes a woman wearing a white shirt. It is clear in the street, and in the space of a sentence or so. It is composed of fragments of stories, the formal and silent shorthand of an esthetic language. It is not a corpus considered as foreign, fragmented in order to be displayed, studied and “quoted” by a third party; nor is it the “spectator” of a lost world, who transfers his or her “soul” in order to work on the machines producing his or her body. 20211116. The windows behave like picture frames, creating a three-dimensional appearance of space. They are an artistic effect, performed with words. They thus produce a rim around the outside of ordinary language. They are an artistic utilization of the interior, and cause a break or discontinuity between the outside and the interior. They are actions of fracturing open the texts that proliferate around them. They are other uses of the same instrument. They therefore form a parallel system. The system is broken up into time periods which are marked by regularities. The consecutiveness of the instants is compensated for by the periodic nature of the uses to which they are put. 20211113. The two children in the colorful room make their space in the image of something that does not yet exist. They transform the given space into something different. What they have to do is to make themselves the master of it and to transform it so that they can then make themselves the authors of a new space. They are writing themselves as masters of their own space. They ensure that their work never becomes a chore or a repetition of history. They ensure that their discourse is always necessary and always pays off. They are in the business of constructing utopias and marvelous complicities, laden with meaning and full of contradictions. 20211031. A group of people in a small store perform a common set of activities.
They are consumers.
They are users of language.
They are translators of cultural traits into physiological facts.
They are translators of anatomical structures into physiological facts.
They are also transformers of these facts into laws.
They make these facts proliferate around them.
They animate them.
Thus, their bodies become a collection of ridges and fractures in the space of a social texture. 20211204. At night, the lights around the windowpanes give it a mysteriousness that makes it hard to read our names in the dark. This source of illumination is a philosopher’s dream, carried away in the dark of night, and at the same time a philosopher’s nightmare, the object of vain exorcisms. The presence of the night is a reproach to the day, a dragging away of the past.
The unfinished business of yesterday is being carried out today. What is here today is only a repetition of yesterday’s mistakes. 20211212. The blue light from the television screen is a kind of broken mirror that makes the spectator's eyes wander. The flickering of the screen is a partial restoration of a lost paradise. It is the vibrato of a body in motion, the murmur of a language, and the movement of an immobile body. These are the effects that the invention of a new visual language produces in the spaces that it creates.
These spaces have been conceived in relation to what is constantly passing by: an onslaught of contrasts, yellows and oranges, of extremes that are hard to describe but which make the heart beat faster, the eyes scan the landscape, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and make your skin crawl. 20211128. The black and white stripes create a dazzling camouflage in the architecture of interior spaces. When the interior is dark, and the letters are gold, we become surrounded by the language of the other. When the outside is filtered through a lens, the letters revealing themselves are there inside the glass, making out of it a mirror with itself. The glass is a utopia in which everything is mirror-paned and a sea of meaninglessness. Only the instrument (a stone) is able to break this mirror in order to bear the image of something that does not yet exist. 20211127. The small kitchen has a dirty concrete floor and a low window overlooking a garden with an iron rail. The garden is immodest, the kitchen is extra, the living-room is solitary and the bedroom is reserved for the sleeping person. The garden is the inverse of the bedroom, in that it is a blank page to be written on by one who has no control over it, and who, consequently, inspires awe and passion in the passer-by.
Everybody has a place, but not everyone has a hobby. Everyone has a need, but not everyone has a job. People come and go, fill up and go, pause and rest, take a moment to enjoy themselves, then they come back to work. The landscape keeps its place, but the machine that cuts it up and polishes it is also the place of play, of surprises, and of menial tasks. It is the antithesis of the “public space.” 20211115. A laptop computer rests on a desk in a small room. But the computer occupies a space of its own, a “virtual space.” It transforms the bewitching world into a text without author, without language, into a mechanical system that makes text produce a gridwork without writer, without altering it at all (even if one can dismantle its facade). The same sort of thing is done in dreams and in the most ordinary of human beings. One can already find the prototype and the essential structure of what will later define the “modern” ideal: the individual subject, an artificial construct created as a result of a process of elimination. 20211229. The empty blue chairs at the back of the room sit there, kind of like giant amplifiers, amplifiers that make everything else go away and exaggerate their own weirdness.
