L + A (+ +): THE GIVEN, THE TAKEN, AND THE GIVEN-BACK

(SLIDE – L + A (+ +) = /S/OME-THING ELSE)

“May it come, may it come / The time of which we’d be enamored” --Rimbaud, “Alchimie du verbe”

(SLIDE – ACER PENNSYLVANICUM)

“No ideas without things”, goes the maxim regarding the stringent, salutary emphasis of contemporary epistemology regarding immanence versus transcendence. If this privileging of the horizontal axis of contingency strikes down any vertical emphasis in paradigmatic or abstract (even metaphysical) concepts (ideas beyond things) it remains to be seen how formalist and purely conceptual operations may be resituated in a radical contingent expression of Becoming (versus Being) and experience (versus ideality and disembodied, rarified, and/or de-natured transcendentals), the latter (experience) always at risk of the plundering exigencies (and codes) of ideologies left, right, and center. The structural ‘nature’ of architecture (its ideological architectonic ‘nature’ … strung out seemingly forever on the structuralist dialectic Nature/Culture … or nailed to the crossroads of mis-representation … that is, caught in the crosshairs of contingent and abstract forces …) in particular is suspended (twisting in the wind) in the apparent endless circling of this gap/aporia in search of its own meaning while negating, in the process, its putative promise as site versus object.

In some ways the foremost place to be today is within the charged space of radical phenomenology, within the unbounded bound of the third reduction traced by Jean-Luc Marion (in Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, 1997), wherein the concept of givenness ‘comes home’ -- as the proverbial cows are always already coming home. It is here, too, that radical contingency opens on the horizon of things and concepts (the so-called ‘world’) and begins to re-inscribe (re-write) experience such that it becomes truly possible to harvest the 20th century and all its tragic historical and discursive currents, aiming, then, toward Some-thing Else altogether.

(SLIDE – VRTBOVSKA GARDEN / SCAFFOLD)

This third reduction takes all of the words out of the mouths of things (phenomena) that we have placed there, freeing both subject and object from a ground literally littered with ruins and debris -- arguably the condition itself of shattered, circular, nihilistic post-modernity (as it resides within the broken promises and premises of Modernity and its discontents).

(SLIDE – VRTBOVSKA GARDEN / GLORIET)

The freely given (as proto-event / urfaktum) frees, as well, things from the logic of the signifier (the so-called “tyranny of the sign”) insofar as that logic is an empirical, objective, and purely rational orbit into which things and concepts have been made to swim (the narrow straits/milieux of positivism). The given restores a primacy to the so-called nature of things by extracting the last traces of specious ‘instrumentalized’ intentionality, a complex of misappropriations that underwrite the everyday destruction of experience (pace Agamben), denoted in the expression ‘the given, the taken, and the given-back.’ Whether this spirit of givenness is the Coming Coming of Heidegger (or the Coming Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, or even the Coming One of Expressionism) remains to be seen, in that Marion suggests that it may be possible to pass through this last reduction and out into freedom, as Artaud suggested that we pass through the real to the surreal (and the surrational), to a ‘sublime’ place that schematises the world.

“The origin of givenness remains the ‘self’ of the phenomenon, with no other principle or origin besides itself.” (Marion, p. 20)

(SLIDE – ICEFLOW)

Entelechy (or the fond, fund) out of which things appear (give themselves), a ‘medieval’ (and Aristotelean) concept resurrected by Umberto Eco in Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (1988), brings this last reduction home to architecture insofar as architecture overcomes its crisis in the static, singular (frozen) object and truly becomes a place of appearance (a form of evidence) for the Real, for authentic presence (for what is given). Such an architecture (an architecture as site) might disclose a radical aesthetics, perhaps, yet not a subject-laden tour of possible forms of beauty other than beauty that is also sublime (a sublime aesthetics?) that permits access to the vast field (fund) of repressions within signifying chains, statics, geometries, and -- indeed -- ideologies. In other words, architecture against architecture (until architecture truly becomes ‘haunted’ … Or, as Pallasmaa has said, until architecture becomes a home for metaphysical beings … “Architecture is always inhabited by spirits. People known to us may well live in the building, but they are only understudy actors in a waking dream. In reality architecture is always the home of spirits, the dwelling place of metaphysical beings.”) … (Pallasmaa, p. 452) In other words, a transcendency that actually takes up residence in things; or, this world made anew.

