Architecture of the Margins: the Topological Space of Ornamental Monsters and Prosthetic Skins
The topological space of ornamental monsters and prosthetic skins
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! A Thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of ! Doctor of Philosophy
! University of Canberra
! July 2018 ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !
v Abstract ‘Monsters’ and ‘prostheses’ emerge graphically and metaphorically from the margins and gaps in discourse. This is significant, for ancient charts and texts harnessed graphic forms to make meaningful comment on related content. The placement of these borderline figures signaled difference but also, and more profoundly, marked out sites of transformation. Although monstrous and prosthetic figures have touched, intersected, and even become synonymous with one another over the course of history, for the most part they have remained split and embedded within contested disciplines. Nevertheless, the prosthetic trope, like the monstrous metaphor, stands for a problematic hybrid interface that has been heavily exploited within diverse disciplines, often reductively. Still, as with its monstrous counterpart, there remains a sense in which the prosthetic figure is also constitutive. This thesis draws on the ancient figure of the monster and its sensual inscription of the communicative space of architecture in order to re-frame the contemporary figure of the prosthesis. The aim is to open the space of architecture to the possibility of a shared reading that holds relevance for a plural and fragmented world. The process of re-reading and re-framing monsters and prostheses aligns with the way meaning and knowing is enacted by the figures themselves, as they disclose new understanding through shifts in perceptual orientation. The points of reference that constitute the three-part form of this dissertation derive from structures shared by both figurations, namely ornament, skin and prosthesis. Monsters and prostheses first coincide in rhetorical ornament where they were harnessed to ‘speak’ and persuade an audience through a dynamic process of revealing and concealing. These inventive mixtures challenged unified, natural orders, and so were not only invested with the power to arouse, but also the power to confuse. The characteristic ambivalence of the rhetorical monster was formally transferred to the space of architectural ornament with Vitruvius’ treatise De architectura (circa) 25 BCE. In architecture, the ambiguous spatium inscribed by this figure is revealed to be an enigmatic structure imbued with revelatory potential—qualities shared by the rhetorical prosthesis. Both monsters and prostheses instantiate a spatial topology and way of thinking and understanding that is inscribed by means of skin and touch. This space is not the abstract topological space of mathematics, but is a primal, embodied space that Maurice Merleau-Ponty associates with ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being.1 Here, meaning is realised through the dynamic interrelation of proximity and distance, a relation that is sustained obliquely through a slow encroachment. The sensual means by which monsters and prostheses give shape to the complex ground that exists between body and world is revealed through a series of pre-modern studies that constitute the second part, Skin. Connecting rhetorical language with the topological domain of ‘skin’, the third part, Prosthesis, explicates the way in which monsters and prostheses fold together to inscribe a space that can be harnessed for its transformative power, and thus make a place for the contemporary body to relate to the built form. This research demonstrates how, an architectural inquiry that braids the corporeal moments in which monsters and prosthesis touch, overlap, and fold one into the other, might scaffold meaningful, embodied architectural experience. This corporeal frame permits a form of shared
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, in The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, ed. James Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 178-188.
vii reading, which is notable for, without meaningful, mediating structures individuals remain detached from others and ultimately their worlds. Frontispiece: ‘Fragment’ extracted from Piranesi, Carcere XIV: The Gothic Arch–second state (1945)
viii Certificate of Authorship of Thesis
Except where clearly acknowledged in footnotes, quotations and the bibliography, I certify that I am the sole author of the thesis submitted today entitled—Architecture of the Margins: The topological space of ornamental monsters and prosthetic skins.
I further certify that to the best of my knowledge the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis.
The material in the thesis has not been the basis of an award of any other degree or diploma except where due reference is made in the text of the thesis.
The thesis complies with University requirements for a thesis as set out in the Examination of Higher Degree by Research Theses Policy. Refer to http://www.canberra.edu.au/current- students/current-research-students/hdr-policy-and-procedures
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Candidate’s Signature Date
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ix ! !
! To my grande famiglia, for keeping me grounded, fed, and at all times surrounded ! with love and support. ! ! ! !
xi Acknowledgements
A project such as this is never undertaken in isolation; it relies on the support and goodwill of many. However, special thanks must be extended to my supervisor Professor Stephen Frith, whose scholarly counsel, incisive guidance, and unerring faith and encouragement has not only made this thesis possible, but also gifted me the opportunity to pursue and find my own voice.
I also thank academic staff at the University of Canberra’s Faculty of Arts and Design, in particular Associate Professor Stephen Barrass and Professor Gevork Hartoonian, for their insightful observations and critique throughout the development of this thesis. I also extend my heartfelt thanks to the University of Canberra’s library staff for their tireless, professional, and at all times enthusiastic support. A final thank you must be extended to Beth Barber and Dr. Les Rymer for their valuable assistance in proofreading and commenting on this thesis.
