Poetry Makes Nothing Happen and Architecture Is When Theory Is the Residue of a Journey

We have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, a reminder not that the world we know is false, but that it is always the world as we observe it. (Jorge Luis Borges, 2007[1939]: 208)

What protects the sane man against delirium or hallucination is not his critical powers, but the structure of his space: objects remain before him, keeping their distance and touching him only with respect. (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1962[1945]: 291)

In the effort to conceptualize and legitimize theoretical philosophy, the 4th-century BCE thinkers invoked a specific institution that the ancients called theoria. In the traditional practice of theoria, an individual (called the theoros) made a journey or pilgrimage for the purpose of witnessing certain events and religious spectacles. In any case, the theoros was sent by the city as an official ambassador: this ‘civic’ theoros journeyed to an oracular center or festival, viewed the events and spectacles there, and returned home with an official eyewitness report (Nightingale, 2004: 2).

If, for Borges, the rational architecture of the built environment incorporates traces of unreason, then, for Merleau-Ponty, reason or sanity would entail the maintenance of a sharp and clear distinction between one’s being as a subject and the palpable objects of one’s perception. A recognition, moreover, of the artifice or the fabricatedness, and contingencies of what is taken as materially palpable. That, in other words, it constitutes a sign: the staging of a culturally-specific relationship between what signifies and what is signified. This maintenance of a sharp difference between the signans and the signatum, however, is not without a problematic two-fold consequence: the notion (first) that a concept can exist in its own right, independent of its articulation, along with the notion (second) that material form can itself exist independently of its articulation. The co-construction and co-determinacy of materialism and immaterialism (spirituality). The performance and practice of theorizing, of seeing: the marking of a journey from which one has returned to report on what was seen.

Worlding [v., intransitive and/or transitive]. Rather than taking architecture as a what, it would be more useful to ask: When – amongst the myriad practices and events of world-making, or worlding – is ‘architecture’? When, where, how, why, under what conditions, and for whom, can given phenomena, or particular artifacts, serve distinctively architectonic functions? Is architecture an aspect, modality, or function, of worlding? Are there then certain distinctively architectonic actions, practices, and events linking what are commonly staged as distinct in occidental modernity as ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’? Particular and distinctive topological or dramaturgical orchestrations of bodies in space, place, and time – where the stagecraft itself is meaningful in a particular way. In effect, making the visible legible, potentially delineating a history, theory, and criticism and a historiography in its own right? Perhaps even what might be termed an ‘architectonics’?

It has been customary for some time to believe that works of art, artistry, or artifice (however defined) are historically significant phenomena; that artifice itself has a history, the astute delineation of which would provide significant insights into the (presumably parallel or in some manner complementary) histories of individuals, communities, and peoples – insights that, not least of all, may be legible as providing lessons for our own times. Chronologies as teleologies. Objects as ‘object-lessons’. The modern professions and institutions of the history of art (art historicism) and of the histories of architecture (architectonics? museography? One of the archival fevers?) were and remain grounded in this enabling assumption, one of whose several corollaries has been that changes in form over time and space may be taken to correspond to changes in beliefs, attitudes, mentalities, intentions, or ideologies, as well as to changes in social, political, or cultural conditions. Or, conversely, that changes in mentality are or should be palpably manifested. This fiction of factual representation has long been a virtually irresistible occidentalist artifice, having become one of the cornerstones of the edifice of the modernities we have built ourselves into, whose exits have yet to lead anywhere than to other framed images, however many posts are posted, pasted, or palimpsested onto those modernities. Post-modernity was never an elsewhere but another picture on the walls of the prison-house of museology.

There were myriad sites over the past two centuries where such fictions were ostensified, yet arguably there was none more suddenly and dramatically brilliant than the enormous prefabricated glass and iron building in London’s Hyde Park of 1851 designed by Joseph Paxton –by profession a landscape architect and designer of garden glass-houses – to accommodate the Great Exhibition of the Arts & Manufactures of All Nations: what immediately came to be called the Crystal Palace. The first ‘universal exposition’. This most bluntly and radically translucent of 19th-century constructions may well have been modernity’s most unsurpassable architectural artifact: the lucent embodiment and semiological Summa of the epistemological principle of order itself. A structure that was infinitely expandable, scaleless, transparently abstract, whose style consisted of a (seeming) lack of style. A plan referred to at the time as ‘a type of what the actual world should be’. A building imitated several years later in Paris, thereby setting in motion a sequence of ‘universal’ exhibitions around the world. The 1851 London Crystal Palace building was virtually duplicated in Melbourne, Australia, a year later. George Cruickshank’s 1851 lithograph poignantly portrayed the exhibition’s global aspirations: astride the world, the building is shown attracting (absorbing) all the world’s peoples and products from every corner of the planet (Preziosi, 2003: 92–115). The earth is bisected from north to south by the British Union Jack: the southern end flies from the Red Fort at Delhi, marking the global reach of the British Empire.

