STUTTERING FALL ( LOG 19 )
Natanel Elfassy in Correspondence with François Roche
Log 19 Spring/Summer 2010
The only thing the reader will see marching past him are inadequate means: fragments, allusions, strivings, investigations. Do not try to find a well polished sentence or a perfectly coherent image in it, what is printed on the pages is an embarrassed word, a stuttering.[1]
– Andreï Biély
EXTRACT:
In late 2009, in Paris, while collaborating on “Une Architecture des Humeurs,” an exhibition at Le Laboratoire, Paris, architect Natanel Elfassy began the following conversation with the architect François Roche – which was subsequently completed by e-mail correspondence – regarding “stuttering” in architecture.
Natanel Elfassy: In a restless moment near the end of their lives, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari revealed their sensitivity to the uncertainty in their work, which was constantly being reformulated, by asking what it means to create. While the act of creation is not a representation of something that already exists, it is also not an irruption of the uncontrolled or undefined; it is not born of pure chaos, nor does it refer to it. Chaos is the ultimate enemy of thought.
Resorting to the idea of creation as chaotic and morbid – where words lose their basis in a colorless, mute night and we no longer see any form or hear any sound – is one of the dangers that lurks in the very act of creation. This danger is based on the misleading understanding of creation as an expression either of transgression, anarchism, or madness. What cannot be thought is the nonrelational – those potentials or movements that fail to be actualized. Creation is danger; however, it is not the danger of madness, but rather the danger of exposing an abundant sanity.
“Stuttering,” where creation cracks and fractures, enables us to see the door to the rabbit hole that leads not to what is beyond, not to the transcendental, but inward, to the immanent. Yet it is this stuttering act of creation, the necessary act of architecture – in its singularity – that can retain access to this door.
Stuttering architecture both stems from the lack of an outlet and constitutes a single outlet – a language of architecture that cannot be traced back to its origin, but can express creation’s intensities through its tremor, giving birth to an affective and intensive “foreign” language within language. Architectural language is a mirror containing within it the moment of translation into concrete existence; the moment when an invisible wall bursts and formed language enters the desert of discourse, always suffering from the death, commonness, and familiarity of this new materiality. Each time, with each new utterance, architecture is again required to generate a new, real state of creation to avoid being trapped in the net of empty words.
François Roche: Stuttering is conflictual, it appears as a disruption of continuity between emotion and language – where they simultaneously corrupt each other, creating a synaesthetic rapprochement where the degree or level of confusion reveals the impossible negotiation between something that tries to articulate knowledge in the public sphere and the protest of the body against being reduced to its simple ipseity.
Stuttering could appear as a field of battle, where the forces present produce noise and chaos, beauty and barbarism, Eros and Thanatos, impulses of life and death. But more to the point, it is the contradictory aesthetic generated from this field of battle that matters.
The catatonia of the stutter is similar – it is an articulation or de-articulation of a psychism and the production of a new physiology accessing public territories and repressed depths of consciousness derived from zones of paranoia and permanent disequilibrium. Antonin Artaud tried to reach this fragile state of schizophrenia, blending language, shouting, screaming, and muscle convulsions, to create in performative works a feeling of repulsion on the part of the spectator/reader and in this way requestioning the boundaries of social conventions and normality.
That is the main point. To stutter is antisocial not because of the nonunderstandability aspect, but because it perverts the appearance of socialization – a shameless pornography.
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for the complete dialogue & images - see LOG 19 spring/summer 2010
Notes:
[1]Andreï Biély, Carnets d’un toque (Geneva: L’Age d’Homme, 1991); cited in Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 113.