These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be - people want them to be - places of identity, of relations and of history. The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of possibilities and prescriptions whose content is both spatial and social. 20211229. Above the brown chair, the writing on the wall is shifting. It is moving out from the back of the windowpane, moving toward the glass, and at the same time, isolating the event or its object. What is obscured by the glass is the writing that creates the drama of the distance or the impossibility of passing on. What is written about remains un-titled. The pane of glass separates the inside from the outside, the wild or domestic from the opaque texturology of a semiotics of their own.
Out of the blue, from the forest of signs, trees, animals, and human beings, emerges a feral other, one that has its own ways and that plays its own style.
The forest is what inscribes the exotic other in the reader’s consciousness, the unchanging voice of the wilderness, the anonymous other of the city. 20210701. A black television anchored by a yellow background. A white line ran through it, drawing its power from the veins of the cable line and, alternately, producing a kaleidoscopic display of images (comprehending both space and time) and obscurities (darkness was supposed to be the limit, the horizon).
As its name suggested, this kaleidoscopic display was intended primarily for children, the adults being drawn toward the television screen to see what they could not replicate. The resulting sensation was one of displacement: everyone went to sleep, except for the child, who woke up from his slumbers almost simultaneously with the news report.
The television lit up the interior of the house and created flickering light in each window, as seen from the outside. 20210701. The word “unknown” on the illuminated screen of the city. This ocular landmark, an exoticism or narrowness, an “apparition” whose presence from too far away causes a break or discontinuity between the side of the buildings, creates a gap in the spatial continuum. Here, the aesthetic or manual activities of passers-by, or the solitary wandering of individuals, are described. Transformed into a term that is specific, unwanted and absolute, this theatre of errors is not content with diminishing marginality or centrality. It is the complete self, with its own tangibility and pivot, endowed with a singular character and expression, characterized by its “usage of the word” and its tendency to “turn the other cheek” in the most diabolical and sublime of places.
There is something pitiless about this use of language: it is the equivalent of throwing oneself down, as one would expect an artist to do when confronted with an inability to make himself the master of a universe. 20210701. In the white empty space, a statue of a clock strikes the eye. The metamorphosis of time into a monster. The beast begins anew.
The solitary mechanical arm slowly but surely immerses itself in the hours, and at the same time it disturbs the rhythm of the day.
For the rest of the day, the immobility of the arm in its daylight subterranean activity, and the perfected and unrestrained speed of the machinery, are sufficient to evoke the passenger’s uneasy acquiescence to the hours of the day. 20210701. A large television screen in the corner of the living room showed a movie about a car crashing into a wall. The screen went black the moment the film was over. There was a static soundtrack.
Until the very last detail, the point at which the story takes an absurd and murderous form, the television viewer cannot help but feel that they are being regularly bombarded by images of violence, of lost lives, of ruined cities.
Yet, in destroying the meaning, it causes a diversion within the spectator’s field of vision and causes a break or discontinuity between the spectator’s position in the story. The gap, or gap between the spectator’s position and the violence they are about to experience, is thus a kind of screen-space heterotopia. 20210701. The brown branches and grass at the bottom of the tree trunk often served as hiding places for small creatures, who ran amuck in the garden. These places of refuge had long-forgotten names, and their acacia-paneled roofs hid the bodies beneath the branches. These underground gardens existed only by virtue of a contract, respect for which was ensured by various rituals. In them the dead returned, not from within, but from without. Their mourning supplied the continuous murmuring of a subterranean language. 20210701. A black and white corridor is a visual echo of the reality from which it extends. It is an illusion, a composite, a distortion. It creates the perception of a distance. It is a fiction. The space of the past is erased from the page where it belongs. The space of the near is also a fiction, but different in that the space of the near is created by a process of elimination and absorption, and not by the erasure of everything that surrounds it, including the past. Because of this, the space of the near is not merely a place: it is a partial precondition of the utopia that surrounds it. 20210701. The door to the left is open.
