Meeting Place: The Human Encounter and the Challenge of Coexistence

First Impressions

First Impressions 121 Circling round the erotope brings us to another topic: the writing of public space. Up until now the phenomenon of meeting has been imagined as emerging out of a primary pantomimicry, as an evolution of gestures informing a performance whose communication is increasingly verbal. The word discourse means literally a running hither and thither, and this sense of meeting as a choreography of encounter has enabled us to define the meeting place in terms of the dynamics of meeting itself, as an event whose meaning is inscribed in the continuous present of the action. A tradition of such actions depends on the repeated performance (always with differences ) of the program. Once again, in this account the ground slips away. The performative characterization of the meeting place becomes increasingly self-sufficient, and outside of itself it leaves no lasting impression. In the northern (and western) tradition, this bias is reinforced by the use of materials in the design of the public domain that resist impression: the cubed and dressed volcanic rocks, the strengthened glass, the miraculously smooth and largely scratch-resistant strips of plated metal—these are not amenable to marking, although graffiti appears there overnight. To put the graphic back into choreography, it is necessary to soften the materials used to construct the place. This need not mean in the first instance substituting sand for cobbles or timber for brick. It may mean thinking about the technology of writing differently. For example, what is the writing of second impressions? Restif de La Bretonne retraces places of erotic encounter, perhaps by chiseling a graffito more deeply, or merely by reproducing certain motions associated with the original event. Proust’s stereoscopic vision is, after all, the ordinary experience of any passer-by in a modern city mall where walls are of reflective or partially reflective glass. 122 first impressions Doubling, self-doubling, and all the palimpsestic illusionism of Photoshop constitute the ordinary multiplication of the self in public space and represent a running writing that in real time joins up our solitary progress to the Brownian motion of an imaginary crowd. Stereoscopy presupposes a synthetic intelligence and vision able to put together materials that have been laid side by side, but it also presupposes the existence of an impressionable matrix able to receive and retain impressions, a hotel or other milieu whose hollow is able to hold these jostling traces so that they can be revisited. To join up these scattered impressions demands a writing able to materializeallthetracesofpassage ,acursivescriptequivalentperhapstoLeibniz’s “geometric line” able to create a pattern of all the points passed through. Such a script would not use conventional signs for sounds and concepts; it would have an indexical relationship to the movement forms it described. It would recover the ground or environment of writing, whose existence is evoked (perhaps surprisingly) by Descartes in a letter to Antoine Arnauld, where he writes: “We say that there are no human tracks in the sand if we cannot find any impressions shaped like the human foot, though perhaps there may be many unevennesses made by the human feet, which can therefore in another sense be called human tracks.”1 A script able to record “unevennesses” would reinstate the mobile histories that underwrite maps; it would record qualities of orientation, rhythm, pose, and repose. The lie of the land and its topography of gradients, hollows, edges, differential textures , and variable hardnesses, so cursorily indicated or not represented at allinpaintingsandplans,wouldbetranscribed.Inaddition,atalargerscale, the microhistories of journeys, the pattern of footsteps, their natural inclination toward meeting places, and even the vortices of erotopes, might be legible. It is these mediated traces that Thomas De Quincey refers to when he writes that all “reasoning . . . carried on discursively” is mediated, “that is, discurrendo,—by running about to the right and the left, laying the separate notices together, and thence mediately deriving some third apprehension.”2 The difference of this “apprehension” from an axiom derived by purely logical reasoning is that it retains a trace of the process that brings it into being. To explain this, De Quincey uses a striking spatial figure of speech. The “third apprehension” can be compared, he says, to the tracks trading vessels leave in the sea, “so many thousands of captains, commodores, admirals . . . eternally running up and down it, and scoring lines upon its face.” Iftheseephemeraltracescouldbepreserved,theweaveofthemwouldyield first impressions 123 a pattern, and, he imagines, “in some...