eS aitcH eYe Tee

Journal of Architecture

Volumn 12, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 423-436

  Holm, Lorens ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 65849390685     PISSN: 13602365     EISSN: 14664410     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13602360701614706     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (49)

1. I mention these three by way of example; there are many others. Peter Eisenman refers to the fact that the body does not have an inside because it is topologically a tube, in a number of places. See for instance, his deconstruction of the architectural object in 'The end of the classical: the end of the beginning, the end of the end' in Perspecta, no. 21 (1984), pp. 154-173 (Perspecta is the journal of the Yale School of Architecture). Georges Bataille's many and varied texts produce a 'circulation' of body metaphors, linking the anus, mouth, eye, genitals, sex, eating, and the like, not unlike Dominique Laporte's.
2. See Bataille's short novel, The Story of the Eye (London, Penguin, 1977),
3. translated by Joachim Neugroschal, and the short essays, 'The Solar Anus', 'Materialism', 'Eye', 'Big Toe', 'Mouth', and 'The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade', all in Visions of Excess; selected writings, 1927-1939 (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1993) edited and with an introduction by Allan Stoekl. For Laporte, please see the second half of this paper.
4. I refer to Mona Hatoum's video installation project, 'Corps Étranger' ('Foreign Body'), 1994, at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and related projects, in which she sends a mini video camera through the orifices of her body to film its insides. 'Corps Étranger' was exhibited as part of her Turner shortlist submission at the Tate Gallery, London, 1995. The inescapable presence of the fish-eye lens invokes the eye, thus confounding the separation between seeing and tasting, eye and orifice, ingesting and expelling, inside and outside.
5. At certain moments, this paper will invoke the fact that it was read at the annual conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Pittsburgh, April, 2007.
6. Henry Dietrich Fernandez, Kress Visiting Research Fellow in Renaissance architecture, 2007, The Warburg Institute, University of London, in private conversation. These observations have been published in Fabrizio Mancinelli, 'Michelangelo at Work', in Carlo Pietrangelli, et al., The Sistine Chapel. The Art, the History, and the Restoration (New York, Harmony Books, 1986), pp. 218-267.
7. Plato, Phaedrus (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2002), new translation by Robin Waterfield. Phaedrus is in four parts. Phaedrus - who is basically a patsy - begins by reading someone else's contribution to the subject of love (pp. 8-12), followed by Socrates's speech on love without love (pp. 16-22), then his speech on love with love, or mad love (pp. 25-42). This speech segues into a discussion in which Socrates insists on the superiority of speech over writing (pp. 44-75). Speech is written on the soul whereas writing is written on paper; speech is interior, writing exterior; speech inseminates the soul (metaphors of sowing, planting, and the like). See in particular pp. 70ff.
8. For Magritte and the logic of self-reference, see Michel Foucault, This Is Not A Pipe (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1983) with illustrations and letters by René Magritte, translated and edited by James Harkness.
9. Mark Cousins, 'The Ugly', (part 1), AAFiles, 28 (Autumn, 1994), pp. 61-64, and (part 2), AAFiles, 29 (Summer, 1995), pp. 3-6.
10. For Mary Douglas, see Purity and Danger: an Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Routledge, 1966), in which she argues that dirt is not a fixed quality that dirty objects have; rather, dirt is matter out of place.
11. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York, Norton, 1981) translated by Alan Sheridan. See the chapter, 'Tuché and Automaton', pp. 53-64: and in particular, p. 53, Aristotle's formula for tucné as an encounter with the real, and 'the real is beyond... the insistence of the signs'; p. 55, the real as 'essentially the missed encounter', and trauma; p. 60, the noise that awakes us from a dream; p. 69, the real as repetition, accident, encounter, the object of the drive.
12. See the Shit Happens website, which illustrates the way each religion deals with accident (accessed 10th July, 2007): http://www.thejaywalker.com/pages/shit-happens.html. The expression 'Shit happens' had not yet been coined in the late 1960s.
13. See Banksy, Banging your head against a wall (Bristol, Weapons of mass disruption, 2001), and Existencillism (England, Weapons of mass distraction, 2002). Banksy has started to publish his work in book format, without any change in rhetoric, as if stencilling a building and stencilling a book were the same.
14. Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2002) translated by Nadia Benabid and Rodolphe el-Khoury, and with an introduction by Rodolphe el-Khoury, p.37.
15. Ibid., p. 7.
16. This thesis is distributed throughout Derrida's work. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, 'Différance', in The Margins of Philosophy (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 1-27, translated by Alan Bass; and Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
17. See also the discussion of Derrida, textual grafting, and the uncontrollability of meaning in Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1982).