xiii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Figures xvii Introduction xxi
Ornament 1 A Beginning: Vitruvius 3 Conceiving a body 3 Myth 5 The Perfect Body 10 Speaking bodies 21 Monsters 28 Milieu 35 Metaphor 43 Ornamental metaphors 43 Vico’s epistemology and ontology 54 Theories of metaphor 60 Ricoeur 65 The ornament of Leon Battista Alberti 73
Skin 103 ‘Topological space as a model of Being’ 113 Depth 116 Serres 119 Monstrous skins 127 Similarity and difference 128 Subversion of the natural order 130 Imagined skins 132 Ornamental skins 139 Metamorphoses 141 Sebastiano Serlio 154 Sympathetic touch 165 Tactile Vision 167 Plural touch 172 Eros 175 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 175 The space of dreams 176 Moral love 180 Masterful touch 187 Disfigured knowledge 195 The skins of Giovanni Battista Piranesi 199 The restorative fragment 212
Prosthesis 215 A plural world: the monster yields to the post-human 217 Topological space and time 222 Smooth space 226 The persistence of the subject 237 Third space 243 Folds 244
xv An approach 251 Resistance, depth, and journeying 257 Ornamental Prostheses 264 Prosthetic ornament 269 An entanglement of tropes 276 Resonance beyond structure 283 Deferral and the desire for wholeness 284 Metonymy as prosthesis 298 Prosthetic ornament and the space of architecture 300 Summa 319
Bibliography 339
xvi List of Figures
Figure 1. Robert Fludd: Man as a microcosmos of the greater macrocosmos. Title page from 'Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia' (1624) ...... 12 Figure 2. Albrecht Dürer: Illustration of the female body in 'Della simmetria de i corpi humani, libri quattro' (1591) ...... 13 Figure 3. Reconstructed image of Camillo's Memory Theatre ...... 53 Figure 4. Carlo Scarpa: The entrance gate to the Tolentini building of the Instituto Universitario d’Architettura di Venezia (1985) ...... 57 Figure 5. Mies van der Rohe: Lake Shore Drive apartments (1949–1951) Chicago, first floor mullions .. 68 Figure 6. Benito Montano: 'The Ark' (1593). The image combines the idea of the Ark based on the proportions of man with the story of the Flood as an allegory of Man's redemption. Hence, the Ark is depicted as the coffin of Christ...... 79 Figure 7. Piero della Francesca: 'The Flagellation of Christ' (circa 1455) Oil on canvas ...... 80 Figure 8. Leon Battista Alberti: Tempio Malatestiano (circa 1450) Rimini, front and side views ...... 97 Figure 9. Leon Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai (1446–1451) ...... 100 Figure 10. Leon Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai (1446–1451) Incomplete edge ...... 101 Figure 11. Paul Cézanne: 'Mont Sainte-Victoire' (1902–1904) Oil on canvas ...... 118 Figure 12. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) The original floor plan (left) was subject to periodic, uncontrolled inundation of water. Scarpa's 're-mapping' (right) also re-writes the way in which water enters the ground floor during flooding ...... 124 Figure 13. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) New steps from northern canal portals (top left) Raised porch linking the northeast room and entry foyer (top right) New entrance bridge through northern façade window (bottom left) Original staircase partially encased in new stone (bottom right) ...... 125 Figure 14. Carlo Scarpa: Castelvecchio (1956–1964) 'Cangrande' viewed from below and above ...... 126 Figure 15. Pierre Bonnard: 'Nude in the Bath' (1925) Oil on canvas ...... 135 Figure 16. Giuseppe Arcimboldo: 'Wasser' (1566) and detail. Oil on lime wood ...... 144 Figure 17. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: 'Apollo and Daphne' (1622-1625). Life size marble sculpture housed in the Galleria Borghese Rome ...... 149 Figure 18. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Fabric detail from 'Ecstasy of Saint Teresa' (1647–1652) and flesh detail from 'The Rape of Proserpina' (1621–1622) ...... 149 Figure 19. Sebastiano Serlio: Book IV "On the Five Styles of Buildings" (1537) Column bases and capitals of the Composite order ...... 155
xvii Figure 20. Sebastiano Serlio: 'Libro Estraordinario' (1551) Portal XX of the first series of thirty bizarre gates and Portal XI of the second series of twenty regular gates ...... 157 Figure 21. The Arch of Septimius Severus, erected at the western end of the Forum Romanum AD 203, Rome ...... 160 Figure 22. Sebastiano Serlio: 'Libro Estraordinario' (1551) Rustic Portal XXIX ...... 163 Figure 23. The 'musical calligram' seen here is a visual representation of the round lyric form (or rondeau). This illustration appears in the 'Compas' of Baude Cordier (circa 1400) ...... 171 Figure 24. Michelangelo: 'Creation of Adam' (circa 1508–1512) Fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel ...... 173 Figure 25. Woodcut image from 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' (first published in 1499) ...... 177 Figure 26. Carlo Scarpa: Castelvecchio sculpture gallery (1956–1964) ...... 178 Figure 27. Andreas Vesalius: Frontispiece from ’De humani corporis fabrica' (1543) ...... 189 Figure 28. Andreas Vesalius: An illustration from ’De humani corporis fabrica' (1543) ...... 193 Figure 29. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Veduta di Roma (circa 1766) ...... 203 Figure 30. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carcere XIV 'The Gothic Arch'–second state (printed 1761) ...... 205 Figure 31. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carcere VIII 'The Drawbridge'–second state (printed 1761) and M.C. Escher: 'Belvedere' (1958) ...... 207 Figure 32. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Campo Marzio 'Ichnographia' (1762) ...... 211 Figure 33. Francis Bacon: 'Study for Head of George Dyer' (1967) Oil on canvas ...... 234 Figure 34. Francis Bacon: 'Three Studies of George Dyer' (1966) Oil on canvas ...... 235 Figure 35. Paolo Uccello: 'Blessed Jacopone da Todi'–fresco (circa 1435–1440) and El Greco: 'Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane'–oil on canvas (circa 1590–1599) ...... 247 Figure 36. 'The Lady and the Unicorn' (circa 1500). Six tapestries depicting each of the senses woven in Flanders from wool and silk. Shown here are 'Touch' and 'To my one desire' ...... 255 Figure 37. Jackson Pollock photographed in 1950 by Hans Namuth ...... 260 Figure 38. Jackson Pollock: Pollock and 'Mural' (1943) Oil and water-based paint on linen ...... 260 Figure 39. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) Garden path ...... 261 Figure 40. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) Travertine door ...... 261 Figure 41. Paul Cézanne: 'Wine Glass and Apples' (1879–1882) Oil on canvas ...... 279 Figure 42. Paul Cézanne: 'Three Apples' (1878–1879) Oil on canvas ...... 279 Figure 43. Paul Cézanne: 'The Large Bathers' (1894–1906) Oil on canvas ...... 282 Figure 44. Hans Holbein: 'The Ambassadors' (1533) Oil on oak ...... 293 Figure 45. Jože Plečnik: Plan of Prague Castle highlighting the southern path, or ramparts (commenced 1920) ...... 302
xviii Figure 46. Jože Plečnik: Entrance to the southern ramparts (commenced 1920) ...... 302 Figure 47. Jože Plečnik: Prague Castle 'Bull Stair' entrance gate and canopy (1920–1932) ...... 303 Figure 48. Jože Plečnik: Prague Castle 'Bull Stair' interior (1920–1932) ...... 305 Figure 49. Hans Scharoun: Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (1967) ...... 309 Figure 50. Günther Domenig: Documentation Centre (2001) Nazi Rally Grounds, Nuremberg ...... 310 Figure 51. Günther Domenig: Documentation Centre ground floor plan (2001) ...... 312 Figure 52. Miralles and Pinos: Stair-ramp assemblage, La Llauna School, Barcelona (1984–1986) ...... 314 Figure 53. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: 'Big Air Package' Gasometer, Oberhausen (2013) ...... 315 Figure 54. Christo and Jeanne- Claude: 'Big Air Package' Gasometer, Oberhausen (2013) ...... 316
xix Introduction
In the Western tradition the intimate relation between body and architecture that persisted up until the Enlightenment bound humans with the greater cosmos, their communities, and each other. However, as secularisation gathered strength in Europe following the Reformation, the body-subject as a microcosm of a greater macrocosm yielded to the individual who, detached from a universal cosmic order, became an isolated, bounded object, an ‘ontologically empty form’ understood primarily in relation to other bodies.2 This shift was marked by the displacement of the public realm by the social realm; a shift that Hannah Arendt claims resulted in the loss of self. For, she points out, a ‘reality that comes from being seen and heard by others’, and the intersubjective relations derived through ‘the intermediary of a common world of things’, was replaced by a reality founded on a culture of consumption and self-expression. In this new social reality the experiences of the private individual are of no interest or consequence to others.3 This is significant, for without meaningful shared experiences the ability of individuals to attribute value more broadly and act with a common purpose is negated.
