Éléments pour une symptomatologie des ambiances urbaines. L’exemple de Venise, à la lumière de Ruskin et de Proust

Abstract

This article is a contribution to current debates on the notion of urban ambience. It attempts to identify the generative dimension of urban ambience and thus seeks to distinguish it from a growing social demand for conditioned atmospheres (supermarkets, subways, etc.) driven by a rather instrumental vision of the relation between humans and their environments. Building on the works of Gilles Deleuze, this contribution revisits the idea that perception conceived of as activity of knowledge is underpinned by an aesthetic mode of understanding: recognition is grounded on sensations that can elude it at any moment and thus initiate an understanding of urban environment along a direction that is no longer conceptual. In this contribution, this process is characterized through the notions of measure and rhythm, on the assumption that at any given moment rhythm can elude measure and feed a perception that is no longer constituent and formal but proliferative and pre-formal. These categories (measure and rhythm) allow the description and analysis of the processes that decompose perceptual synthesis. It is hypothesized that this process is tantamount to an understanding of urban environment through its ambience and appearances rather than through form and structure. Hence, urban ambience is by no means something given a priori : it belongs neither to the subject, nor to the object ; rather, it acquires singular status through the emergence in thought of unthinkable elements of sensitivity. At this level, the urban entity offers no explicit meaning but the signs of a complex reality. Such reality cannot be understood easily and codes that can help understand it need to be identified. Following Ruskin and then Proust in Venice, urban ambience is characterized through the signs it offers to experience and through its symptomatology. This perspective introduces a reflection on the phenomenological approaches to urban ambience and on the way these approaches allow understanding problems related to multiplicity, novelty, and ongoing developments.

Keywords

• urban ambience
• measure
• rhythm
• trace
• sign
• symptomatology