18. Laporte, op. cit., pp. 12ff.
19. Ibid., p. 13.
20. Ibid., p. 147: and see Laporte's Figure 6.12, 'Coining'.
21. Here's a beautiful detail. Laporte writes 'Where shit was, so gold shall be.', (p. 39, his italics) in connection with the difference between the old mired Paris and the new Paris regulated by excrementory statutes. As if the shitty city is the unconscious of the clean city. Laporte takes this phrase from Freud's Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, a phrase that, wittingly or no, has become one of the front lines in the battle of Freud exegesis. The standard English translation (by Strachey) is 'Where id was, there ego shall be.' Lacan's translation can be summarised as 'Where the subject of the unconscious was, there must (in a moral sense) the subject who speaks (ie, the 'I') be born'. Strachey: the ego will replace the id. Lacan: the subject will come to the point where the 'I' will refer to the subject's unconscious and not to its ego (constituted of 'alienating identifications'). As translated by Strachey, 'Wo Es war,...' seems to encourage repression by advocating the development of an ego strong enough to replace the id, which is the home of unconscious desire, the paradigm of a private place, shitty with desire. As translated by Lacan, it is the opposite of repression. It is about letting the unconscious speak, or in Laporte's terms, letting the shit circulate, precisely so that distinctions such as private/public, inside/outside remain articulated. This is a circulation, as opposed to a rung on a developmental ladder, because the unconscious does not speak once, or once and for all. The unconscious is always hidden and the I is always moving into a place where it can speak for it.
22. Cf. Jacques Lacan, 'The Freudian Thing: or the meaning of the return to Freud in psychoanalysis', in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English (New York, Norton, 2006) translated by Bruce Fink, p. 347.
23. For the English translation of Freud, see Freud, The New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London, Hogarth Press, 1974) translated and edited by James Strachey, 'Lecture XXXI, The Dissection of the Psychical Personality', p. 80.
24. Laporte, op. cit., p. 13. According to Freud, civilisation is built on the repression of instincts of death and destruction, of which beauty order and cleanliness play a part, along with other forms of repression. See Civilisation and its Discontents (London, Hogarth Press, 1975) translated by Joan Riviere, p. 34; 'and this seems the most important of all, it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction of powerful instincts.'
25. In their condensation of Freudian psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis describe the anal stage: 'The object-relationship at this time is invested with meanings having to do with the function of defecation (expulsion/retention) and with the symbolic value of faeces.' This has to do with gift giving and control. At this stage, the meaning of 'giving and withholding are ascribed to the activity of defecation; in this connection, Freud brings out the symbolic equation: faeces = gift = money.' Cf. 'Anal-Sadistic Stage (or Phase)' in J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London, Hogarth Press, 1973). It should be clear that any discipline (not just architecture) that advances by defending its borders and making money is indebted to the anal stage.
26. At the end (see pp. 495ff) of The Eternal Present: The Beginnings of Architecture: a Contribution on Constancy and Change (London, Oxford UP, 1964), Giedion describes the modern space conception as characterised by a dynamic interaction between inside and outside which suggests that modern architecture is the most anal of all architectural cultures, which is consistent with Freud's account of the development of civilisation.
27. Le Corbusier's 'les tracés régulateurs' are one of the form-controlling devices of modern architecture that are made manifest when the viewing conditions of the work approximate certain forms of representation. Cf. Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture (Paris, Flammarion, 2005/1923), pp. 49-64.
28. I mention The Building Regulations (HMSO, regular updates, 2005) to refer to a mosaic of instruments that include planning law, the Highways Act, various statutes controlling fire egress, etc., all of which keep British building orderly, if not beautiful. 'Symmetry' is defined by Vitruvius as the harmonious relationship of the whole to its parts. It is one of several aesthetic prerogatives discussed in The Ten Books of Architecture (New York, Dover, 1960), translated by Morris Hicky Morgan.
29. See Book 1, chapter 2, 'The Fundamental Principles of Architecture', pp. 13-16, for a definition.
30. See Book 3, chapter 1, 'On symmetry: in temples and in the human body', pp. 72-75, for a worked example. This chapter was subsequently illustrated in Renaissance editions with the so-called Vitruvian man. In the introduction to Book 6, Vitruvius remarks that geometry (seen in settlements) is the trace of civilisation. Le Corbusier's tracés are an updated version of Vitruvius' symmetry.
31. Laporte, op. cit., p. 9. Please note that the next series of quotations are repetitions of parts of this quotation, and are not therefore noted again.
32. Ibid., pp. 119ff. Besoin both in the sense of a lack, something I need; and in the sense of feeling full of shit, a pressing need, needing to expel that which fattens our abdomen.
33. It is difficult to give a succinct reference for objet a. One wants to point the reader to Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York, Norton, 1981) but s/he would have to read the whole text. Objet a is the focal point of lack or absence in the subject, that organises all its needs and desires. Each subject is driven throughout the narrative of its life from first cry to last will and testament, each in its own way, to make up this lack. This lost object appears a number of ways in the vicissitudes of a life - by the breast, the faeces, voice, and gaze - but never attained, except maybe in death itself, which is the limit of experience. See Lacan's summary of the oral, anal, invocatory, and scopic drives, pp. 103-04. Laporte's model for civilisation as a circulation of signifiers, is indebted to Lacan's very close reading of Freud's texts - including Civilisation and its Discontents and 'The Drives and Their Vicissitudes' (1915) - on drive theory, for which see Lacan, the chapters 'The Deconstruction of the Drive' and 'The Partial Drive and its Circuit', pp. 161-186.