Simply put – to paraphrase Freud 50 years later arguing for his new science of psychoanalysis – the Crystal Palace purported to be an impartial instrument, like the infinitesimal calculus for making legible the similarities, differences, and the cognitive, aesthetic, and ethical hierarchies amongst all peoples by means of their juxtaposed and plainly-seen products and effects; their artistries. Art itself as the pan-human measure of all peoples; the universal module.

On the eve of World War II, WH Auden composed a eulogy for another poet who was a well-known political activist as well, WB Yeats (see Auden, 1991[1940]: In Memory of WB Yeats). In this poem, Auden makes the famous remark that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, which has had multiple parsings, and most commonly these three: first, that a poem (or poetry in general) is ineffectual in the world of daily life, a mere non-threatening or un-dangerous phantasm; second, that poetry is a pastime or a sideline (parergon) outside or alongside the main work (ergon) and grit of civic life; and third, that the art of poetry creates ‘nothing’ as an entity; a palpable positivity or some thing in its own right. Like the zed or number zero, that brilliant invention of Arab mathematicians. Auden’s is a telling insight into the art, artistry, and artifice of what is promoted or construed as real or natural. A subject and a conundrum as old as Plato’s dilemma about whether to admit the (mimetic) arts into an ideal society or polity precisely because of their potential to trouble the souls of its citizens: that is, making manifest the artifice or fabricatedness of what is taken, promoted or legislated by those holding or desirous of power as true, real, natural, and thereby beyond debate. It is proper and necessary to foreground the ‘danger’ and terror posed or instantiated by artistry and artifice.

Moreover, in the ‘surviving’ noted there, the reciting of a poem is, among other things, an evocation (a ‘mouth’) that foregrounds its own artifice, as well as, at the same time, its context (the ‘valley of its own making’). The former is a manifestation of the ‘poetic (aesthetic) function’ of any semiotic/communicative activity, following Jakobson’s (1960: 360–377) multifunctional and multimodal matrix of signifying praxis, where that modality of use co-exists and co-signifies along with several other modes – what came to be termed the referential, the emotive, the conative (or exhortatory), the phatic, and the meta-linguistic or systemic, which foregrounds the speaker or maker’s attention to the sign system itself. ¹

The basic point is that signifying practice in any modality or dimension is only rarely singular but is ordinarily co-present with other dimensions or functions, any one of which may be in dominance in a given utterance. Consider simply the multiple connotations possible in a given description of a space and its choreography, or, if you prefer, in the practice of worlding. Denotation, in other words, as Roland Barthes and not a few others have insisted, is but one species of connotation, as an artifice in its own right. The question to be reckoned with about (what is called) architecture is not (or less) ‘what is’ that ‘it’, but rather under what conditions is architectonic practice legible (reified) as a ‘kind’ of thing; as one modality or instance of fabricating space and choreographing together bodies, places, spaces, and things – as the enabling and constraining of practice. Like Auden’s poem, it similarly ‘makes nothing happen’. You might wish to say that architecture (to echo Shakespeare’s stunning words in The Tempest) ‘carves from airy nothing a local habitation and a name’ but it is equally the case that ‘airiness’ and ‘nothing’ are simultaneous co-fabrications. ²

I’m reminded of Gertrude Stein’s remarks about the city of Oakland that ‘there is no there there’ (see Stein, 2004[1930s], emphasis in original). If architecture (even ‘Architecture!’) is not any kind of ‘it’, then this is more than a matter of simply replacing things, reified entities, with events, practices, performances, or processes. We need to reckon with and interrogate, as much as is feasible without presuming a globalist, universalist, or ‘neutral’ perspective, our most fundamental presumptions about how we reckon with our ways of world-making – and without bringing on board Heideggerean notions about ‘world-pictures’ and their imagined ‘ages’ – back-formations from some Hegelian vanishing point of final and perfect fulfillment. Oratorios in time–space sounding out episodic tableaux. Dramaturgies staged from the point of a trompe-l’oeil that is amnesiac with respect to its own fabricatedness (Preziosi, 2003: 1–14, 137–54).

As I’ve been asked to contribute a few words about the Western concept conventionally called ‘architecture’ for a special issue of an academic journal (the one you’re reading here) devoted to research and reportage on another contemporary fiction called ‘visual culture’, the following remarks will likely be construed as heretical within the context of that discourse, whose theological foundations and presumptions I will also consider as these remarks unfold. I’m not going to engage with the problem that is marked by ‘architecture’ historiographically, as I’ve been dealing with such questions in a critical manner elsewhere (Preziosi, 1979a, 1979b, 1992, 2014; Preziosi and Farago, 2012) for some time and at considerable length, but I will here attempt to reckon with the issues epistemologically through two cases.

