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The Ontological
Structure of Mediance as a Condition of Meaning
The ecumene, a word deriving from the Greek oikoumene (ge), i.e. the inhabited (earth), from oikeo (inhabit), has been considered by modern geography as an object, that is, the part of the Earth inhabited by Humankind. It is here understood an an ontological relationship, meaning both the Earth as inhabited by the Human, and the Human as inhabiting the Earth. I call 'mediance' (mediance) the disposition of this relationship, a word coined from the latin medietas (half) and meaning that our being dwells half in the topos of our body and half in the chora of our world. This conception stems from three main sources. First, the Heideggerian concept of Ausser sich sein (being outside of oneself), which Watsuji developed into that of fudosei (mediance) and defined as the structural moment of human existence. Second, Leroi-Gourhan's concept of corps social (social body), implying the evolutional process by dint of which the human species emerged. This process, through the development of technical and symbolical systems, exteriorised into a social body the functions which initially were, directly and individually, those of our animal body. Third, Merleau-Ponty,s idea, recently developed by Lakoff and Johnson on the ground of cognitive sciences, that thought stems from our flesh. Added to the findings of biosemiotics, this discards both the modern conception of thought as disembodied and the postmodern conception of meaning as a mere combination of signs. Meaning stems from the ontological structure of mediance, as the ecumene supposes the biosphere, which supposes the planet, while the reverse is not true : it is a tendency, which cannot be reversed because it has a history, that of the contingent emergence of life out of matter and of language and thought out of life. Yet, in order to understand this contingent dynamic of mediance, we have to modify Leroi-Gourhan,s schema. While technical systems act as an exteriorisation of our animal body,s functions into a world (i.e. are a cosmisation of our body), symbolic systems act on the contrary as an interiorisation of this world into our flesh (i.e. are a somatisation of our world). Meaning is this dynamic of cosmisation-somatisation ; that is, the pulsation of human existence (ek-sistence), by dint of which our being comes out as a world, and the world comes in as our being. This process is called trajectivity. It entails that the things around us are not objects ; they are fraught with our existence. This relationship is not, as in the modern view, a one-sided projection of human subjectiveness onto objects. The modern view entails that meaning is a mere semiotical and arbitrary structure, with no ontological relation with the things. On the contrary, trajectivity founds the signs in the meaning of things and this in turn in the ontological structure of mediance, the origin of which is the history of the universe. Traditional cultures have intuitively expressed this contingent but not arbitrary relationship through sets of analogies between the human body and the world, as reveal the very words of kosmos and mundus (originally meaning an order which encompasses and couples the universe and the body) and the cosmological structure of pre-modern settlements. Modern dualism has disrupted such analogies, and by so doing has deprived meaning of its ontological and cosmological grounds. Contemporary architecture, in the wake of poststructuralist deconstructivism, utterly expresses this deprivation of ground. In that sense, understanding the cosmo-ontological structure of mediance leads to a refoundation of architecture.
These views are developed in my book Ecoumene : introduction a l'etude des milieux humains. Paris : Belin, in the press. See also Mediance : de milieux en paysages. Paris : Belin, 2000 ( 1st ed. 1990) and Etre humains sur la Terre : principes d'ethique de l'ecoumene. Paris : Gallimard, 1996. E-mail: berque@mail.sp.myu.ac.jp
Augustin Berque, (b.1942),a French geographer and orientalist, member of the Academia europea, teaches at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (Paris) and at Miyagi University (Sendai). He has published extensively on questions concerning the ecumene, especially on Japan. Eight of his books have been translated into Japanese, and two into English: Japan: Nature, Artifice and Japanese Culture and Japan: Cities and Social Bonds, both at Pilkington Press (Yelvertoft Manor, Northhamptonshire) in 1997. His latest publications include, as co-author, Between Japan and the Mediterranean: Architecture and Presence to the World (Entre Japon et Mediterranee: Architecture et presence au monde. Paris: Massin, 1999); as editor and co-author, La Mouvance: From Garden to Territory, 50 Words for Landscape (La Mouvance: Du jardin au territoire, 50 mots pour le paysage. Paris: Editions de la Villette, 1999) and the two volumes of Logic of Place and the Overcoming of Modernity (Logique du lieu at depassement de la modernitie, Brussels: Ousia, 2000), associating 25 philosophers and social scientists from 9 countries in an assessment of Kitaro Nishida's conception of basho (place). A. Berque has received several awards, including a Prix de la Society de Geographie in 1991 for his book Mediance, and the 1997 Yamagata Banta sho for his works in Japanese studies. A general presentation of his theories has recently been published by Toru Araki: Along with Augustin Berque (Ogyusutan Beruku to tomo ni. Tokyo: Kenkyukai Signo,1999).
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