The door to the right is closed.
To the left, there is a void.
To the right, actions.
These are oppositions that have been positively defined, for example between private space and public space.
Between family space and social space.
Between aesthetic and metaphysical space.
Between the space of leisure and that of work.
Between cultural space and useful space. 20210701. This wooden hole in the trunk of a tree is a representation of the habitus. We see a disc representing the body of a god on one side and the deceptive qualities of a goddess on the other.
In this combination of flesh and myth, of feminine and masculine characteristics, a fiction is created within the observer's own discourse that shapes his or her own image of the world and distinguishes him or her from others. This is a double reversal that is characteristic of either the religiousness or the modernity that I referred to above. 20210711. Two people sitting on a bench look through a window with white blinds. This is the mirror. It protects the innocent looking into the eyes of the architect’s schemes. It protects the inquisitor's complicities. It ensures that in constructing the objects of desire, the spectator's gaze will never stray from the limits which it sets on itself and that it will always remain within the place which it sets as a template. The spectator’s activities are thus directed toward justifying the constructions whose language they have learned to make their own. 20210709. A small potted plant on a wooden dresser represents the division of the inside and the outside. On the interior, the ensemble comprises the house, the bedroom, the couch, the bed, mirror, etc. On the other hand, the outside is a territory, an abstraction.
On the one hand, the garden represents the idyllic experience of children invited to play outside: on the other, the delirious experience of adults who cannot escape from it any longer. These are two particularly fundamental types of heterotopia. 20210701. The arched windows of the large white building in which the institute was housed, where the glass divided the daylight from the darkness of the night. This made the city a spatial monument (a spatial acronym) while simultaneously presenting the public to the persecutory reflections of their own thoughts, while eliminating the advantages of darkness. Ultimately, the public was spared these effects and, in a place totally bereft of them, viewed the city as a repository of the perfect amount of light, a glowing ember.
This place was a hasty reconstruction of a lost paradise. 20210702. Through the large glass windows, a black and yellow sign advertises the privileged place of the media, advertising, and political representation. It beckons one to enter: enter, and you will be recognized instantly by the computer, and will not be able to escape from its terror. This is the utopia of solitary confinement in the most perfect liberty. Is this utopia exclusive? Does it exist only by itself? In a society as perfect as ours, in which every child is raised in the shadow of a mythical and conventional order, there will always be a limit to the achievements of individual minds. And there will always be a limit to the technocratic conquest of a society by eliminating the gap that separates the privileged places of order from the rest.
An essential theoretical question in the development of conjunctive and cumulative memory remains to be asked: how can memory be made to operate in these specific places? 20210717. The black blinds on the window separate the different parts of the night, the momentary brilliance of a solitary window, and the metallic mass of the nearby cities.
These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be - people want them to be - places of identity, of relations, and of history. The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of circumscribed and specific places that are determined by relations. 20210710. In the living room, the potted plants stand before the wooden walls. Beyond this scene vines swing across the paths, forming networks and corridors. In the middle of this swinging garden, a great solid space, like a forest, carrying on forever, perpetually moving, invisible but deadly, boundless in secret but univocal in its demands, perpetual warping and colonizing the place, always by its very silence. If you are patient enough and quiet enough, you may subject yourself to the solitary walk of a thought and feel free, in the mysteriousness of the night, to recognize yourself in it only when you have made yourself clear. 20210717. A small animal is looking into the camera through a steel fence. In this space between a utopia and a nightmare, it moves about, like a dancer, lost in its own action, one that is nothing but an indiscreet shadow, a stream of poetry, or a nervous excommunication.
What is it that we make stand in for it in this ironic and obsessive photographic mirror? Nothing. The mirror provides a backup for the eye and torments the body, without leaving anything in its own place. 20210718. Above the wooden desk, a picture on the wall gives the illusion of a thousand years of history. The image of a woman stretched out on her back, stretched out on a log overhanging the void, stretched out on a power pole, fixed like the parasol on which the civilized world writhes, dreams, slumbers, and knows nothing else but the darkness that spreads out before it. 20210714. The empty wine bottles scattered about make disturbing sounds in the wind. They are like the howling of a child running free in the garden. The laughing gasps of the city.