Case in point one: In her research on the cultural practices of the traditionally nomadic !Kung Bushmen peoples of the Kalahari desert in West Africa, the late American anthropologist Lorna Marshall once described their settlements as follows:

It takes the women only ¾ of an hour to build their shelters, but half the time at least the women’s whim is not to build shelters at all. In that case, they sometimes put up two sticks to symbolize the entrance of the shelters so that the family may orient itself as to which side is the men’s and which the women’s side of the fire. Sometimes they do not bother with the sticks. (Marshall, 1960: 342–343)

Case in point two: The place-making and worlding practices of certain aboriginal groups in Australia, who use anything and everything in their material environments to narrate stories, often via journeys over great distances, where such journeys (to paraphrase Michel de Certeau, 1988: 101, speaking of New York or Paris) constitute a ‘great poem of [i.e., made by] walking (a) city’, where the walking is an ‘architecturizing’ of a space, transforming a space into a place. A mythomorphic transformation, in Jacques Derrida’s (1978: 268) terms, creating that of which it speaks. For the Australian groups, the artifice, the ‘architecture’ is the worlding of and with and by a particular given environment (which often may be thousands of square kilometers in area). Worlding problematizes clear distinctions between geography, geomancy, landscape, environment, artifacts, and talismanic relationships amongst phenomena.

A propos of our encounters and reckonings with palpably fabricated human environments, whether or not conventionally distinguished as ‘material’ or ‘virtual’ – and where these are construed more generically as events and as occasions or solicitations for what is being referred to here in the introduction to this issue as ‘the choreography of bodies in space and time’, and less as ‘objects’ – what is of interest in the first case in point is Marshall’s calling attention to the contingency and dispensability of what in our contemporary world might commonly be assumed to be the necessary material sites, frames or containers for (and by extension the expressions, re-presentations, and the marks or markers of) behavioral activity. Her account reveals that the made formation (the hut) is the circumstantial product of behavioral attitudes and routines regarding the topological staging of gendered relations of kinship. The hut, whose temporary material form results opportunistically from exploiting various unique local resources at a given time in the nomadic movements of the group, is at the same time an instrument to strengthen and focus behavior in socially-sanctioned ways. What is notable here, in other words, is the coexistence; the co-determination of both the (temporary) made formation and the topologies of bodily relationships between individuals: who interacts with whom under what conditions, when and where, and toward what ends.

There are three implications here. First, what constitutes dwelling for the !Kung people is both a built form and a set of topological relations structured according to differences in gender, and that there is no implication of a direct causal link between the two. Second, what constitutes dwelling (worlding) is not exhausted by a built environment or by the culturally-specific concepts of construction, fabrication, building, architecture, settlement, or cities. The third most general and, perhaps, most interesting implication to be drawn from her observations is that settlement or dwelling is a multimodal, multifunctional, and multidimensional behavior which may (or may not) employ ‘built’ formations. What is reified as the building is a nexus of functional relationships, which itself exists in space and time: built spaces both enabling and constraining present practices in particular ways with respect to social, historical and political (dis)placements, (dis)locations, and disruptions. Worlding, of course, as socio-political praxis.

In the task of revealing more precisely the natures, places and functions of artifacts, buildings, cities, or built environments generally in social behavior, the critical analysis of communicative events or cultural performances in their multimodal and multifunctional totalities is of fundamental importance. Multiple modalities of signifying media not only commonly co-exist, but each modality incorporates multiple functions, in hierarchical arrangements that vary in dominance, often radically, on specific occasions. The point is that the semiotic behavior of worlding is inherently redundant and indeterminant, affording fabrications of meanings in multiple dimensions, perspectives, and media both at the same time and over time and space. The palpable poesis of palimpsesting.

I use the term ‘communication’ (the word is etymologically a visual and architectonic metaphor, referring to the juxtapositioning and sharing of walls or boundaries) in the broadest sense to involve manifesting or disseminating information regarding the perception of similarities and differences (of any kind). Social behavior in general aims at affecting (and effecting) the behaviors, normally in multiple ways, of both oneself and others. The mere insertion or citation within social space of a form, word, gesture, or a sound – both materially and virtually, to use conventional (and problematic) distinctions – potentially influences the behavior of others, who are thereby placed in a position of having to react (or pretending to react) or of avoiding (or pretending to avoid) reacting. ³ At the same time, how a formation is received and understood cannot be securely controlled without external direction or modification, leading to an awareness of the essential indeterminacy or semi-determinacy or contingency of semiosis. An indeterminacy held at bay by maintaining a ‘rigorous distinction’ between signifier and signified – an insistence that reifies the artifice of transcendence as a distinctive realm of being. ⁴

In short: a building is not an index. Neither is a building a symbol, a sign or an icon. In fundamentalist religiosities, of course, every sign is an index: that is, it bears a relationship of direct connection between a signans (the signing material entity) and a signatum (what that entity is purported to point to). It was Derrida who astutely pointed out that the maintenance of that duality leaves open the possibility of conceiving of an immaterial realm of existence as having a life of its own. But this works both ways, for it suggests that material ‘form’ itself can exist independently of its ‘articulation’ – the scientism of art historicism (Preziosi, 2014: 84–100).

