EXTRA-ACADEMIC EXERCISES - DRAFT 03/11/03

ON THE ABSENCE OF NOTHING MUCH AND THE PERSISTENCE OF EVERYTHING ELSE

UR-FORMALISME

Wherein long-dead Provencal troubadours take (and leave) the stage, Colin Rowe crashes into the concrete bottom of a modernist swimming pool, Umberto Eco arrives with Aquinas in tow, Isozaki renounces irony (but gets into hot water anyway), Mary McCarthy re-visits Florence, Vittorio Storaro re-edits his work, neo-neo-functionalism receives yet another drubbing, Surrealism remains un-bounded (but an antidote is offered), and Landscape + Architecture comes out swinging (and growling) ...

I. WRITING GARDENS - TERRAIN VAGUE (NE PLUS ULTRA)

The mellifluous, munificent rolling 'r's and 'm's of urrr-forrrmmmalismmm signify a terrain of phonemes. These phonemes signify nothing much. This nothing much signifies the foundational jouissance (unauthorized writings and readings of the wor(l)d) behind / below all things just barely alive-and-kicking, and / or the 'as such' or 'the given', or that which is always-already crushed by almost everything else.
 
Openings to this nothing much are timeless insofar as time is the business of the Architect of Time (Blake's demiurge). In Architecture, the demiurge is valorized. In rare instances -- such as the work of Arata Isozaki -- the demiurge is problematized. In a sense, Apollo was an architect, and Dionysus was a landscape architect. Temples and vineyards ... Oracles and wine ... The dialectical prison-house ... We stumble over words and concepts forever, into and through time.

In this almost nothing resides the Universal -- a some-thing that is truly almost nothing. For Zizek, this almost nothing of the Universal is always-already contested, constructed ground. For contemporary Architecture, the Universal is almost always converted to an aesthetic of a minimalist sensibility -- or that which pervades architectural modernism and all forms of architectural neo-modernism. That this architectural aestheticism is also an abstract aestheticism explains the constantly-shifting recourse to formalism(s) -- and suprematism(s) and / or constructivism(s) -- with a periodic dive into functionalism(s) by way of an inverted, de-racinated re-deployment of Tafuri's caustic (toxic) critique of the 'ideology of the plan'.

IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI*

What is detailed in such architectures is the sublimation of the nothing much. This is also the source of the totalizing drive in Utopian architectures. Yet, to truly arrive at the true universality of the 'as such' requires the embrace of the nothing much. The endless rotation of this wheel -- in architectural history and theory -- shows that Architecture is oftimes complicitous with hegemony and -- out of necessity, if not a guilty conscience -- tries to overcome itself over and over again. The recourse to 'emblems of an intellectual bad conscience' -- e.g., forms of surrealism and (perhaps!) post-conceptualism -- as noted by Tafuri in Architecture and Utopia (1973), indicate that systems (architectural or otherwise) that induce delirium or quietism, as an elective turn toward some-thing else, also contain the irreducible traces of the source (source code) of the problem -- viz., the contestation of forms of delimiting time and space.

*"We walk in circles in the night and are consumed by fire."

II. THE LACANIAN 'LOOP DE LOOP' - DECONSTRUCT, RE-CONSTRUCT, & MYTHOLOGIZE YOUR /S/ELF

"The page contains a single sentence: 'Underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isn't any.' The sentence is repeated over and over for the whole length of the page, giving the impression of a wall, of an impediment. There are no periods or commas or margins, a wall, in fact, of words that illustrate the meaning of the sentence, the collision with a wall behind which there is nothing. But towards the bottom and on the right, in one of the sentences the word any is missing. A sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the light that shows through." --Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch (1966)

The nothing much resides inside formalism, whereas formalism -- which is almost always a game of syntactical and material operations -- is merely its mask. This 'inside' is intimately / ultimately related to the shadowy, sigilistic, recondite, and 'wild' inmost nature of nature + culture (the complex) -- viz., its common ground -- and resembles the wasteland, waste-place, waste-water, waste-stream, or rubbish tip of history and all diachronic systems of / for massaging history; e.g., the interstitial lacunae of instrumentalized systems, and pace Lucretius, the place of inhabitation of / by 'the gods', and the place that they always-already flee to. As a far-fetching thing -- fetchingly attired in the latest fashionable garb and jargon -- formalism may or may not go 'there' depending on whether or not the quest is for meta-physical fire or, simply, revolutionary smoke (and ash) and / or neo-modernist parlor games. 