The windows are the mirrors of its secrets. Drawing its power from subterranean and mysterious fluids, they produce images in the city. Distorting it. 20210718. A bright picture of a tree is the only color in an otherwise dark office. The computer monitor directly in front of the wall where you scribble your theories on balance is a sort of mirror that reflects the theory’s impossibility. The mirror is a virtual philosopher’s stone! It allows the discourse to be enacted in space and time, in spite of the law that sets off balance in the form of disorder. This division, which is reflected in mathematical terms between “the good” and “the bad,” remains logically consistent throughout the difference between being “universal” and “territorial.” When one speaks of “the geography of the mind,” that is, between being “assigned” and being “educated,” the idea of time is composed of an infinity of possibilities, without any fixity or singularity. 20210828. A tall building with many windows on one side and a huge open plan on the other. It is a gallery of unequalled magnificence. The gallery could be to the eastward of a city like Lyon, or the northward of a great republic like that of Brazil. It opens onto an infinity of territory contrasting with the picture of the city, or the savanna to the south. The building is magnificently austere in its archaicness. It reminds me of the time that I, in my youth, used to dream of built cities rising up around me like the images at the backs of my brown eyes. 20210831. The potted plants and the pictures on the wall provide a systematic unity of a characteristic with a rectangular plan. They are vertical even though, from pole to pole, from window to window, they rotate along with the wall. They thus define an antistate. They are thus also voids. In the same way, the line dividing equals or exceeds the space by which its utilized; it is an "in-between space," the kind of "space" that Proust means when he writes that "space is wanton" between the "space" of a telos and the "space" of a god. 20210826. Piles of rocks and rubble situate a universe where nothing ever quite clicks or responds, except perhaps to the faint howl of the brokenhearted. And yet, in the midst of this universe, something is moving: the dynamism of the movement that punctuates the void, the brittleness of a thing that is lost in the process, the slow progress of a movement that is neither broken up nor elevated. What remains are remnants, the echoes of a fractured world and a measure of pain. The suffering of the ordinary man is compensated for by the anguish of the world. 20210803. People sitting along a brick sidewalk with buildings in the background.
They are the historians of the city.
They are also the prophets of time.
They have made it their specialty, as architects, engineers, social scientists, political or religious men.
They are charged with organizing the activity of men in power.
They thus privilege spatial relationships. At the very least they attempt to reduce temporal relations to spatial ones through the analytical attribution of a proper place to each particular element and through the combinatory organization of the movements resulting from successive operations. 20210808. Above the metal railing, rests a flag on a pole. The flag is an imperialist emblem waving in the wind, a message of unfindableness. The flag is an irresistible signifier that seduces, intrigues, and converts the passer-by into an accomplice of the law. The whistling of the storyteller, the recitation of a fable, accompanied by the murmur of a church bell, is an expeditionary tactic in the service of an unfindable law. 20210921. A picture on the wall above the wooden table shows the moment when Breton met his death. He was a great artist. He created a universe in a single sitting. He fell in step with the rhythms of his craft. He did not plan out his movements in advance. He simply made them.