(SLIDE – HOUSE_HOUSE)
(SLIDE – PERSPECTIVE)

Radical immanence then (transcendence within immanence) … The given appears as subject to the object as subject, and subjectivities meet face-to-face  … “The phenomenon taken in its duality [its doubling in intentionality] remains immanent to consciousness only because intentional consciousness has first become immanent to the appearing object.” (Marion, p. 25) … Marion implies that one must be receptive to the given (align oneself with it), which implies, in turn, the whole range of justifications for ‘programming’ and for the theft of subjectivity always already underway within ‘objectifying’ systems (various and sundry repressive architectures included). It is (and was) Roman Jakobson’s 1935 lecture “The Dominant”, delivered in Brno (at Masaryk University), that seemed to lay bare the principal method of repression operative within the 20th century; that is, the quasi-scientific modus vivendi appropriated by various disciplines -- inclusive of Architecture (the capitalised version) -- formerly considered fine arts (or at the least arts of one kind or another …) … The coincidence of the work of Edmund Husserl (c.1901) and Fernand de Saussure (father of structural linguistics), and the insistent coordinates of diachrony and synchrony (now much problematised and exhausted) marks the second-to-last turn of the century and the starting point for a long and oftimes rigorous examination (exhumation) of the problem of representation and its current transformation under the sign of simultaneity. As some have said, the sign has, indeed, set … And yet, as Thoreau has suggested, the sun is also a morning star.

(SLIDE – OJAI SUNSET)
(SLIDE – DESCARTES)
(SLIDE – ISOZAKI’S MoCA / LA)

Now, Marion points out that (famously) Husserl never offered a definition of givenness but arrived at it through the phenomenological reduction (which he was always re-tooling anyway). Essentially, it (givenness) is a remainder (despite Marion’s claim otherwise) in the same manner that Descartes’ cogito is an “indivisible remainder” for Slovenian-Lacanian magus and trickster Slavoj Zizek. This prompts speculation that the same is true for L + A (+ This + That), regarding the Real; that is, it will always remain a remainder within everything else (anomie, urban crises, environmental degradation, etcetera) until -- indeed -- the cows come home. It is perhaps by way of the negative dialectics of minimalism (and in particular Swiss minimalism … speaking of the cows coming home’ …) that we can see that the Some-thing Else that awaits us (is on the doorstep?) is also not to be named, as such, but experienced. In Isozaki’s ‘paranoid urbanist’ phase (before he renounced irony and got into trouble anyway for his rationalist-surrealist loggia at the backside of the Uffizi Galleries in Florence) -- and it is the link between Massimo Cacciari and Isozaki that points up the end of normative metaphysics within nihilism -- we can still see an attempt to perform a type of reduction (if not surgery) that approaches an uncanny (perhaps de Chirico-esque) dimension within design that opens on to a post-modern sublime, or the sublime anti-aesthetic spectacle of the city (a demoted Sublime, in the same way that Foucault demoted the Zeitgeist to the episteme), a vision yet held in thrall to abstract perhaps sinister forces (pace film noir) both deterministic and merely unfathomable (incommensurable for the wrong reasons) because such reasons are, after all, mechanisms left over from the implosion of Modernist hegemony. It is these same mechanisms rendered more or less immaterial by late-Capitalism (and certainly neo-liberal capitalism, i.e., global capitalism) that invest contemporary urbanism (and its latest manifestation as ‘landscape urbanism’) with a specious heterogeneity that represents the endless semiosis of a fallen and/or broken Utopian dream (the gist of Manfredo Tafuri’s caustic and oftimes apocalyptic analytic). The current nightmare, or collective psychosis, is best exemplified by the influx of datascapes and information theory into architectural production (under the enigmatic term “total flow”, instrumentalized immanency), such that the old mechanisms are merely re-mapped or re-coded as temporal flows crossing the filmic surface of everyday experience and rendering depth (the enemy of nihilism) an illusory something endlessly deferred (or simulated). Depth rendered harmless then … Depth deferred over and over again, given its anti-dogmatic and anti-objective givenness.

Massimo Cacciari’s dyspeptic 1980 summary of “urban planning” remains apropos of the current situation insofar as most of the occasions for this critique remain as ‘facts on the ground’ today. In the contemporary city, according to Cacciari, “A play of reason centered about the com-posing, de-composing, and re-composing of the signs of the metropolis” is writ large, ugly, and everywhere (and ‘in-between’, despite the continuing privileging of this ‘in-betweenness’ by those whom should know better anyway … meaning the so-called avant-garde cadre within architecture and landscape architecture …) … Cacciari sees, where Koolhaas sees frisson and excitement, “disenchanted variants of a fundamental ‘misery’.” 

