STUTTERED ARCHITECTURE
August 2009
Tel Aviv University, Department of Philosophy |
The David Azriely fellowship Program
Experimenting Surrational Architecture
Presented at Deleuze International Conference , Köln University | Germany
EXTRACT:
A Figure Gazes upon the Spacious Desert
The situation is familiar, you have been here before. In front of you, the desert landscape recedes to the horizon. You have been moving, perhaps, but now you’ve stopped to look. The rest of your body is, comparatively, still. You are gazing ahead, facing the view and looking into the distance; the apparent field is not frontal. It has depth, volume, and things unfold within it. Matter can be divided, but the body moves within the indivisibility of an idea. Space surrounding you has no parts; it appears totally and all at once.
The desert cannot be perceived as a whole; one must walk through it, span it, while integrating movement and perspective (which is never linear).Time wrapped up in space and depth is giving rise to a complex system: complex alternation between order and disorder, global and local realities. The desert is a disordered structure that symbolizes the virtual.
The Architect
Facing the desert he stands, the one seeking to build a wall in it in presence of the many ways to intervene. With space, the architect has to make a wall . . . At any place he chooses to intervene; he then chooses a possibility abolishing all other options. Then, once the political act of architecture occurs, and the wall is built, an infinite number of new possibilities are created that were not there, in the desert, before (such as hiding behind the wall), creating a whole new level of interpretation.
As coming to intervene with the desert, so is architecture: flattening and turning events into words, architectural elements. With every laying of a stone (foundation), in every attempt to mediate, architecture creates a border line for itself. As for stuttering, architecture is the language that thinks of its own failure to speak.
How can architecture face the unknown? How can an architect draw movement into the total immobility, unity into infinite multiplicity?
In order to actualize the virtual, to transform the absolute into what is always relative, great architects choose the middle, stuttering the language, in a measured intervention that seeks to pass on the prophecy, but in the same gesture, preserves hatches and cracks through which we can feel the muted, endless infinity behind it—infinity more devious and secret, which slips away from divisibility.
In language we assume that the relationship between a signifier and its signified is obvious— that the full meaning of the word is present and that both speaker and listener understand the meaning. In architecture, however, both the signifier and the signified are always present simultaneously; what is seen is a truth in presence .[2]
Therefore, for the architect, saying is doing [3]; the elements of architectural language (wall, column, etc) don’t exist independently of the architect, who selects them and links them together through himself.
It is impossible to differentiate between the architect’s tools, his words, the movement of his hand and his body. As we cannot separate between the architectural project and the design process—content is form and form is content—so the architect does not write of the events, but writes the events themselves, nullifying any gap between the experience and the report.That doesn’t mean that the architectural language is a homogeneous system in equilibrium, or close to equilibrium. On the contrary, architecture is a system in perpetual disequilibrium [3]or bifurcation, in which each of its terms in turn passes through a zone of continuous variation . And it is this fragile unity of the architectural gesture, the unity between the signifier and the signified, where saying is doing, that can introduce desire into architecture and enter it into regions far from equilibrium. It is the architect that can put architectural language into a state of boom, close to a crash; a suppressed multiplicity (resolving the problem of the unity of the multiple). It is the architect, the conductor of space, who becomes a stutterer in language, corresponding form and content, in an affective and intensive language that actualizes the powers of bifurcation and variation, of heterogenesis and modulation.
Stuttered architecture is a process of becoming, a creation of syntax that actualizes the virtual by giving birth to “a foreign language within language, a grammar of disequilibrium. But in this sense it is inseparable from an end, it tends toward a limit that is itself no longer either syntactic or grammatical, even when it still seems to be so formally.”[4]
These ideas acknowledge a view of reality based on transforming being to becoming; space created does not contain being; instead, it holds the situated appearance, the becoming. In this way, architecture can attain the absolute that was melted away in an infinity of appearances.
By putting the void in reach, the stutterer-architect attains pure visions that are still related to language while introducing the future into the eternally present, which makes architectural language tremble. Harmony, rhythm, and melody fuse into the obstinate silence of things. Changing breadth and depth but allows the void to remain intact;
the architect builds a wall but leaves openings, missing bricks, cracks, and broken parts, as if trying to retain a part of the possibilities, of the potentials that were in the ever-changing and ongoing event of the desert, before the wall, before the limitations of language. The phrase comes apart, abandons any grammatical appearance; we can hear the body, the grinding of teeth, the necessary pauses between the words. Voids open before us a wicket through which we meet expression in its raw state.
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“...A path opens up towards bestial monstrosity, as though there were no other possibility of escaping the architectural strait jacket.”