The uncoupling of the body-subject from the communicative ‘intermediary’ space of architecture holds profound implications for practitioners and theorists whose concerns extend to making meaningful, non-trivial architecture that evokes a bodied response. In a plural, fragmented world defined through selfhood, is it still possible to create architectural experiences that permit a form of shared reading? How can built works allow individuals to feel, and therefore know things in new ways, expand human horizons, and so become transformative? Is it possible for an embodied architecture of the past to fold into, and somehow illuminate an embodied architecture of the present? And, where does one begin to find purchase in explicating these questions?
2 David Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, Diogenes 36, 142 (1988): 56, 54. 3 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 50, 58.
xxi While this is not a new line of inquiry, since contemporary architectural theorists have frequently debated these questions,4 this dissertation seeks to provide illumination by adopting, to quote T.S. Eliot, ‘a new point of view from which to inspect it’.5
Through overlaying the disordered figurations of the monster and prosthesis this thesis derives an original theoretical frame that opens the experience of architecture up to new forms of understanding and a shared reading. The reasons for harnessing these figures to re-frame the experience of architecture are plural, although not unrelated. While monsters and prosthetic figures have tended to signal separate ends of a temporal anthropomorphic locus bifurcated by the Enlightenment, they trespass temporally and discursively into opposing realms, and so the points of intersection offer a means of overcoming the temporal divide and of straddling diverse domains. Notably, this structuration does not abstract from, or attempt to recover the past but represents, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes it, a ‘partial coincidence’.
It is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remembers an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future, that emerges from Being or that will incorporate itself into Being, that "is of it" but is not it, and therefore is not a coincidence … but an overlaying, as of a hollow and a relief which remain distinct.6
By drawing on particularities and insights pertaining to both figures, meaning and sense is given to a contemporary reading. The discursive divide is similarly navigated. Eschewing the inappropriate direct transference of foreign discourse into architecture, here there is recognition that meaningful works are culturally embedded, and that a critical reading of shared structures affords an authentic means for deriving new understanding. As Vittorio Gregotti correctly observes, it is necessary to consider the ‘complex connections’ that exist between the discipline of architecture and a broader context in order to avoid a narrow self-referencing that has the potential to weaken the discipline.7 By means of shared structures this thesis develops a schema for re-embodying the contemporary prosthetic trope—and so establishes a corporeal construct that founds a communicative space which affords opportunity to counter the fragmentation of pluralism.
4 Scott Drake provides a considered account of the relation between body and architecture in contemporary discourse. Scott Drake, ‘A Well-Composed Body: Architecture and Anthropomorphism’ (Doctor of Philosophy, University of Canberra, 2003). 5 Thomas Stearns Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (London: Methuen 1920), 106–107. 6 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 122–123. 7 Vittorio Gregotti, ‘Mimesis’, Casabella, 490 (1983): 13.
xxii As transitive emblems of transformation, early monsters and prostheses offer insight into the way in which enigmatic sites operate. They challenge notions of wholeness, completion, and bodily limits, and therefore create a dynamic and complicated nexus, or ambiguous space between integrity and disintegration, order and incoherence—a nexus that shifts perceptual experience from a worldview dominated by sight to one that includes hapticity and touch. It is posited here that the intertwining of body and world inscribed by these figures counters the subject–object schism associated with dualism and, instead, configures a spatium8 that converges with Merleau- Ponty’s ontological chiasm.9 This is significant, for this structure allows a subject to relinquish sedimented, habitual modes of thinking; it permits movement beyond what is known.
The philosophical premise that informs this dissertation owes a significant debt to Merleau- Ponty. Avoiding the extremes of transcendence associated with dualist philosophies, and the pure immanence associated with post-structuralist philosophies, Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology, while embracing immanence, also recognises that humans are always intertwined with their world, other bodies, and history.10 Merleau-Ponty accepts a transcendent, material exterior as well as an immanent, conscious interior that precludes complete reduction to pure immanence.11 That said, during moments of intertwining, boundaries collapse sufficiently to allow for things to ‘pass into us as well as we into the things’; an encounter that allows the subject and the object to be changed, or ‘enlarged’ by experience.12
The method and structure that underpins this thesis aligns with the way meaning and knowing is enacted by monstrous and prosthetic figures themselves, which do not ‘argue for’ facts but disclose new understanding through shifts in perceptual orientation. This methodological
8 The Latin term spatium is used here, in place of its contemporary derivative ‘space’, for its expansive sense. Lewis and Short define spatium, from the root word spa meaning ‘to draw’ or ‘to stretch’, as; a distance or interval; a moment of leisure; size, such as bulk or extent; a walk or promenade; a public place or square; the length of a path or race course; the race itself; a space within a building; the action of walking; a turn or change in direction; an interval or period time (including the portion of time in which to do anything and a year of life); and, metrical time, both as measure and quantity. Charlton Lewis and Charles Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879). Ingrid Rowland points out that for the Romans spatium was not ‘restricted or empty space’ but, ‘full to bursting with quantity, quality, potential, and significance’. She observes that the modern German word for ‘taking a walk’, spazieren, retains links to spatium’s original sense as it denotes ‘strolling through a physical space in the luxurious expanded space of time relaxed’. Spazieren then, is a term that connects rambling, or prolonged (ornamental) embodied practices with duration and the expansive notion of pleasure. Ingrid Rowland, ‘Renaissance Ideas of Space: Introduction’, Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 58 (2013): 1–2. 9 As described in his final posthumously published work. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 130–155. 10 Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37, 3 (2006): 244–245. 11 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 89. 12 Ibid., 123, 144.
xxiii approach deliberately eschews a positivist stratagem that defines a gap in knowledge and then purports to fill it—an idea founded on the idealist illusion that epistemological mastery, certainty, and complete understanding is possible.
