Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment

3. The Quest

3 The QuesT The doorway to dreams lies ajar, a sinuous road passes through. What will I find on the other side, where, with a shiver of fear, the bold would confront monsters? The void? A voyage through the interplanetary vacuum or monsters in a land of marvels?To discover the place of enjoyment,we must enter the dream because the real has betrayed joy. This departure is like many others: initiatory voyages,Alice in Wonderland , Wilhelm Meister (a dangerous analogy but Wilhelm crossed the theatrical imaginary before completing his personal education). What is specific to my case is that, from the outset, I know what I’m looking for: not happiness, or delight, or joy, or sensuality, but the place where I would like to experience them, the place where I can linger in one of those felicitous encounters. This is not as absurd as it sounds. There exist places of contemplation,of serenity,of power and cruelty.So,is what I am looking for, once awakened near the doorway to dreams, simply beauty? Yes, if beauty is the“promise of happiness.”1 I’ve prepared a long time for this trip. Over the course of years, I’ve attempted to cultivate and educate (problematic words:“culture,”“cultivate ,”“education”) my body, to provide it with a sense of space. But this complicates the situation, for in order to discover or construct the space of enjoyment, mustn’t we enjoy space and, therefore, have learned it the way a child learns to walk? I’ve asked a great number of people and have come to the conclusion that none of them strongly experienced his body in space, the relationship of his body to his surroundings. Was this informative? A charming Brazilian, A., long and lithe as a vine, said to me, shortly after his arrival in Paris,“This space is no good for me. I’ve 32 The Quest 33 lost the dancing gait I had back home. I’m stiff. My walk is uncertain. These walls are like a vice, the angles are cruel instruments.” It is obvious that most people experience their body only through the words that identify and separate the parts of that body, that the body is dispersed in their conscious mind through its fragmentation. It is also true that those same people have only a narcissistic perception of themselves , reduced to the skin, the face (understood in terms of beauty and ugliness), the eyes—to a handful of privileged locations. Is there a reason for this? Language, perhaps? The mirror? The unconscious? No. Rather, it is Western culture, more barbarous than the barbarians, that misunderstands the body. It is the ideology of imagery and language, the Jewish and Christian tradition of contempt for the flesh, aggravated by the reign of advertising rhetoric, signs and significations, in a social space in which references to the body have disappeared, supplanted or replaced by the reference to speech alone. This return to the body does not imply a return to the body of old, when the child, the adolescent, the adult obtained from their environment the indispensible elements that enabled them to experience their body without leading it astray. A tree? Consider the uses for the body and the gifts that this creature of nature, so easily within our reach, showers upon us.The tree remains upright, tall and calm, from its roots to its uppermost leaves.The child turns around the tree, climbs upon it, hides in it, and his body uses it as a model, taking the measure of this enracinated being,solid and erect,rising to its full height.Likewise,from the most delicate blade of grass to the most stable rock, nature provides thelessonof livingthings;theyhavenothingincommonwiththeabstract thing,the fearful thing,the sign-thing,the coin,the banknote,the wallet and portfolio, the electric light, a Gillette or Philips razor, gadgets and kitsch. In all these objects, there is nothing that offers our senses (the organs and our awareness) the body entire. All are fragmented and dispersed , degrading and extrapolating the body’s perceptions and its lived experience (through a process of metaphorization). Most people ignore their body and misunderstand it. Some, caught up in the division of labor, only make use of the gestures of fragmented labor, gestures that have an influence outside work and shape the body and daily life. Others, including our “elites,” are consumed by images, narcissism,abstraction.Abstract social space contains this unrecognized (diabolical) paradox.It is homogeneous because...