Renovation 1

Renovation, specifically the renovation of buildings, has been an obsession of mine for quite a while. I mean this in the sense that it is one of the only things that can evoke a real and visceral sense of disgust or hatred in me. So, I guess it’s then less an obsession with renovation and more so an obsession with lamentation – with what I see as the death of the building. Every time I go to eat in a newly renovated restaurant it feels as if I am defiling a corpse and I find it displeasurable to even eat the food. Part of this is definitely a sort of neurotic-nostalgic tendency (I guess one could say a certain “complex” or arrangement brought forth by my intensely sheltered-suburban upbringing), and it’s one that I’m not particularly proud of. But I don’t think it would be practical or beneficial to try and dismiss my disgust, because it’s an obsession that I can’t help but see everywhere, including in the process of renovation itself. 

An analysis of that process will be the primary focus of these entries, though I’ll inevitably veer into discussion about nostalgia in the context of “social groups” (I’m wording this in the most general way because I have no satisfactory way to specify what I mean by this right now, I hope that it will become clear in time what specific social phenomenon I’m referring to).

About a year ago I wrote about renovation and nostalgia on a different blog, and it was awful, like really, really awful. But I think I was moving in a somewhat interesting direction: backwards. Maybe it’s incorrect to say that I was moving backwards, rather the thing I found interesting in my old post was that I had firmly rooted the concepts of renovation and “refresh” in a sort of return, as counter-intuitive as that might sound. And I mean this at a level more profound than “a renovation needs to take into account what it is renovating,” I think that renovation is primarily a process of indeterminate returning. All renovation, as a formal process (and I should clarify, when I say renovation I don’t mean some generalized notion of “creative addition” or “change” – renovation is a specific formal process, I’d even go as far to say a specifically “captured” process: an appropriated form of creativity and change, I guess), needs a model to work with: a stable stock of “raw-material” (processable “things” – I’m not sure whether I should call them ideas or concepts or something else entirely) to interface with; to take from and to deposit to in one (none?) indeterminate motion. I’m going to follow the advice of Guattari and say that this is in no way a thermodynamic process, there is no strict arrangement of input / output or cause and effect in the process of renovation. And in much the same way when I say that it is a captured or appropriative process that in no way means that it is destructive or otherwise “bad,” it rather means that it is just profoundly up in the air in terms of its most immediate social implications (this is the part that intrigues me most); renovation is still, whether it be through a hazy relation of reference or a relationship of another sort entirely, rendered as a creative social force and thus still brings with it the potential for genuine social-molecular flux, change, and rupture. So maybe it’s better to formulate it as such: renovation is a specific and formal (captured, appropriative), yet also indeterminate and creative process, and there is no reason to view these two “sets” of qualities as separate from each other in any binary way – they are same “side” of a zero sided coin.

I’m going to leave it here for now, but as you can see these posts will probably tend towards being quite unfocused and informal, which I think is ok for now.

Everything above is subject to change – and it will, I assure you.