34. For the detailed account of the scopic drive and its object, the gaze, see Lacan, the section 'Of The Gaze As Objet Petit a', pp. 67-119.
35. Cf. Lacan, The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988) translated by Sylvana Tornaselli, pp. 154-55 and 158 (Lacan's italics).
36. See the chapters on dream interpretation (ie, the interpretation of symbols that come from nowhere): 'The Dream of Irma's Injection' and 'The Dream... (conclusion)', pp. 146-171 and especially pp. 154-55, 158, and 164.
37. Cf. Chapter 5 in 'The Book of Daniel', The New Testament. King Belshazzar is partying hard in the palace one night when a disembodied hand writes strange symbols on the wall (paragraph 6). 'And this is the writing that was written, MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN' (paragraph 25). Before the night is out, he is slain for his hubris and his kingdom divided up.
38. First quotation: Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola (Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1971).
39. Second quotation: Saint Augustine, De magistro 1, 'De Locutionis Significatione'. Both quoted in Laporte, op. cit., p. 10.
40. Laporte notes that smell has to be excised from our perceptual lexicon for Beauty because 'all smells are primordially the smell of shit' (his example, attributed to Kant, is the smell of a rose, no doubt also the source of Bataille's image of the rose in shit). See, pp. 84-88, in particular, p. 86.
41. For a very good study of the very bad reception of graffiti in cities, see Joe Austin, Taking the Train: how graffiti art became an urban crisis in New York City (New York, Columbia University Press, 2001). Austin documents the discrimination against, and the vilification of, graffiti by the New York City Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), the press, and the public, focusing on 1976, the American bicentennial and a high point in the exuberant voluntary public art programme known as graffiti. Graffiti (a misdemeanour) is put on a par with rape (a major felony) by the municipal authorities.
42. See Adolf Loos, 'Ornament and Crime', in Ornament and Crime: selected essays (Riverside, CA, Ariadne Press, 1998), introduction by Adolf Opel, translated by Michael Mitchell, pp. 167-176;
43. and 'The Principle of Cladding', in Spoken into the void: collected essays 1897-1900 of Adolf Loos (Cambridge, MIT Press, 1982) with an introduction by Aldo Rossi, translated by Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith. There is no single line to Loos's argument about ornament and cladding, and it has been well worked through. We shall not recap its varied strands. We have already noted that ornament harks back to the practices of Papuans, children, women, criminals, and other degenerates from earlier stages of cultural development, which are no longer appropriate forms of expression for today. Loos's argument seeks support from contemporary, ie, Freud's, accounts of the psycho-sexual stages of development.
44. See for instance, Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos: Theory and Works, translated by C. H. Evans (New York, Rizzoli, 1982), 'The Removal of Ornament', pp. 66-71, for a succinct account of 'Ornament and Crime', and a discussion of its relationship to Freud's 'Three Essays on Sexuality'.
45. Reyner Banham called it pseudo Freud in his essay 'Ornament and Crime: The Decisive Contribution of Adolf Loos', reprinted in A Critic Writes: Essays by Reyner Banham, originally published in The Architectural Review, 121 (February, 1957), pp. 85-88.
46. Cf. also Harry Francis Mallgrave, 'Adolf Loos: ornament and sentimentality', in Nadir Lahiji and D.S. Friedman, eds, Plumbing: Sounding Modern Architecture (New York, Princeton Architectural Press, 1997), for a discussion of cladding and the 'satrapic splendour' of Loos' interiors. Mallgrave insists that bekleidung be translated dressing not cladding to bring it in line with Semper's thesis that the origin of architecture was in fabric.
47. See Sigmund Freud, 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality', in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and other works (London, Penguin, 1977), translated by James Strachey, pp.39-169.
48. Cf. Jimena Canales and Andrew Herscher, 'Criminal Skins: tattoos and modern architecture in the work of Adolf Loos.', Architectural History, 48 (2005), pp. 235-256. Canales and Herscher discuss Loos's thesis on ornament in the context of contemporary debates in criminal anthropology, aesthetics, and evolutionary science: whether ornament is natural or culturally determined, whether culture is material or psychological, whether or not ornament issues from an aesthetic drive that is outside of evolutionary or material determinants.
49. For Semper, cladding dresses or represents the building; for Loos, cladding dresses or represents the space. Mallgrave refers to Loos's 'fundamentally ornamental conception of architecture', because for Loos, architecture was first and foremost about producing a spatial effect, and this is an effect of the dressing, not the support behind it. Cf. Mallgrave, op. cit., pp. 129-31.