PASSAGES

Charles Baudelaire, Journaux Intimes (1887)[1]

he paradox of a beauty founded in sorrow, a love of loss, of longing, is melancholy’s gift to aesthetics.  Despite the potency of this bittersweetness, melancholy has been largely marginalised within architecture and landscape architecture, overshadowed by the supposedly nobler aesthetic conventions of the sublime, the beautiful and the picturesque.    Society clamours to suppress all signs of sadness, and the design professions aid in this denial, offering buildings and parks that act as all-pervasive sedatives, numbing and desensitizing.  This aesthetic anaesthesia is manifested in such seductions as the virtual, the architecture of happiness, and an avoidance of subjectivity.  Even memorials shy away from the beauty of sorrow, offering instead a distancing, a detachment, through such strategies as focussing on the arithmetic of tragedy, the numbers of losses, the volume of debris, dates, lists of names.    

Throughout history, melancholy’s eternal recurrence infuses philosophy, art, literature, and medicine, from Aristotle’s Problem XXX, I, which concerned the paradox of melancholic genius, through to the re-investigation of melancholia by Freud in 1917, an event which Giorgio Agamben asserts “testifies to the extraordinary stability over time of the melancholy constellation: the withdrawal from the object and the withdrawal into itself of the contemplative tendency.”[2]  Slavoj Žižek positions melancholy, and its concern with loss and longing, at the very heart of the human condition, that, “In this precise sense, melancholy (disappointment with all positive, empirical objects, none of which can satisfy our desire) is in fact the beginning of philosophy.”[3] 

Melancholy’s terrain, its topological formation, is complex, at some times a physical manifestation, and others psychical.  Fear of the dark connotations of melancholy make it vulnerable to the incursions of pharmacy upon its richly mythic domain, attempting to drive out its demons, and with them the very soul of things.   The shadowy qualities of melancholia are sublimated, happiness comes in a packet, the very denial of the conundrum of melancholic genius.   

At the same time as this deadening of the spirit takes place, there arises the spectre of the parasitic consumption of images of tragedy.  The landscape and architectural analogues of bodies wasted by war are the images of bankrupt spaces, of dereliction and toxicity.  Melancholy is sometimes conflated with such imagery, yet, as this manifesto asserts, such a perspective confuses the elusive beauty of longing with an impoverished sensibility borne of considering the world a mere spectacle.  Far beyond the spectacle, far from noxious toxic landscapes of ruin, lurk architectures and landscapes of melancholy, hovering within an elusive liminal sphere, the topos of pathos. 

[1] In Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 151.

[2] Girogio Agamben,  Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (trans. Ronald L. Martinez)  Theory and History of Literature, vol 69. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 19.

[3] Slavoj Žižek,  Did Somebody say Totalitarianism?  Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion.  (London: Verso, 2001), 148.