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S/Erialurreal (Re)Presentation, Or, a Žižekian 'Sustainability' for Architects

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S/Erialurreal (Re)Presentation, Or, a Žižekian 'Sustainability' for Architects 580 WHERE DO YOU STAND S/erialurreal (Re)Presentation, or, a Žižekian ‘Sustainability’ for Architects ROBERT SVETZ Syracuse University Mike Twohy. The New Yorker; Kunaver/Mohar. Slavoj Žižek Does Not Exist “Sure, the picture is in my eye, but I, I am also in the my ‘material existence.’ Materialism means that the picture.” -Jacques Lacan1 reality I see is never ‘whole’ - not because a large part of it eludes me, but because it contains a stain, a blind spot, which indicates my inclusion in it.’” “Materialism is not the direct assertion of my in- 2 clusion in objective reality (such an assertion pre- -Slavoj Žižek supposes that my position of enunciation is that of an external observer who can grasp the whole of It is perhaps taken for granted that architectural reality); rather it resides in the reflexive twist by discourse should regularly reinvest itself with test- means of which I myself am included in the picture constituted by me - it is this reflexive short circuit, ing and debating its different practices for integrat- this necessary redoubling of myself as standing both ing - most often by accommodating or excluding outside and inside my picture, that bears witness to - the competing and sometimes wholly contradic- S/ERIALURREAL (RE)PRESENTATION 581 tory demands among its economic, social, material, most fundamental to his Marxist project, the rela- technological, aesthetic, and other design interests tionship of these and other themes to the fostering - comprehensive and sustainable design no less than of “emancipatory politics” under global capitalism. If complex geometry, custom fabrication, and design- to an architectural readership this terrain of Žižekian build studios offering cases in point. Less well ex- concepts sounds already too overwrought, then amined are how and to what degree these same Žižek is both innocent and guilty as charged. For, competing interests’ incommensurabilities, forever on the one hand, while having remained among the inscribed a priori as inherent tensions or unfulfilled most important cultural theorists of the past twenty “virtual” dimensions of actual designs, might also be years across EU and more especially US academe, understood positively to disallow any singular rep- Žižek’s scant presence within architectural discourse resentability or performance of a building or proj- suggests something of a dereliction of duties among ect. This very split condition of incommensurability historians and theorists otherwise invested in Marx is the “parallax” of Slavoj Žižek’s most recent work and Lacan, not to mention various anxious modern- to figure the “minimal difference” or “gap” of the real isms and utopian ghosts.8 Yet, on the other hand, within the myriad politico-aesthetic subjects and ob- there are certainly issues of timing, intentional dif- jects of his Lacanian-Marxist cultural analyses. And it ficulty and double-framing complexity which offer is the blind-spot constructedness operating in Žižek’s some explanation to this apparent exclusion, and dialectic, with its perverse3 double-framing between that bear our quick review here. a perspective literalism and a perspective lapse, that I want to argue holds promise for engaging the ar- First, quite simply, the momentum of Žižek’s popular chitectural divide between today’s still post-critical rise following his 1989 inaugural release of The Sub- and post-political Deleuze-and-Guattarian affect- lime Object of Ideology came in the midst of archi- oriented projective/emergent sensibilities4 and the tectural theory’s Derridean high and ensuing reprisal more recent pragmatic call for a critical renewal of of Deleuzian affectivity, not to mention that Žižek, architecture’s potential for socially motivated stra- unlike these writers, had not engaged (until present- tegic intervention and engagement.5 Thus taking ly) in any explicit architectural speculation. Second, up Žižek’s injunction to leverage the “real virtual- as with Lacan’s avowed aim to forestall the kind of ity” potential for reflexively engaging architectural everyday misappropriations that enervated Freud’s form’s inevitably ideological projections and read- clinical specificity, it stands to reason that Žižek, too, ings, this paper looks both to examine certain as- seeks an efficacious activation and not merely a jar- pects of Žižek’s theoretical program and to further gonistic appropriation of his work, whereas jargonis- project onto it two often overlooked modernist prac- tic appropriation and blunt translations into formalist tices - musical Serialism and photographic Surreal- technique - aporia, emergence, rhizomatic ? - are ism - whose own blind-spot formulations for some in fact how many designers take theory out for a disjunctive inscription can already be seen emerging drive.9 Appropriately then, and quite alike Derrida’s among certain design practices today.6 and Deleuze’s work, Žižek’s writing is a dense meta- discourse (on Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, just for ŽIŽEK ON