Contact with this 'region' within nature + culture constitutes ur-formalism (and ur-figuration). There are innumerable examples of this in art-, literary-, and architectural-historical, synchronic studies. These cross-sections cut through time exhibit the latent tendency of formalist operations to access this sub-territorial (sub-linguistic) plenitude discreetly. The last, wholesale cultural-epochal plunge into this territory (perhaps) coincided with the so-called Renaissance, also the putative beginning of Modern times. The late-modern plunge, typified by post-structuralism, in fact, appears to have all the markings of a collision with the concrete bottom of a vast and decrepit swimming pool, much as Colin Rowe suggested, a mock deep-sea dive for things thrown there by "naughty children", versus a proto-urformalist dive into the nether regions of sub-cultural production.

The fact remains that the origins of the Renaissance are totally obscured by the mists of time and, if certain scholars are to be trusted, the first signs of this then 'some-thing else' appeared in France, with the peregrinations of Langue d'Oc-intoxicated troubadours; Langue d'Oc being an archaic language with a peculiar excess of rolling and guttural phonemic forms.

Umberto Eco's Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages is instructive, especially as regards the concept of entelechy, as developed by Aquinas, and based in part on Aristotle's concept of entelechy. That Aquinas effectively 'spiritualized' this idea is significant insofar as the language of discursive praxis (and is that not what the troubadours were actually up to?) secrets within itself signs toward the nothing much that underwrites everything else.

"For Aquinas, the intellect cannot know sensible particulars, and it is only after the abstraction, in the reflexio ad phantasmata, that it comes to know sense objects." Here, the late-modern, Lacanian subject rears its neo-Freudian head ... "The human intellect is discursive. So also is the aesthetic visio; it is a composite act, a complex apprehension of the object. Sensible intuition may put us in touch with some feature of a particular object, but the complex of concomitant conditions which determine the object, its position in space and time, its very existence, are not intuited." Hence (and ever more?), the architectonic thing is disconnected from Mercury (Memory) ... "They [things] demand rather the discursive process of the act of judgment. For Aquinas, aesthetic knowledge has the same object, namely, the substantial reality of something informed by an entelechy."(1)

Clearly, the some-thing else hidden in things leads some-where else ... That it led to the Renaissance, by way of various and sundry late-Medieval heresies, here and there, is not without significance. That the Renaissance we know, love, and sometimes loath was in fact a gigantic amalgam of mixed metaphors and conflicting claims -- aesthetic, religious, political, and otherwise -- is as yet a problem for Modernity itself, as it heads down the path of converting itself / disappearing into History. Hence ‘immodernity’, or actually-existing modernity (being-modern).

Perhaps we should take a page out of contemporary architectural theory and propose Writing Gardens, versus Writing Machines. Strange as it may sound, it is in writing machines that we may detect the ghost-hand of the architectural demiurge. Writing gardens, on the other hand, might re-introduce a pre-industrial strength lyricism that may or may not form a path to ur-formalism; 'may' in the case that Writing Gardens are purely hypothetical non-sites, and 'may not' insofar as they are misconstrued as actually-existing gardens with actually-existing herbaceous borders, arch-lovely arbours, and chic extruded- and / or brushed-aluminum furnishings. Instead (always perhaps), we should speak / sing of gardens-as-pretexts (gaps) …

Within the auto-biographical (auto-poetic?) turn, or in indulging one's subjectivity, one may well find a secret passage which, in turn, is a possible way out. This is a secret passage only insofar as one fails to recognize that human subjects are, too, an amalgam of forces, constructs, coordinates, and other stuff generally posited as the 'Ego' -- or that which covers the archaic Self.