(SLIDE – HUMPTY DUMPTY)
(SLIDE – ANGEL / NOUVEL)

As with Heidegger, in Cacciari’s essay “Eupalinos or Architecture” (1980) we (collectively) are bound within the necessity of continuing to “unmask all appeals” to a “science of productivity” in building … And we wait, listening, for that sublime Some-thing Else always already absent, enduring “the continuous wait in the silence of listening.” (Cacciari, pp. 396-397)

(SLIDE - MOUNT AUBURN CEMETERY)

How works of L + A (+ +) appear (arrive) and whether they remain captive within the throes/knots of an ideological matrix, the confinement of empty geometric gestures (neo-purist or otherwise), or the autistic gestures of an empty formalism or an elective minimalism (which is effectively and affectively an ‘elective’, private utopia) seems the first order of questioning to be staged (and re-staged), all the while remembering that “the reduction does nothing; it lets manifestation manifest itself; it takes the initiative (of considering seriously what is lived by consciousness) only in order to offer it to what manifests itself […] The reduction must be done in order to undo it and let it become the apparition of what shows itself in it, though finally without it.” (Marion, p. 10)

(SLIDE – GETTY GARDEN / IRWIN)
(SLIDE – VOGUE / MILIEU)
(SLIDE – GEBAUER / RUNNING GIRL)

This ‘zigzagging’ process mirrors the path of consciousness itself, that telltale ‘doubling’ of intention insofar as the thing or concept arrives almost as a spectre (ghost) ‘in the world of appearances’ not as mere representation but as authentic presence. If it continues to act as an index (pace Krauss), or semiotic shifter, it is still, to a degree, a manifestation of a state of things (perhaps as Caillois has proposed by way of the ‘intuitional’ milieu of ‘environmental’ mimicry, the nominal ‘self’ merging with/mirroring its milieu), an echo of what lies beyond/before the transcendental subject (the ‘I’, or the ego), a sign that is, in fact, a lacerating thing (gesture) caught within cultural production and its ideological analogues. This gesturalism derives its energy and its being from coordinates that, even if unstable, remain this side of the sublime aesthetics always already witnessed within the given conditionality of the world.

(SLIDE – BATTERY PARK CITY WINTER GARDEN)

And, if neo-modernisms just keep coming, as so much traffic at a busy intersection, first turning left, then right, then ploughing straight through in both directions, simultaneously, it is because the traffic engineers (the architectural authorities) have decided to merely widen the roadway (open further the definition of modernism). As everyone knows, if you widen the roadway, adding more and more lanes, more and more traffic will ensue, while the pedestrian (the given) is stranded on the pavement or midstream (on the island amidst all this traffic) quite simply ‘waiting’ and ‘waiting’.

(SLIDE – ARAKAWA & GINS / REVERSIBLE DESTINY)
(SLIDE – EISENMAN / SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA)

If Some-thing Else (whatever it is or may be) is presaged anyway, always in the margins (offstage), waiting in the wings and (perhaps) mise en scène (placement in scene) of architectural production, if it is L + A (+ +), or if L + A (+ +) may best prepare and secure its arrival, then a look at two extreme (radical) projects might suggest what is at stake, even if this /S/ome-thing Else is not quite there after all.

(SLIDE – L + A (+ +) = /S/)
(SLIDE – EISENMAN / BERLIN MEMORIAL)

Both Arakawa & Gins’ on-rolling Reversible Destiny and Peter Eisenman’s Cultural Center for Santiago de Compostela appear (almost out of duress/agitation) within the horizon of a phenomenological turn of the same sort Marion diagrams (schematises), such that each is a type of portent (vivid presentiment) as well as possible canonical work of the early 21st century, arguably completely outside and well beyond the reactionary revisionism of neo-modernisms left, right, and center. As canonical, these projects (hardly architectural objects any longer) reside in a place that conflates imagination and a possible sublime aesthetics, and they in many senses set the stage for L + A (+ +) and that very slippery Some-thing Else that only mimics a classical master signifier, while signifying everything else (everything repressed).

With Eisenman, perhaps, we should question whether modern architecture actually ever occurred, is occurring, or can occur (appear), as an elective way out of the circular (hermeneutic) arguments surrounding the hegemony of the architectural thing-in-itself (the object). Or, with Loos, perhaps we must pass through the tomb (the ‘X’ within the labyrinth of architectural thought) and out into that time of which we might be enamoured; a type of time, versus merely another time.

(SLIDE – EISENMAN / SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA) 

Eisenman, as extreme formalist, and Arakawa & Gins, as extreme phenomenologists (though their language games do not permit this self-identity), attempt a type of end run on Modernist hegemony and dogma (and all of its reifications / redefinitions) by positing instead an in-born(e) sense of time purely configured within the architectural complex (formal field, plus discourse) presenting not objects but fields and folds (waves, vortices, event-horizons, landing sites) that imply the thing always already suppressed within modernist rhetoric; that is to say, the sublime Some-thing Else buried, bruised and bleeding (depth versus mere space, or merely more abstract space) beneath everything else.