Georges Bataille, Architecture. Documents, (1930) Reprinted in Oeuvres Completes, vol I , gallimard, paris.
The animal has memory, but no memories.
Heymann Steinthal, Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1871; Berlin: Dummler, 1881)
The stutterer-architect acknowledges his disability and accepts his senses and body intuition, like the stuttering man trying not to confront syllables and words, since he knows too well the frustration which this attempt will bring upon him. The body receives a status equal to that of consciousness, and ceases to be an appendage, being that which makes it possible for us to have an immediate, pre-reflective familiarity with reality. It occupies and is immersed in space.
Experiencing space as the body points us to the source of creation, uncovering its finiteness and all the while showing the greatness of what is human, which contains the consciousness of the infinity. The deed of architecture extends and breaks the boundaries of language. It emphasizes and empowers the dryness and meagreness of language. The attempt to stop stuttering fails time and time again. Speech is cut off, not able to withhold the contradiction. These are the silences, the parts of nothingness within the stuttered phrases, a state where the body is frozen, which indicate, more than anything, the mighty splendour of architecture.
This is an attempt of an architect and a thinker to be freed from the endless pursuit of pointing to the catastrophe, realizing that it won’t disappear if we only deal with indicating to it, if we only deal with warning, informing, and if we only pursue information. There is a need, an urgent necessity to act.
The stutterer-architect chooses his own direction as he moves; he can’t aim for a certain target or try to predict the result of the design process. Instead of trying to achieve something perfect, relying on reliable techniques, the architect ignores his predecessors and must begin again from scratch. Events in the world, reality around us, are interpreted differently every time and do not bear testimony of the history of architecture, as they don’t hint of its future. Stuttered architecture never speaks or even thinks of eternity. It is an ephemera, a flickering image, forever different and new. For the stutterer-architect, architecture has no aim but to prove that architecture itself is possible. It does not describe or present its content with words, but rather uncovers processes and means, thinking and happening all the time. Stuttered architecture acts at the same time, inside and outside, undermining and blurring the border lines between them and collapsing them one into another. A new language is created, not external to the initial language; it is the outside of architectural language but is not outside it.
“Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium.”[5]
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…When during an argument with Corbu he turned to me and said:“Mais mon cher Soltan, il faut que ce soit beau.”
Jerzy Soltan, Working with La Corbusier, La Corbusier, ed.H Allen Brooks.
There are many ways to grow from the middle, or to stutter. Each of these ways coincide with a task, an experiment, a way of feeling space. For the stutterer, style is always nonstyle; as they let an unknown foreign language escape from it, so they can reach, each one of them in his own way, the limits of architectural language itself and become something other than an architect, conquering fragmented visions that pass through to the words of architecture, to the drawings and to space.
The stutterer who put too much in his work, speared out and expended the human gesture. As an animal about to dream of the human[6]. pushing architectural language to scream; a revolution of men against himself, a desperate attempt to escape from his own body in which he is imprisoned. In his drawings, space is superabundant; the parts appear separately, and then parts of the parts, until one ends by getting lost. He is a foreigner in his own language: does not mix another language with his own language. Always retaining the rules, with the directional vectors he carves out a non-preexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the landscape scream and stutter.
On the other hand, Stand the stutterer who tries to impose a human stamp on space, to compress space, to drain off its exteriority. Sensitive to the architectural gestures, he confronts us with silence. draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him; embraces the architectural language so well that it leaves the words intact, complete, and normal, but it uses them as if they were themselves the disjointed and decomposed members of a superhuman stuttering, a thwarted stutterer.
“What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make the language take a flight; they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its term.” [7]
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NOTES:
[1]Image: Tamotsu Fujii, Ilyuni Salt Lake,“Horizon” MUJI poster, 2006.
[2]Peter Eisenman, Eisenman’s Doubt; Log, vol.13/14 fall 2008, Anyone Corporation, New York.
[3]Quand dire, c’est faire. This is an allusion to the title of the French translation of J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1962): in Deleuze Gilles, He Stuttered; Essays Critical and Clinical, Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
[4]Deleuze Gilles, He Stuttered; Essays Critical and Clinical, Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
[5]Deleuze Gilles, He Stuttered; Essays Critical and Clinical, Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
[6]Bataille, Georges, (1970), Corps Célestes, dans: Œuvres Complète Tome I (Edition Gallimard, Paris).
[7]Deleuze Gilles, He Stuttered; Essays Critical and Clinical, Translated by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco, University of Minnesota Press, 1997. And in : Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka - Toward a Minor Literature, Translated by Dana Polan, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
