fragmentation and wholeness

Sanford Kwinter, in Chapter 2 of Architectures of Time:

Much of our (modernist) culture clung exuberantly to this new world, but often as a radical, new form of totality that was comprised no longer of oppressive, passe, or falsely consoling forms but of fragments. This gesture came to represent nothing less than an apparent rebirth of matter and meaning, for suddenly anything seemed again possible, the old laws no longer applied, the new ones were yet to be invented; all was polyvalency, possibility, and promiscuity. But this exuberance of experimentation was seldom separable from an almost universal anxiety of loss, of disenfranchisement and disorientation. Fragments after all were shards, ruins--at best, braves traces of a past or future plenitude. Fragmentation and its attendant spectacle of polyvocality was perhaps an incomplete consolation for a world that would never again serve as a home. Yet are we not still far from the Greek world of happy immancence where delight in phenomena and appearance was everything? Can our own "condition," typified and expressed through the modern emblem of the "fragment," ever be conceived free of the nihilism embedded both in myth and memory, a nihilism by whose agency we define ourselves (and our world) always in relation to what we are not (and never were)--that is, unitary and constant beings? Fragments, for the moderns--though still for us today--are too often "thought" in terms of a world and a Wholeness to which they no longer have any relation. Is it not possible, however, to restore to the fragment that which is properly its due, to develop it in the element of its positivity, as a specific characterization of matter within a continuous, fluctuating, and time-imbued multiplicity? (37)

thoughts:

1. Kwinter's last question is that which faces all students as they posit the function of constructed space under the pressures of pervasive globalism.

2. Kwinter suggests that we re-place the fragment within that which is continuous, but also that which is fluctuating and time-imbued. i'm not sure what he wants from such a project. isn't it the fragment that has not been restored to "that which is properly its due" that describes a continuity in a fluctuating multiplicity? i thought that's what he was saying before the last sentence.

3. i agree with Kwinter's use of the term 'ruin,' and my project at this point is to position the physical ruin within what Kwinter describes earlier in chapter 2 as the "philosophical, ontological problem of modernity."