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The Detail and the Pan 267also the ‘‘appearance ‘of’ ’’ a labile, unstable paradigm. That is why theorder of reason is in some sense subtracted from it twice over.I note in passing that, in his way, Proust articulates a like ‘‘unstablesovereignty’’ when, in a passage about the music of Vinteuil, heevokes its ‘‘unperceived phrases, obscure larvae at first indistinct,’’ butsuddenly ‘‘dazzling architectural structures’’: not architecture whosecolumns can be counted, but, he says, ‘‘sensations of light, clear rumblings’’—andtransfiguring ones. 68 Specifically, Proust articulates atonce the insistence of these singularities and their pure value as fugitive‘‘radiances’’: they ‘‘promenaded before my imagination with insistence,but too rapidly to be apprehended, something that I mightcompare to the silky scent of a geranium’’ 69 . . . What crop out, hecontinues on the same page, are ‘‘disjointed fragments, radiances withscarlet fissures,’’ and they are fragments not of a whole in action, butof a force, something that he calls ‘‘an unknown and colorful fête.’’ 70Now at this point Vermeer of course crops up again: Vermeer, whosepaintings are ‘‘fragments of a single world,’’ he says—but not a reference-world,a reality-world: it is, on the contrary, ‘‘the same new andunique beauty, an enigma in this period when nothing either resemblesor explains it, if one doesn’t try to sort it out by subject, but torelease the particular impression that the color produces.’’ This worldis strictly ‘‘a certain color of fabrics and of places,’’ Proust writes:which is to say, in a sense, paint itself, applied to canvas to produceits own place, its deposit of color and meaning. 71Beyond the Detail PrincipleLet’s attempt a short recapitulation. Concerning the relation betweenpart and whole, let’s say that in the detail the part is severable fromthe whole, whereas in the pan the part consumes the whole. Thedetail: it is, for example, a thread, in other words an easily locatedcircumscription of the figurative space; it has extension (however minimal),a well-defined size; it pertains to a measurable space. The pan,by contrast, presents itself as a zone of colored intensity; as such, ithas an ‘‘inordinate,’’ not measurable, capacity of expansion—not ex-