He was also a great storyteller. The art of telling stories is a lifelong process of "making out of a word" an act of reading that transforms it into a fragment of a greater "saying." 20210821. At the end of the hallway, a wooden door leads into another world. It is a paradoxical presence that opens up onto the outside world only at the moment of breaking up the eye-beam of its reverie. The chiasm is produced by the doorway. Drawing its strength from the brokenness of the place in which it is quartered, it simultaneously creates a fractured and continuous space out of it. It is an "exit" that opens onto the outside world and carries away its shadows. 20210908. In the literature resting on the long wooden table, she punctuates the gaps with her "stories" and her diaries. She writes them in the names of facts and of laws:
"a warm body" (a narcotic)
"a magazine" (a stimulant)
"a future" (an ideal, a myth)
"a constitution" (a collective memory)
"a way of operating" (an accommodation of the operational framework)
"a rhetoric" (a cladical system composed of images)
"a lyric space" (anesthesia)
"a version" (a voice that changes the meaning of a word) 20210803. The large glass doors of the balcony lead to the abyss, the barren nothing. Beyond the window, an abyss of the present makes the beauties of the city disappear. It is the glass that makes everything else disappear. What can be seen through the windowpane is the island of the near and the far, the spires of judgment which, through the glass, makes the city a palimpsest. But that is only the beginning. 20210807. The bare walls above the bed were a sort of holographic mirror that made the sleepers dreamless, but did not kill them. These dreams were a sort of lubricant in which the body was simultaneously inactivated and active, a lubricant that was also a foreignness, an exoticness, that enjoyed occupying the body from side to side, from liquidness to hardness. This is no longer an accident that resulted from the action of a capriciousness and jealousies. 20210801. In a black and white photo, a single image occupies the privileged place reserved for expression of permanence. In this space the picture is already there, an identity document, a document late in life, the death document, which issues the individual with the right to resign his/herself and to be forgotten.
But paradoxically it is the writing machine that holds aloft the singular and mutates the plural. It is through this tool, by producing a certain kind of anonymous laughter a literature appropriates and perfects itself, becomes an ensemble of solitary initials, the development of a singular individual identity. 20210921. Below the black and white pictures, white words and monochromatic descriptions. The photographic plate glass by itself has the peculiarity that it can make anything appear; it can make someone else's dream come true, or make someone else's nightmare come true.
In these monochromatic texts, what appears in the glass is a radical departure from the models that have, as its corollary, substituted the artificial flavors of language for the natural ones. Here, we have substituted a visual vocabulary for the one composed entirely of sounds. 20210928. The clothes hanging on the rack imply an expectation (although an unexpected one) and thus makes the wearer assume a presence that is invisible but still there. Here, the term “Dressed to Kill” is properly applied. Not only that, but these clothes also have the function of making the absent man present, present at home, in the flesh, in a mutation of the space where he used to be. He is the equivalent of a tool, an instrument manipulated by its master. He is thus a metaphor for effective ways of operating. 20211114. Three tall windows separate the interior and exterior, a division that establishes the modalities of social space. We see, through these windows, that the differences between the inside and the outside are inverted. The exterior is considered as a totalizing and mysterious space. The interior space is a theater stage on which the flesh moves about. It is the space of a Cyberpunk future without lives, without dreams, and in which the only plurality is the virtual confinement of a cybernetic matrix. 20211112. The computer desk is a sort of monument within the living room. All the rest, that is the virtual space within the computer, is considered equal in importance. As for the space on the other side of the desk, that is, the work space, it is like entering into a cosmological dream. You are there, there where you are, in absolute peace and in total mystery. You are in the company of silence and reference. You are personally responsible for all that is good in the world and you make it your own. You make yourself the master of a space and you own it. No one else can do it. 20211204. The entire architecture is one large glass window, looking out upon a world that embodies the paradox of the body in its moment of lucidity, but it is the body that is dreaming through the windowpane. The dream that is arousing the sleeping subject is revealed to be but a simulacrum — a phantom of the reality that the instruments of the body has created. A phantom that constantly makes a body an object of illumination is aroused, edited, repaired, and put back into working. 20211002. The sign on the wall describes a woman wearing a white shirt. It is clear in the street, and in the space of a sentence or so. It is composed of fragments of stories, the formal and silent shorthand of an esthetic language. It is not a corpus considered as foreign, fragmented in order to be displayed, studied and “quoted” by a third party; nor is it the “spectator” of a lost world, who transfers his or her “soul” in order to work on the machines producing his or her body. 20211116. The windows behave like picture frames, creating a three-dimensional appearance of space. They are an artistic effect, performed with words. They thus produce a rim around the outside of ordinary language. They are an artistic utilization of the interior, and cause a break or discontinuity between the outside and the interior. They are actions of fracturing open the texts that proliferate around them. They are other uses of the same instrument. They therefore form a parallel system. The system is broken up into time periods which are marked by regularities. The consecutiveness of the instants is compensated for by the periodic nature of the uses to which they are put. 20211113. The two children in the colorful room make their space in the image of something that does not yet exist. They transform the given space into something different. What they have to do is to make themselves the master of it and to transform it so that they can then make themselves the authors of a new space. They are writing themselves as masters of their own space. They ensure that their work never becomes a chore or a repetition of history. They ensure that their discourse is always necessary and always pays off. They are in the business of constructing utopias and marvelous complicities, laden with meaning and full of contradictions. 20211031. A group of people in a small store perform a common set of activities.
