An Ode to Kneading Dough

In his chapter on
the soft matter of the earth, Bachelard sees the workings of oils,
creams and doughs as derivatives from what he calls an ideal of primary
‘paste’, ‘the perfect synthesis of stiffness and softness, a marvellous
equilibrium of yielding and resisting forces’ (Bachelard 1948: 78).
Bachelard’s discussion of this primary paste occurs as the first in a
series of discussions of dreams of terrene matter, as these are played
out between the alternatives of the hard (rock, crystal, diamond, iron)
and the soft (clay, putty, oil). It is the ideal of such a paste which
allows Bachelard to posit the existence of a new kind of cogito,
or sense of self. In between the neutral cogito of mere self-knowing
and the more active kind of self-recognition which arises in the
‘phenomenology of the against’ the sense of straining or striving against things (and perhaps before both of these allotropes of the cogito), there is ‘a cogito of kneading’ – ‘un cogito
pétrisseur’ (Bachelard 1948: 79). The action of kneading is a process
that turns slack mud, mire or waste into a dough or paste that is taut
with potential, whether as nutriment or cement. Mixing in is vital to
this process, in particular the addition of oil, butter or other fatty
substances to powder or flour. The aim of kneading is to blend together
the joined and the disjoined, breadth and depth, the virtue of oil’s
smooth spread and the density of pulverised substance. In kneading, one
repeatedly folds the outer skin of the substance inwards, until it is as
it were crammed with surface tension, full of its outside. The result,
for Bachelard, is no mere mixture, but a tonic mass, full of
tensile potential: the strudel dough that can be drawn out almost
indefinitely. The action of kneading makes the material alive because it
invests it with energy. One seems literally to put work into the
substance one kneads, inducing kinetic potential into the previously
dead substance. When one kneads dough or clay, it is as if one were
winding a spring. A lump of worked dough is a negentropic niche in
things. Time has been folded in to it along with work and air, and so,
having undergone a transition from an in-itself to a for-itself, it has a
future. Dough is quickened mass: not amorphous, but incipient of shape,
not slack but charged. Erotic life may begin with the caress, but
without the action of kneading, moulding your partner into new life,
eros cannot be long protracted. The body is quickened as the soil is
quickened, by turning it over, by folding it into itself, with the
addition of air. When air is folded into pastry, time is folded in too:
the time of growth, of the swelling of the soufflé, the breathed-in
dish. In one sense, the skin is the antagonist of a kneaded world, for
the skin is what holds individual lives separate and aloof; it is
integument which guarantees the integrity of shape, and signifies the
suspension of decomposition that is all life. But skin, which Serres
always represents topologically, also holds the dream of the kneaded
body, the dough-body, the cogito pétrisseur.

http://stevenconnor.com/topologies.html