The temporal dislocation of monstrous and prosthetic figures may, in part, account for the fact that contemporary scholarship has tended to focus on each figure in isolation, or at best link them through reduced notions whereby the first form transforms into, or inheres as an abstraction in the second. More recently these tropes have been labelled clichéd and irrelevant. However, pejorative charges take aim, again, at reduced manifestations that overlook the rich material ground from which both figures first emerge and the essential, bodied relation upon which they are founded. The intention here is to align an architectural inquiry with the shared corporeal moments in which the tropes intersect, touch, overlap, and fold into one another. This structuration inscribes a liminal, middle space that is sympathetic with the ‘depth’ associated with Maurice Merleau- Ponty’s chiasm, where simultaneous views ‘coexist in degrees of proximity’.13 It is a structure that also converges with Michel Serres philosophical concept of ‘skin’, a notion that offers a means of making this dehiscent space tangible.
The ultimate aim of this thesis is to explore how a thickened reading might scaffold a form of embodied architectural experience that holds contemporary relevance. This frame allows for a revelatory understanding of architectural space, one that is sustained obliquely, via secondary, or deferred means—an idea that holds for each intersecting moment. It is a corporeal structure that permits a form of shared reading where meaning, which is derived hermeneutically, exceeds the limited vision (or experience) of either the creator of the work or the participating subject.
Three domains of inquiry are braided and mark the three-part form of this thesis, Ornament, Skin and Prosthesis. Each domain represents a discursive locus inhabited by both figurations. These are not discrete, tidy, or isolated areas of investigation since key themes interpenetrate and swell as each part is overtaken by the next. The literature review, which is interwoven with the text, draws deeply on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and Serres but, notably, also draws on the scholarship of Paul Ricoeur, Gilles Deleuze, and Jacques Lacan.
13 Ibid., 219.
xxiv The first part, Ornament, undertakes a study of monsters and prostheses as overlapping rhetorical structures. Their appearance from within the domain of rhetorical ornament is traced, considering the way each figure enacts a subversive mode of transfer that challenges established hierarchies, and the way in which each represents a persistent threat for its appeal to the senses.
In architecture, as with oratory, the monstrous metaphor was intimately bound with ornament. Although the monstrous topos was first documented and thereby fixed in Vitruvius’ treatise De architectura (circa 25 BCE), and not encountered again until much later with the publication of Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria in 1485, the figure’s expression in both works was closely allied with rhetorical theory and practice. Nevertheless, this discipline manifested uniquely within each of these scholarly enterprises and, together with the authors’ differing worldviews, determined the extent to which monstrous invention and its embodied sensual appeal was embraced. In response, the communicative space expressed through ornament was distinctly nuanced within each of these projects.
Unlike the long-lived monster, the rhetorical prosthesis enjoyed, but a relatively brief temporal hiatus. It entered the English language post-Renaissance just as classical forms of discourse, including rhetoric and poetics, were being deconstructed and reconstructed. It was the monstrous mixing that was foundational to both disordered figures, with its attendant opacity and ability to distort supposed truths that was instrumental in effecting their eventual disappearance. For, with the elevation of rational (truthful) scientific discourse and the associated marginalisation of rhetoric, the figures’ ornamental value became diminished. Although for a time both monsters and prostheses signaled within two increasingly divergent domains, their medical denotations would ultimately become the primary means by which they were both understood.
Ornament opens with the section, ‘A beginning: Vitruvius’, which traces the emergence of the monstrous grotesque in architectural discourse, and concludes with the section, ‘The ornament of Leon Battista Alberti’, which examines the conditions that give rise to Renaissance ornament’s celebration and, overlapping this, the conditions that ultimately contribute to its decline. The section, ‘Milieu’, is positioned between these two architectural accounts. It forms a nexus that orients the reader toward the common ground that situates both the ornamental monster and prosthesis. ‘Milieu’ is extended by the section ‘Metaphor’, which investigates bodied and expansive tropic theories, including those of Giambattista Vico and Paul Ricoeur, and the
xxv implications these theories have for understanding the way in which monstrous and prosthetic tropes configure spatial experience.
The second part, Skin, mediates between Ornament and Prosthesis. It gives definition to the environ in which monstrous ornament and prostheses ‘touch’. Skin is constituted and ‘thickened’ with a series of pre-modern studies that explore the sensual means by which these disordered figures trouble, elaborate and amplify the complex ground that weaves bodies with worlds. Each study holds implications for architectural experience and draws, to varying degrees, on Merleau- Ponty’s concept of perceptually incarnated ‘flesh’, a matrix that simultaneously sustains a gap or difference between categories whilst facilitating their chiastic intertwining. In each study relations are expressed through the dynamic of proximity, envelopment and distance, notions that can only be properly understood by means of prolonged, indirect encounters.14
Skin contends that the topological space inscribed by the figure of the monster and prosthesis is not only founded in the sentient-kinetic body and expressed by means of the senses, but also is fundamentally entangled with sensual, imagistic language. These are ideas that draw sustenance from the figures’ early rhetorical denotation and close association with the poetic domain.
Serres considers ‘skin’ the paradigmatic spatial metaphor for understanding the relation between the self and world because it represents the essential ground for all sensory experience.15 Accordingly, he asserts that knowing cannot be arrived at through unveiling but only by taking up a position amongst things, through situation in ‘the midst of their mixture’, or an exploration amongst veils.16 The sections ‘Monstrous skins’, ‘Ornamental skins’, ‘Tactile vision’, ‘Eros’, and ‘Masterful touch’ constitute the investigative ‘veils’ that materialise the sensual ground that situates pre-modern monsters and prostheses.