This leads straight into the crypto-hermetic language of Arakawa and Gin's recent Architectural Body (2002), a book replete with a scintillating and slippery language that posits Being as a site (a process of 'siting'), or / and the siting of Being as an elective process of acculturation. This is built atop Arakawa and Gin's previous work on Reversible Destiny (or reverse nostalgia!) and marks an 'elective' brand-new day, or a possible radical concept of Self as proto-architectural vessel. The figures of speech and the shock tropes associated with this assault on the maxims of the Architect of Time (the demiurge), and the diktat of temporizing systems, converge at the fulcrum of just what constitutes subjectivity. Acknowledging the fact that much that is taken for 'the given' is actually 'constructed' allows for the re-emergence of the ur-thing formerly known as Self, and the complications or delimitations henceforth stuck to and contaminating the Ego are called into question / to task. Here, in this portentous gesture toward reversing mortality (destiny), is the consummate challenge to architecture as a form of or variant on the prison-house of formal languages. That this powerful, yet slight book addresses the address / site of this endless or seemingly interminable system of proto-oppressive representations signals that the nothing much is, indeed, something extraordinary after all.

III. FLORENCE (NOT THE SUBWAY STOP IN PRAGUE)

"According to Niccolo Macchiavelli, calumny spread under the loggias of Florence, through the arcades, where men gathered to talk business and make vile gossip. Botticelli, another Florentine, confesses the same paranoia in his painting 'Calumny', which allegorises malicious gossip as a historical force." --Jonathan Jones, "Masterpieces of Dresden", The Guardian Unlimited, March 6, 2003

Arata Isozaki's journey from architectural irony to no irony in many ways represents the curve -- "walking the curve" -- of the late-modernist turn away from architectural neurosis toward 'S', the so-called sublime synthesis of the arts marked within Architecture by the presence or absence of the complex (i.e., thing as constellation, thought as concept, concept as conflation of conflicting claims, etcetera). Here, in this passage (passim), is the sign of some-thing else most clearly not to be found in the re-tooling of modernism as typified by most forms of neo-modernism. Here, too, is an elective un-ease with biding time uneasily through re-working worn out, tired, faux-universal formal languages. Here, then, is an excellent example of a possible way out. In Isozaki's work one finds evidence of a search for a way out versus an actual way out. As with all referents on the way to 'S', it is better to extract the energia, the source of the conceptual fireworks, than to focus too intently on fast-receding forms of expression. As with de-natured examples of this process every-where, it is oftimes better to send the otherwise depleted stuff of useless syntactical operations to the scrap heap, than to endlessly recycle them in the name of neo-modernist agitation and so forth.

Florence is an excellent case in point. As far as architectural hegemony is concerned, there is no better case study. At the murmuring heart of Florence, beloved by tourists every-where (as, too, the exacting, high Baroque landscape-architectural punishment of Versailles), the Piazza della Signoria remains the emblem of high Renaissance mise-en-scène. Spliced onto the medieval fabric of the piazza, with its sinister Palazzo Vecchio, is Vasari's Uffizi galleries, Buontalenti's re-worked loggia ... See Mary McCarthy's near time-less Stones of Florence (1963) ... Furthermore, see Vittorio Storaro's The Light: Writing with Light (2002) for an equally compelling (cinematic) presentation of a multivalent, layered vision of Rome ...
 
Isozaki's proposed new loggia (Nuova Uscita su Piazza dei Castellani), for the back-side of the Uffizi, is, therefore, an exercise in aesthetic confrontation with both implicit and explicit historicity ... Heidegger's consummate question "What does it mean to be historic?" comes home endlessly in Florence. Apparently, IT does not mean endlessly circling the wagons of a more or less bankrupt system of architectural production while waiting for the architectural (functionalist!) equivalent of Godot.

IV. GRRR-FORMALISM - GRAPEVINES & GROWLS (TOWARD L + A)

It is time then -- high time -- for Landscape Architecture every-where to come out swinging, from grapevines, growling and swinging at Architecture every-where, to foment the always-already deferred synthesis otherwise not known as Landscape plus Architecture. L + A must bury Landscape minus Architecture, and Architecture minus Landscape, in an avalanche of extreme inter-textual debris. This matériel -- an exegetical, sublime matériel -- must shatter the complicity of Architecture with all forms of proto-, high-, and low-hegemony. To do this, L + A must reiterate endlessly -- or until the cows come home -- 'the given', the 'as such', and the 'nothing much' that matters much, much more than 'everything else'. There is, quite simply, no other way out.

Gavin Keeney (March 2003)

ENDNOTES

1 - Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 72-73
For details of Isozaki's Uffizi project, see http://www.geocities.com/ateliermp/voxpopuli.html