In worlding – in the ongoing semiotic bricolage of daily life – we orchestrate anything and everything at our disposal (including our own and other bodies, not to mention also the stellar constellation Orion) to create and maintain a meaningful environment; to elicit and solicit action. Any sign system is a complexly-ordered instrument or modality for cueing such perceptions in given sensory channels and in conventional and culturally-specific media. Moreover, meaningfulness or sense is itself inherently time-and-space-specific.

What exactly would it mean, then, to ‘decode, read, and interpret’ the ‘spatial language’ of urban space or human environments more generically if what we are actually confronted with are situations in which a strictly ‘spatial language’ (or the ‘built environment’ from which it is deduced) would itself be only part of the picture? This is one of the fundamental challenges to any visual or material semiology as such. We are faced with the problem of accounting for the totality of multimodal, multifunctional, and multidimensional signification. This is a question that more often than not in recent times continues to be reduced to a dichotomy between visual and verbal signification – for example, the somewhat hasty observations of Brazilian architect Christian de Portzamparc in an essay called ‘Can we think without language?’ where the author claims that this is really a question about architecture (‘logos’ vs the ‘domain of forms’) (see Portzamparc and Sollers, 2008: 21–46). Recall Derrida’s (1997[1986]: 324) ironic (after what we’ve seen here) remark quoted in the introduction to this issue that ‘architecture no longer defines a domain.’ For it is the nothing being addressed here.

There are several implied questions here: (1) What are the methodological implications for reckoning with inherently multimodal, multifunctional, and multidimensional communication, performance, or behavior? How can we possibly model such complexities effectively and efficiently? (2) What are the possible effects of such investigations: that is, what could such information be used for, and for whom and under what conditions would or should they be used? (3) Finally, what is now meant by interpretation? Is any new fabrication a potential interpretative artifact vis-à-vis those in its ambient environment, or in the (still with us!) sadly lugubrious ‘histories of art (and architecture)’ more broadly? This is an issue with philosophical implications which are beyond the limits of this short piece to adequately address, so I shall pose it in a slightly more manageable way by reframing the question of what is an interpretation by asking instead When is interpretation? Under what conditions is some thing (or event) interpretative? Can a building, city, artifact, or painting interpret itself? Is a museum a reframing of its own exterior world? A rethinking of its world? An eloquently raised eyebrow in front of the latest sad annex to MOMA? Museology as poetry; the formatting of episodic narrativity; of voice as poeisis. Is a city its own interpretation; its own metaphor or allegory? The ideology of chronology?

Emmanuel Levinas (2000[1948]: 122) once observed that ‘The whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory … In utilizing images art not only reflects, but brings about this allegory.’ As human artifacts, cities themselves may always have ‘borne on their face’ their own allegories. Are ‘art’ and ‘architecture’ essentially, or largely, rhetorical mechanisms designed to bring about that of which they speak? Are they consequently mythomorphic? The profession of architecture as a constative morphing, a making of the myth of its praxis as merchandise. Rendering individuals and communities as worshipful spectators in the latter-day religion of starchitecturology.

Is what we’re referring to as architecture (or art) staged as a material entity, rather than an event, the mark of (an) amnesia? Amnesia is less a negative loss or forgetting than a production: an artifact.

A final point concerns the architectonics, viz. the social semiology, of the trompe-l’oeil – something that is arguably at the heart of the discourse on architecture, citation of which raises the question and the specter of: What is not a fool-the-eye phenomenon? If everything is only ever palpable from a particular locus or ‘standpoint’, and since there is no placeless standpoint except for that of a fictional transcendent divinity, isn’t architecturizing, isn’t worlding, then, the betrayal, the veritable problematizing of transcendence; a (fabricated, to be sure) amnesia regarding the art, artistry, and artifice of any transcendence? The Platonic dilemma. Once you ‘mark a domain’ (Derrida) or build a thing, you can’t fully turn off its voice(s). What the tale of the Tower of Babel told. Plato’s solution to the dilemma of artifice was more and better artifice: cosmic decorum: the tethering-together of the here-and-now to the always-already.

The idolatry and blasphemy of reification that architects toy with always, everywhere, is the same that Moses knew when he was railing about that ever-so-shiny golden calf. By making nothing happen, architecture – architectonic praxis – worlding, in short – makes its seeming antitheses very solid indeed. All that is virtual seemingly melts into place.