In the third part, Prosthesis, monsters, prosthesis, rhetorical language and the complex of ‘skins’ fold together. Two studies principally guide the themes developed here. The first is Julie Singer’s account of a medieval ‘lyric prosthesis’, in which a poetic form is substituted for an eye in order
14 See ‘The Intertwining–The Chiasm’: ibid., 130–155. 15 Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, trans. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley (London: Continuum, 2008), 80. 16 Ibid.
xxvi to restore the protagonist’s vision.17 The other is Vivian Sobchack’s subjective account of the dislocated, disordered, dynamic, and ‘ambivalent’ ways in which prostheses are understood by people who use them.18 Sobchack, as Singer, merges a tropic or rhetorical frame with a medicalised conceptualisation of prosthesis in order to illuminate the intricate ground that exists between body and artefact—a ground that, for both, resists closure and is characterised by unendedness. In these studies, the dominance of paradigmatic metaphoric abstraction grounded in vision is eschewed, and a more indirect, sensually based, non-hierarchical relation finds expression. It is posited here that a conceptualisation of prosthesis that encompasses its original rhetorical sense can be interpreted as a form of bodied metonymy that allows for expansive perceptual experience. Envisaged in this way, the prosthetic frame becomes an acculturated, corporeal tool that can be harnessed to move individuals through and beyond skin boundaries, permitting processual sensual engagement with their worlds by means of slow encroachment—a gesture that retains the complexity and resistance of membranes. It is the monstrous category on which this bodied metonymy is founded that enacts the transformation.
The first section in Prosthesis, ‘A plural world: The monster yields to the post-human’, examines the emergence of the monstrous simulacrum in the post structural discourse of Deleuze, and the implications that its freedom from the constraints of representation has for restructuring time and space. As with the classical monster, the space of the Deleuzian simulacrum is a space of becoming. These ideas are considered in the context of Piranesi’s etchings, with a focus on the dynamic tension between the forces of porosity and fluidity and, countering this, the need for resistance. The section concludes with a critique of the subject. While the Deleuzian simulacrum has become linked with disembodied theories exploring the techno/machinic human interface, this section examines how an interlacing of the ideas of Deleuze, Serres and Merleau-Ponty might, instead, make a place for the ‘fleshed’ subject.
The section ‘Third space’ undertakes a contemporary reading of the ontological locus between self and world. It begins with a study of the category of the fold, followed by an expanded re- examination of Serres’ ‘skins’, and related to this James Elkins’ pictured bodies, both of which resist reduction and remain bound with sensual imagery and language. The section concludes
17 Julie Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2011), 147–186. 18 Vivian Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), 24.
xxvii with a reappraisal of the ornamental prosthesis, the fraught space it establishes between body and artefact, and the way in which the rhetorical prosthesis ‘sets the scene’ for its medical manifestation.
‘Prosthetic ornament’ builds on ‘Third space’. This section aims to construct a contemporary notion of prosthesis that is founded on its sensual rhetorical beginning, a beginning that reveals a close association with metonymy and the curved, ornamental, space that this trope inscribes. The explication of the metonymic and prosthetic relation, and the implications this has for architectural experience, guides the development of this section. Drawing on the subjective ‘tropic’ account of prosthetic space described by Vivian Sobchack, the metonymy of Cézanne, the occulted operation of metonymy described by Lacan, and once again Singer’s account of the lyric prosthesis, an embodied frame emerges. In the section that follows, ‘Prosthetic ornament and the space of architecture’, a series of architectural case studies are interpreted through the unfolding, sensual, spatial experience associated with the form of embodied metonymy referred to in this thesis as ‘prosthetic ornament’.
Prosthesis concludes with ‘Summa’—a review of key findings.
xxviii
Ornament
In architecture, the margins of the built environment determine the phenomenon of the spatial environment, and they are the locus where the transformation of space takes place.1
Marco Frascari
1 Marco Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory (Savage, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1991), 21.
1 A Beginning: Vitruvius
Conceiving a body
When the ancients first participated in the primal act of planting an upright post in the ground and marked it, they were not only taking possession of the earth and its immediate surrounds, but also abstracting themselves from the natural world in order to establish their bodies in a new context. Others would subsequently interpret these ‘bodily analogues’ metaphorically in an activity long recognised as a form of building.1 However, it was not until (circa) 25 BCE that the analogous relationship between architecture and the body was formally described and documented in De architectura, the first and only comprehensive treatise on architecture to survive from the time of classical antiquity.2 Conceived and composed by the Roman military architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the work was almost entirely referenced from classical Greek sources that had their origins some four centuries earlier.3 It was, therefore, a work that was uncoupled from its historical and geographical beginnings even at the time of its making. According to Indra Kagis McEwen, this rendered it a fragment in history and time, or ‘an ahistorical remnant’, its value resting primarily with its potential to be harvested as a ‘source of metaphors and insights’.4 While many have questioned the accuracy, validity, and inherent bias of Vitruvius’ claims and assumptions because of this uncoupling, there are others who regard the historical proximity of De architectura to its origins as providing legitimacy for its assertions, despite any shortcomings.5
1 Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 119, 122. 2 Indra Kagis McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 1–2. 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Ibid. 5 George L. Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), 3.
3 At the time of Vitruvius Roman culture was steeped in the Hellenistic tradition. Vitruvius himself was not only trained in this tradition, but had opportunity to directly encounter and experience original architectural forms and ideas that would later disappear.6 Dedicated to the Emperor Augustus and comprised of ten books, De architectura’s first seven books refer to building while the remaining three deal variously with water, the cosmos, and machines. Notably, for Vitruvius, together these books should be understood as a unified whole.