They are consumers.
They are users of language.
They are translators of cultural traits into physiological facts.
They are translators of anatomical structures into physiological facts.
They are also transformers of these facts into laws.
They make these facts proliferate around them.
They animate them.
Thus, their bodies become a collection of ridges and fractures in the space of a social texture. 20211204. At night, the lights around the windowpanes give it a mysteriousness that makes it hard to read our names in the dark. This source of illumination is a philosopher’s dream, carried away in the dark of night, and at the same time a philosopher’s nightmare, the object of vain exorcisms. The presence of the night is a reproach to the day, a dragging away of the past.
The unfinished business of yesterday is being carried out today. What is here today is only a repetition of yesterday’s mistakes. 20211212. The blue light from the television screen is a kind of broken mirror that makes the spectator's eyes wander. The flickering of the screen is a partial restoration of a lost paradise. It is the vibrato of a body in motion, the murmur of a language, and the movement of an immobile body. These are the effects that the invention of a new visual language produces in the spaces that it creates.
These spaces have been conceived in relation to what is constantly passing by: an onslaught of contrasts, yellows and oranges, of extremes that are hard to describe but which make the heart beat faster, the eyes scan the landscape, make the hair on the back of your neck stand up, and make your skin crawl. 20211128. The black and white stripes create a dazzling camouflage in the architecture of interior spaces. When the interior is dark, and the letters are gold, we become surrounded by the language of the other. When the outside is filtered through a lens, the letters revealing themselves are there inside the glass, making out of it a mirror with itself. The glass is a utopia in which everything is mirror-paned and a sea of meaninglessness. Only the instrument (a stone) is able to break this mirror in order to bear the image of something that does not yet exist. 20211127. The small kitchen has a dirty concrete floor and a low window overlooking a garden with an iron rail. The garden is immodest, the kitchen is extra, the living-room is solitary and the bedroom is reserved for the sleeping person. The garden is the inverse of the bedroom, in that it is a blank page to be written on by one who has no control over it, and who, consequently, inspires awe and passion in the passer-by.
Everybody has a place, but not everyone has a hobby. Everyone has a need, but not everyone has a job. People come and go, fill up and go, pause and rest, take a moment to enjoy themselves, then they come back to work. The landscape keeps its place, but the machine that cuts it up and polishes it is also the place of play, of surprises, and of menial tasks. It is the antithesis of the “public space.” 20211115. A laptop computer rests on a desk in a small room. But the computer occupies a space of its own, a “virtual space.” It transforms the bewitching world into a text without author, without language, into a mechanical system that makes text produce a gridwork without writer, without altering it at all (even if one can dismantle its facade). The same sort of thing is done in dreams and in the most ordinary of human beings. One can already find the prototype and the essential structure of what will later define the “modern” ideal: the individual subject, an artificial construct created as a result of a process of elimination. 20211229. The empty blue chairs at the back of the room sit there, kind of like giant amplifiers, amplifiers that make everything else go away and exaggerate their own weirdness.
These places have at least three characteristics in common. They want to be - people want them to be - places of identity, of relations and of history. The layout of the house, the rules of residence, the zoning of the village, placement of altars, configuration of public open spaces, land distribution, correspond for every individual to a system of possibilities and prescriptions whose content is both spatial and social. 20211229. Above the brown chair, the writing on the wall is shifting. It is moving out from the back of the windowpane, moving toward the glass, and at the same time, isolating the event or its object. What is obscured by the glass is the writing that creates the drama of the distance or the impossibility of passing on. What is written about remains un-titled. The pane of glass separates the inside from the outside, the wild or domestic from the opaque texturology of a semiotics of their own.