ARCHITECTURE? starters), evasive of casual surplus value extraction while ever generous in the sheer use value pleasures With the 2010 release of his Living in the End of engendered by its brilliantly tantalizing repertoires Times, Slavoj Žižek at last arrived at architecture’s on Hitchcock, sci-fi, and a never-ending smorgas- doorstep and, wasting not a moment, directly en- bord of pop-culture and political references. joined the discourse to get on with enjoying the nec- essary failures of its irreconcilable politico-aesthetic Finally, and most germane to our discussion, is that differences.7 Like all of Žižek’s “lighter” case-study Žižek’s form of writing is itself quite purposefully and current-event montages, Living’s interlude chap- reflective of the most signal psycho-analytically in- ter on “The Architectural Parallax” grafts an array of formed difficulties he is writing about - the unrepre- common and highbrow examples into the larger fab- sentability of the Real, dialectically subjective reflex- ric of his own critical positions on: the “flattening” ivity towards the object, and the Kantian sublimity inherent to postmodern relativism, the properly “re- of ideological obfuscation inherent to cultural prac- flexive twist” of Hegelian dialectics, the formally re- tices like, yes, architecture. As Tom Brockelman has lational constructedness of the Lacanian “gap,” and, noted, “In his unique combination of lucidity and dif- 582 WHERE DO YOU STAND ficulty, the ability to produce the sense of a definite distinguishing a philosophical (as opposed to mere- meaning just out of the reader’s grasp, Žižek writes ly optical) parallax: in precisely the way that sets him up as the ‘writer- supposed-to-know’ - a relationship with his reader “’Parallax,’ according to its common definition is the apparent displacement of an object (the shift of its that we might, in order to differentiate it from full- position against a background), caused by a change 10 bore analysis, call a ‘’philosophical transference.’” in observational position that provides a new line of Thus entirely apropos the psycho-analytical mise en sight. The philosophical twist to be added, of course, scène in which he immerses us, and so quite on a is that the observed difference is not simply “sub- jective,” thanks to the fact that it is the same object par with Derrida’s densely multivalent layers of inter- existing “out there” which is seen from two different pretation or Deleuze’s writerly “lines of flight,” Žižek points of view. It is rather, as Hegel would have put quite literally stages a Freudian “working through” it, subject and object are inherently “mediated,” so for his readers’ desires for analytical insight.11 that an “epistemological” shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an “ontological” shift in the object itself.”12 To be sure then, in “The Architectural Parallax” we are put “on the couch” amidst a fusillade of often The “architectural” parallax, in other words, is dia- freely associated references - from Loos, Venturi, lectical materialism enacted vis-à-vis architecture, Jameson, Gehry, Liebeskind, Koolhaas, Foster and which is to say it remains in the mode of critical Zaera Polo, to Albanian bunkers, gold faucets, Stalin- analysis and is not a prescriptive thing; a “way of ist neo-Gothic Baroque apartments, the Korean DMZ seeing” architecture, yet one that is certainly no and, of course, Sarah Palin - that we might better guide for how to specifically represent or build ar- work through how Žižek is prompting us to put archi- chitecture. Captured here by our attentively Mon- tecture - and most particularly the building envelope et-gazing headphoned amphibians no less than - on the couch. To accept this theoretical maneuver, by Kunaver and Mohar’s brilliantly double-framed we must first give over to the idea that architecture surreal portrait, “Slavoj Žižek Does Not Exist,” this could productively enlist a kind of psycho-analytic “stained” Lacanian seeing is doubly critical for its perspectivism, i.e., one invested in a symptomatic capacity to locate in the shift from one limited vi- recognition of its incommensurabilities and lacks, as sion to another the ground of our being able to see represented through the different registrations of more in the thing than the thing-in-itself. blunt formal manipulations (Imaginary) and their in- evitable ideological projections (Symbolic), such that As embedded in Žižek’s own writerly “parallaxical” in the strategically minimal difference between the descriptions, the inherent difficulty of this concept two a fuller virtual dimension might perversely be - perhaps most especially for architecture’s visually activated (Real). What Žižek will claim this conceptu- oriented thinking - resides in its blunt unrepresent- ally animorphotic approach has to offer is a recogni- ability to consciousness: even as we are asked to tion of the politically positive because formally side- picture that our “materialist” sense of reality has stepping role of relationally critical tensions which do a limit, hinting we need only zoom out to discern not regress into the pastiche of politically expres- such a limit, we are told that the limit is in fact sive representations.
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