… I have thought it best to write in short volumes in order best to reach the minds of my readers, in this way things will be readily understood. I have set up the organisation of my subjects so that those seeking information will not have to gather it in separate sections— instead, they will have the explanations for each area of interest in one single body of text, and in individual volumes.7
Throughout the text Vitruvius refers to his treatise as a corpus architecturae (body of work), or corpus emendatum architecturae (a complete body of work).8 Yet, the metaphorical use of the Latin word corpus to refer to a complete or entire collection of parts was not conventional at the time of Roman antiquity.9 Since Vitruvius himself directly acknowledged the significance and power of language, evident in the claim that ‘An architect must [firstly] be a man of letters’,10 the deliberate use of this metaphor gives substance to the view that he conceived of, and regarded his treatise as a body in its entirety.11
It is in the two books on temples (Books III and IV) that Vitruvius formalises his understanding of the relationship between architecture and the body. He engages two antithetic theoretical approaches to account for the derivation of architectural forms.12 The first is poetic in nature. It references an early Greek mythical, theological, historical canon to describe the origins of the Greek orders, their proportional variations and mimetic ornament.13 The second approach stems from metaphysical philosophy, and its recognition of the equivalence between macrocosm and
6 Ibid. 7 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas N. Howe, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 63. [Book V, Pref. 5.5.] 8 ———, On Architecture, Volume II: Books VI–X, trans. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library 280 (London: Heinemann, 1934), 266, 267. [Book IX, 8.15.] 9 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 9. 10 Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V, trans. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library 251 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 9. [Book I, 1.4.] 11 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 6–9. 12 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 113. 13 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 150.
4 microcosm, together with the notion of a singular unalterable universal order and the ‘noetic structure of building’ derived from these principles.14
Myth
Early Greek theology was largely formulated through the mythological accounts of the poets Homer and Hesiod who, it is generally agreed, were active during the century 750–650 BCE, and the first to articulate a concept of the divine and notion of cosmic order.15 The myths and legends recounted by these poets describe a sharply divided universe: there was a celestial realm inhabited by a multiplicity of immortal, anthropomorphic gods, and an earthbound world inhabited by humans.16 The plurality of gods was necessary, for it limited the power of any single divinity. These capricious gods largely controlled humankind’s brief passage through life toward inevitable death, affording them few opportunities to influence their destiny or fate. That said, the personification of forces and their metamorphosis into divinities provided a stable ground for negotiating with these powers, principally by means of sacrifice, ritual, and prayer.17
Ritual practice was frequently referenced in the poems of Homer and Hesiod.18 The practice not only highlighted the absolute divide between mortals and the immortal gods but, paradoxically, offered humans a means for temporarily bridging this divide.19 In ancient Greece the first rituals took place in hallowed groves and fields where sacred trees were decorated with sacrificial paraphernalia that included victims’ bones, urns, food, flowers, and weapons.20 The value of body
14 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 113. 15 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy, trans. Rod Coltman (New York: Continuum, 2001), 36. 16 Ibid. 17 Almut-Barbara Renger, ‘Between History and Reason: Giambattista Vico and the Promise of Classical Myth’, JCRT 14, 1 (2014): 41. Homer recounts in The Odyssey how on death the human soul passes to the underworld of Hades where it ‘lives’ a bleak and tenuous existence as shadowy, vaporous representation (shade) of its original form. For the unfortunate, miserable shades, memories lost with the shedding of the fleshed body could only be recovered through the consumption of sacrificial blood. Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Samuel Butler (London: A. C. Fifield, 1900 ). Book XI. See also Michael L. Morgan, Plato and Greek Religion, ed. Richard Kraut, The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 236. Gadamer, The Beginning of Philosophy: 37. 18 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 2. 19 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 145. 20 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 11. Essential offerings proffered to the gods in early Greek sacrifice consisted of wine and thighbones wrapped in fat. Hesiod’s Theogony offers a mythical account of this practice resulting from Prometheus’ attempt to trick the gods. Prometheus slayed an ox and then, in an effort to deceive Zeus, divided the carcass into two portions, one made up of the meat and organs wrapped in tripe and another made up of bones wrapped in fat. Prometheus then offered the parcels to Zeus who, despite recognising the deception, chose the fat and bones in order to fuel his anger toward mankind. Since the choice was binding and eternal, all sacrificial portions offered to the Olympian gods thereafter would contain the victims’ bones wrapped in fat—offerings that would then be consumed by fire. Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 145.
5 parts was expressed through the ritual partitioning and reconstruction of sacrificial victims.21 George Hersey contends that the importance of ritual reconstruction stemmed from a sense among worshippers that blood sacrifice was immoral. Reconstruction then becomes a means of negating the causality associated with slaughter.22 It was a process that commenced with the departure of the victim’s spirit upon death which then allowed a god to inhabit its form. Since the divinity was too enormous to be contained, it was deemed necessary to break apart the offering steeped in the god’s essence, which was then consumed by worshippers in a form of communion. In this way the worshippers’ own bodies were combined with those of the victim and god. Notably, the inhabited victim’s remains were considered too holy to discard, and so were preserved as relics or trophies.23 Funeral practice, warfare, and hunting were all strongly connected with sacrifice. Friendly and unfriendly gods could occupy the bodies of animals and enemies alike, requiring the display of trophies connected with each of these activities.24 Accordingly, the grove of sacred trees, and subsequently temples necessarily become decorated with the paraphernalia associated with reconstructed sacrifice.
The temples of ancient Greece were built almost exclusively for the purpose of sacrifice.25 The founding of such culturally valuable and symbolic structures on bloody, bodily acts inevitably produced spatial and material meanings that intimately referenced the body.26 Hersey supports Vitruvius’ assertion that the Greek legends accounted for the origins of the two central orders, the Doric and Ionic (named after the two main dialects of the Greek language), and their canonisation into masculine and feminine forms.27 However, he goes further, suggesting that the temple can only be properly understood in the context of the ‘literary, associational, and poetic meanings’ derived from its mythical origins.28 After careful examination of the Greco-Roman language used
21 For the ancients, limbs and organs of the body were associated with different aspects of the personality. While consciousness, intelligence, feelings and thoughts were believed to reside in the chest and its organs, the head was considered uniquely precious and sacred. As the head was believed to house the reproductive matter (an idea that fed the notion that a vigorous head of hair was a mark of fertility) and soul, it represented the source of life. Accordingly, offerings that included hair from the head of the victim may have been considered a dedication of the soul, with the whole vicariously included in the fate of the part. Richard B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107. 22 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 18–19. 23 Ibid., 19. 24 Ibid., 20. 25 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 145. 26 Mark Wilson Jones, ‘Doric Figuration’, in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 68. 27 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 115. In Book IV Vitruvius divides columnar forms along gendered lines. For more detail see: Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V: 207, 209. [Book IV, 1.6, 1.7, 1.8.] 28 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 152.
