THE FORMALIST MOMENT ‘NOW’

Staring at a ventilation unit this morning (a concrete block with nine holes, high in the wall of my temporal abode at the edge of the Adelaide grid), I realized why the nine-square was so dear to Hejduk ... It seems to represent the perfect relationship of the subject to the world of representations ... It's perfectly symmetrical and contains the center, kernel in relation (exact relation) to all the other portions ... It is also a Greek cross ... "Geometry is the vestibule of Philosophy" (Plotinus) ... All this while listening to music (Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Jacksonville City Nights, 2005) and drinking coffee (Turkish style) ... In my head, then, The Formalist Moment leaps forth (the 'Now', the intersection of the two axes of that 'crossing' of world and representation, contingency and abstraction -- the formalist moment itself) ... This leads back, into Russian Formalism, and poor Viktor Shklovsky (much ridiculed by Jameson in The Prison-House of Language) feeding books into a stove (echoes of Doctor Zhivago, 1965) to stay warm while discussing the phonemic structure of poetic language (see Svetlana Boym's The Future of Nostalgia), on to the sacrificial troubadours Akhmatova and Mandelstam buried in the avalanche of post-Revolution Soviet ideology (the war against bourgeois subjectivity/kitsch), toward the 1950s and the 'warming' with Khruschev (all for obvious, post-Stalin ideological reasons, after all), up through Tarkovsky and the arrival of The Thing from Inner Space (Zizek's summary of Tarkovsky's 'cinematic moment') ... All prompted in part (and in turn) by reading about the connections forward from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein ...  

UNREASONABLE GLOSSES / POST-KANT

Schopenhauer (1788-1860) - The confrontation of the subject and the world plays out as Will and Representation, the will as a vast primordial darkness, which provides the backdrop for the self (produces the self), which produces endless representations (‘till the cows come home’). The self (stuck in the anamorphic stain of Being-There) can free itself (its Self) by giving up all willing and representation. Off then, with Schopenhauer, to “the (well-appointed) hotel at the edge of the abyss …”

Nietzsche (1844-1900) - The self is a necessary illusion. Representations serve the will (the Will to Power). All that matters is doing (willing), making representation an affirmation of this tragic state.

Wittgenstein (1889-1951) - The metaphysical subject exists outside the world creating/living in language (that mirrors/represents the world). Language is the umbilical cord connecting monads (metaphysical subjects). Truth is logic (everything else is aesthetics).

Heidegger (1889-1976) - We are thrown into the world, into Being  (the world worlds us), our existence is towards negation (freeing ourselves from the law of averages, the levelling). Being toward negation (death) is our primal condition, nullifying being trapped in representations (perspectivism), the folds of the spent metaphysical and onto-theological project.

Lacan (1901-81) - The Real, the Symbolic and the Imaginary intersect (interpenetrate) in the modern (post-Cartesian) subject. The Cartesian subject is the subject of all psychoanalysis. The Real always is reflected in a system held in tension by Law, Custom, the Names-of-the-Father, mediated by fantasy (jouissance), repression, misidentification, drives. It is phantasmatic. Acceptance (versus interpretation) of this state leads to transference. The subject is healed but offered no way out of the labyrinth (house of mirrors).

Marion - The Reduction arrives finally at Paradox (revelation), the metaphysical dyad Self/Other becomes metaphysical-existential ‘X’ (exit) revealing ‘the given’ as pure phenomenon (not of transcendent but absolute contingent origin), without concept and before representation, as Event … Out of the Thing (the Sublime) and its withdrawal distance is given back, producing the fundamental time-space of the Real, the ‘Now’ (the Present-Present) as the trace of the encounter with saturated phenomenon. Saturated phenomena cause a short circuit in the metaphysical apparatus of thought. The world comes about out of its own resources (the subject is left staring back at its foremost extension, infinity). The finite then registers the infinite and the apparent broken world dissolves back into One Thing.

[…]

THEREFORE - Art (and Architecture, if it dare rises to the level of Art) is ethical, moral and utopian; that is, Art is -- after all -- of the Formalist Moment, in itself/for itself, par excellence …

GK (10/19/05)

THE (IR)REAL THING (09/26/05) - Having arrived at conclusions regarding Architecture (the capitalized version), and circling the Real-Irreal (Irreal-Real) kernel at the heart of Representation, it is clear that the Way Out is always the same way out. The Real in the Irreal, and the Irreal in the Real, is this way out. It (a proverbial Nothing Much) comes about (arrives) through Reduction; that is, a set of reductions to things, but also through things and out the other side of things into a cosmogonic landscape of other things (the paradoxical non-place of the Other). One can only find this path through things by living the path, by living within the Reduction, a rite of passage to the Real-Irreal ‘place’ buried in the categorical Everything (the Everything and Nothing in the Here-and-Now). It is this Everything that contains the Too Much and the Too Little, as it contains the Nietzschean chiasmus the Too Soon and the Too Late. This path leads through the mirror, then, and onto/through the flame as well, toward the World-on-Fire (the world as metaphysical-existential anti-milieu, if you will), out into the Night of the World Itself. Thus the Philosophy of the (Ir)Real as the path and as the Way Out (of nihilism). Thus, too, the tomb of Architecture, and Architecture’s spent corpse. Yet the question remains, for Architecture: ‘Is the end rich, protean ‘humus’ (earth) or a toxic wasteland with an after-half-life of 10,000 years?’.