(SLIDE – LOOK DEEPER / SF)
(SLIDE – HEDJUK / SANTIAGO DE COMPOSTELA)

This sublime Some-thing Else has for the most part (elsewhere and erstwhile) been problematized by Eisenman as the grotesque (and by Vidler as the uncanny) while remaining within its prescribed orbit of phantasm (within phantasmatic space … as angels are said to arrive from/return to a super-celestial phantasmatic space … which brings up the whole problem of Hejduk and the presence of his two towers embedded within the Santiago complex). This phantasmatic surplus registers as well within the Lacanian orbit, as a screen (the Imaginary) onto which things are projected -- intuited as almost always monstrous things -- or, a form of psychic mechanism that signifies representation itself alongside or within the field of normative constructs typified by the complex of the Lacanian Symbolic. Within this perverse system the Real only ever appears as irruptive and/or uncanny episodes. As ‘Other’, and as such (disembodying ‘the given’), the Real is automatically marginalised, problematised, and instrumentalised -- and the transcendental ego (subject/self) is, in turn, simply traumatised in its presence.

(SLIDE – WITCHHAZEL)
(SLIDE – KSLA / TOPIARY GARDEN)
(SLIDE – ANTONIN ARTAUD)
(SLIDE – VELAZQUEZ’S CHRIST)
(SLIDE – SUB-CALLA)

What, then, is this sublime Some-thing Else? Perhaps it is best approached by a series of analogues, since it may be after all (as Marions says) ‘unsayable’ (and unassailable). Such a series of analogues would include but by no means be limited to: Perhaps 1/ the space (urban void) from which emerges Ken Smith and Jim Conti’s Glowing Topiary Garden (inclusive of the warped parameters that allow illuminated fabric cones to re-constitute a form of ironic urban ‘topiary’) … Perhaps 2/ the blackness you see when you close your eyes … the black pupils of your lover’s eyes … the black pupils of the icon’s gaze … Perhaps 3/ the space underneath your bed (pace Bachelard) … Perhaps 4/ mesmeric pools (pace French landscape aesthetician Jean-Marie Morel) … Perhaps 5/ the blackened space of the cinema (despite Godard’s endless reservations) or theatre (despite Artaud’s endless enmity) … Perhaps 6/ the vault of the night sky … or the abyss (despite rationalist scare tactics) … Perhaps 7/ the chiaroscuro of Velazquez, Caravaggio, Salvator Rosa … or the inky-black prints of certain modern and late-modern photography (e.g., the contemporary work of Michael Kenna and Bill Henson) … Perhaps 8/ the proverbial black-box (inputs and outputs known, but what’s inside unknown) … as the Jungian collective unconscious (and its archetypes) and/or the Freudian unconscious and its drives (and repressions) … Perhaps 9/ the so-called Cloud of Unknowing (called such by those who know without knowing) … demoted by Lacan to the phantasmatic realm of the Imaginary (putatively concealing the Real) … a remainder found within the work of Derrida and Foucault … the ‘feverish’ interior of every possible ‘archive’ … Perhaps 10/ the ‘hole’ in the illuminated night-time grid of Manhattan, seen from the air, trace and index of Central Park … yet cipher for the very space of the Imaginary …

The return of such enhanced parameters suggests a necessary response to the problem of imagology expressed with poetic precision in Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality (1988) … For Marion, this same problem is the fundamental problem of nihilism (and most contemporary art, installation art in particular, which remains mired in ironic dispersal or mere mimetic agitation). Marion offers, as a preliminary antidote, the long-overdue third reduction of phenomenological analysis, the unconditional provision of ‘sublime’ givenness (sans all the usual scare tactics and without a transcendental source, outside things, or “that which metaphysics names God” … to quote Rogozinski …), a conceptual sign, then, that indeed indicates a Way Out of the labyrinthine ‘nature’ of suspect (and bankrupt) representational systems that serve -- always -- the machine that is swallowing the world.

Gavin Keeney (May 2004)
IFLA Conference, Prague
Re-edited 10/14/04

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness [Etant donné: Essai d’une phénoménology de la donation, 1997] (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), passim
Juhani Pallasmaa, “The Geometry of Feeling: A Look at the Phenomenology of Architecture” [1986], in Kate Nesbitt (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture, 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 448-453
Massimo Cacciari, "Eupalinos or Architecture" [1980], in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 394-406
Jacob Rogozinski, “The Gift of the World”, On the Sublime (Albany: SUNY, ????), p. ??

SUPPLEMENTAL DOCUMENTS

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