6 by Vitruvius and others, and the function performed by sacrifice revealed in the works of the poets, Hersey posits that ritual ornamentation was so pervasive it rendered the ancient Greek temple a ‘trope of sacrifice’.29 In support of this assertion, he describes the ways in which tropes were used to produce meaningful architectural signs.
For Hersey, the ornamentation of Greek temples bore no relationship to beautification; but instead, related to the original sense of the word ornament, namely ‘to equip’ or ‘to prepare’, which in this case meant to prepare the temple to honour the gods.30 Hersey claims that ‘the connection between sacrifice and ornament was recognised because it was a part of everyday speech’.31 Temple ornament would have possessed sacrificial associations readily understood by the Athenians of the time and, although meanings would likely be lost to later generations, these ritual practices probably endured in the same way customs and rituals from the past endure today. It is only through the examination of language that Hersey believes original meanings can be properly recovered.32
Hersey carefully details the multilayered meanings associated with ornamentation of the Greek temple’s architectural orders. While the Doric column was an analogue of man in the manner of its proportions, it also displayed trophies and ornament derived from hunting and battle, funerals and sacrifice.33 This is revealed with the rich decoration and associated meanings found at the column base, named the ‘foot’. Hersey notes that the same word (in ancient Greek) refers to footwork, or rhythmic stepping, and so this term not only invokes personification of the column, but creates a connection with the ceremonial dancing associated with bringing sacrifices to the altar.34 The cavetto and torus mouldings commonly found binding the column base build on this association, as the terms derive from rope, which would have been used to bind the limbs of animal sacrifices.35 Theological associations are hinted at with the scotia mouldings that cast
29 Hersey points out that the terms ‘trope’ and ‘sacrifice’ are related to one another through the term ‘trophy’. Trophy shares its etymological origin with the word ‘trope’. In ancient Greece, a trope denoted a twist or turn (subsequently this word comes to stand for the twisting of words). Linking the two ideas, Hersey suggests trophies were erected on the battlefield by the victor at the site that the battle turned in their favour. Ibid., 9. Marco Frascari also highlights the etymological link between trope and trophy and, by extension, the terms’ connection with sacrifice. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 22. 30 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 149. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Ibid., 150. 33 Ibid., 21. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid.
7 deep horizontal shadows across the foundation of the column, for they share their name with the goddess of darkness and the underworld.36 Finally, the apophysis, or hollow curve located between the column base and shaft, that derives its name from the word for a piece of bone, or blood vessel, links the formal and functional characteristics of this bodily part with its sacrificial inferences to the formal and functional characteristics of the column flutes.37 In sum, the ancient Greek temple derived embodied architectural meaning through the transference of the formal and functional characteristics associated with sacrificial ritual. Marco Frascari suggests that ‘an elemental architecture’ is produced when function and representation are united in the detail since each of the elements becomes, as Leibniz’s monads, ‘indivisible units of physical reality’.38 Accordingly, he asserts that in such works it is possible to examine a single architectural detail and, in doing so, understand the total ‘eloquent and intelligible’ architectural reality.39
The personification of the column that begins with the foot and rises to the throat was completed with the head. The head was believed to contain the spiritual essence or soul and so was considered the most vital of the body parts. Importantly, its columnar equivalent, the capital, was adorned with headdresses and ornaments made up of sacrificial offerings in the form of blossoms, hair, and horns.40 These decorations were considered meaningful monads for, as corporeal trophies with genuine emotional value, when transmuted into stone structural supports they rendered the supports equally meaningful.41 Consequently, Frascari suggests that these trophies, by their action, were metonymic rather than metaphoric.42
In architecture, tropes such as metaphor and metonymy create an association between forms. Frascari’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy turns on the idea that metaphoric substitution is based on visual similarity, while metonymic substitution ‘is achieved by a
36 The association is noteworthy as darkness and shadows were understood to consist of vapours dense with the ‘shades’ of the dead. Ibid., 21, 23. 37 Ibid., 23. 38 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 15. Leibniz describes monads as indivisible, extensionless, self-sufficient mental entities that evolve and develop completely independently of each other, yet, in a way that is ‘dependent upon their intrinsic nature’. Leibniz’ monads were responsible for perception and the ‘appetitive states’. They were considered an expression of a greater external reality. For more detail see Simon Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 207, 238. 39 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 15. 40 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 23, 30. 41 Ornamental trophies were not abstract signs, which would indicate the reduction of an original value but, rather, represent a direct transference of this value. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 120. 42 Ibid.
8 “causality” or “congruency” between representation and function’.43 Metaphor creates the relation between unrelated terms, an association that is contingent on imagination, intellect, judgment, or explanation to make the conceptual link. In this relationship similarity and difference are held in tension. Metonymy, on the other hand, relies on a known relation between terms, and so effect might be substituted for cause, container for contained, material for the object, and so forth.44 In metonymy the association can be either physical or conceptual, although in architecture the expressed form is principally visual, with the associated, linked morphological characteristics perceived by the other senses.45 Frascari points out that with metonymy, substituted forms displace or defer the senses.46 Since metonymy neither states nor implies a connection between objects, for the relationship is already understood, it evokes sensorial experience which, in the case of anthropomorphism, can be subliminal or subconscious such as when a door handle is shaped to receive, and thus invites the grasp of a hand.47 Through this mutual understanding, metonymy achieves a depth, or state of embodiment that cannot be realised in the same way with metaphor and its cultivated, intellectual dependencies.48 Returning to the column, it is the reconstructive act that negates the causality connected with sacrifice, and it is this that is transferred to the stone capital via sacrificial ornament. In sum, it is by means of metonymy that the temple structure reverses the violation associated with slaughter.49
While the poetic worldview derived from Greek myths and legends provided Vitruvius with a rich source of anthropomorphic imagery, his principal focus rested with the second theoretical approach, and this ultimately underpinned his anthropomorphic canons for symmetry, proportion, and harmony. Dalibor Vesely, as McEwen, recognises that Vitruvius’ treatise cannot be read as a primary text.50 Instead, he believes that De architectura must be recognised as deriving from a primary tradition, a tradition that governed notions of corporeality until the eighteenth century.51 For, according to Vesely, it is only by understanding the worldview contained within this
43 Ibid. 44 Hugh Bredin, ‘Metonymy’, Poetics Today 5, 1 (1984): 45. See also Marco Frascari, ‘The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa’, RES 14 (1987): 124–125. 45 ———, ‘A New Corporeality of Architecture’, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 40, 2 (1987): 22. 46 ———, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 7. 47 Bredin, ‘Metonymy’, 57. 48 Frascari, ‘A New Corporeality of Architecture’, 22. 49 ———, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 120. 50 Vesely also notes that Vitruvius relied on an eclectic mix of historical texts sourced much earlier (circa 100 BCE). Dalibor Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 30. 51 Ibid., 31.
9 tradition—where the human body is intrinsically connected to the soul, which in turn is intrinsically connected to the entire structure of reality—that the Vitruvian connection between body and architecture can be properly understood.52
The Perfect Body
McEwen submits that, at its most fundamental level, namely its physical manifestation, De architectura signifies embodiment.53 Vitruvius combined ten volumina, or scrolls to form a ‘whole’ corpus, a perfect ten, or decad, a number that, for the Pythagoreans, represented the cosmic order. McEwen suggests that while this was a deliberate contrivance, evinced in the forced configuration of themes in the books, it was necessary. For perfection and completion in man (displayed with the ten digits of the hands), and therefore Nature, was revealed with the number ten.54
The ancients decided that the number called ten was perfect, because it was discovered from the number of digits on both hands. And if the number of digits on both hands is perfect by nature, it pleased Plato to state that the number was also perfect for this reason … 55
The perfection of ten, which was metonymically mediated into building structures through measures that included digits, palms, and feet as standards, bound Nature and building by means of the body.56 Number symbolism had a significant intellectual following amongst the Romans of Vitruvius’ time, and numerous references to Pythagorean ideas and beliefs can be found in De architectura.57
Pythagoras was the first to posit the link between microcosmos and macrocosmos, which held that structural order was derived at both cosmic levels by means of the unseen principle of harmony, defined originally as a ‘“fitting together”, or “adjustment” of parts within a complex whole’.58 Pythagoras found support for this theory in the structure of music. Upon discovering that the harmonious relationships between musical notes depended on precise mathematical
52 Ibid. 53 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 39. 54 Ibid., 42–43. 55 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 47. [Book III, 1.5.] 56 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 44. 57 Ibid., 40. 58 Francis M. Cornford, ‘Mysticism and Science in the Pythagorean Tradition’, Classical Quarterly 16 (1922): 143.
10 ratios, he adduced that numbers and their relationships must similarly order the entire natural universe.59 However, it was Aristotle who would subsequently define the microcosmic– macrocosmic relationship whereby the sensible, corporeal body comes to be seen as representative of a universal reality.
Aristotle’s theory of cosmology was premised on the notion that all things in nature were moving from a potential to an actual form, or toward a final cause. It was the teleological movement of the whole world in this purposeful way that generated an intelligible world order.60 Aristotle explains:
[I]f an animal is ever in a state of absolute rest, we have a motionless thing in which motion can be produced from the thing itself, and not from without. Now if this can occur in an animal, why should not the same be true also of the universe as a whole? If it can occur in a small world [microcosmos] it could also occur in a great one [macrocosmos]: and if it can occur in the world, it could also occur in the infinite; that is, if the infinite could as a whole possibly be in motion or at rest.61
For Aristotle, body and soul were not only intrinsically bound, but also vitally connected to the whole structure of reality.62 Vesely suggests that the microcosmic–macrocosmic relationship lies at the heart of embodiment, which depends on the reciprocity produced through the continuous mediation between humans and the various realities that make up their world. It follows that embodiment must also form the basis for the relationship between humans and architecture, since the reality of the world is not structured around separate entities with isolated meanings but is made up of entities, including architectural entities, that are integrated into the unified structure of human existence.63 (Figure 1)
59 Samuel E. Stumpf, Philosophy: History and Problems, 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 11. 60 Ibid., 98. 61 Aristotle, Physics, trans. R. Hardie and R. Gaye, vol. VIII (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 1913). Book 8.2. 62 Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, 31. 63 Ibid., 32.
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Figure 1. Robert Fludd: Man as a microcosmos of the greater macrocosmos. Title page from 'Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia' (1624)
Vesely illustrates this idea with reference to Giovanni Lomazzo’s Idea del Tempio della Pittura. In considering the exemplary drawings contained in Albrecht Dürer’s Della simmetria de i corpi humani, libri quattro (1591), Lomazzo determines that human proportion cannot be properly understood (drawn or modelled) without understanding the correct placement of the anima, or soul.64 In Dürer’s Simmetria the soul is depicted as a line that passes along the transverse axis of the figure (from head to foot). (Figure 2) It is an invisible concept that is transformed into the visible appearance of a body.65 W. F. R. Hardie notes that the belief that the soul is located along the central axis of the body originates with Aristotle. Because the soul was responsible for movement, and the two halves of the body moved independently of one another, Aristotle adduced that the soul must be situated in a ‘governing position’, within the ‘central organ’ of sense—the heart.66 Hardie points out that, although this notion of a governing soul seems to contradict Aristotle’s traditionally hylomorphic concept of soul as the form, or entelechy of the
64 Ibid., 34. Lomazzo writes: ‘In order for painters and sculptors to better understand the proportions described and those that will be described, as well as how they are derived, it is necessary for them to know what the anima is. It descends from the head to the bottom of the feet through the middle [of the body]. … To understand this, one examines the figures drawn in Durer’s Proportion [Simmetria], which all possess a line passing through the middle of the body: this is its anima’. Giovanni P. Lomazzo, Idea of the Temple of Painting trans. Jean Julia Chai (University Park, Penn.: Pensylvannia State University Press, 2013), 153. 65 Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, 34. 66 W. F. R. Hardie, ‘Aristotle’s Treatment of the Relation Between the Soul and the Body’, The Philosophical Quarterly 14, 54 (1964): 57–58.
12 body,67 the two concepts are deliberately combined in Metaphysics.68 This leads Hardie to posit that Aristotle may have situated the moving soul ‘primarily’ in the heart for pragmatic, or physiological reasons, while continuing to ascribe to the principal doctrine of hylomorphism, in which matter is combined with form.69 The same idea leads Vesely to conclude that the prosaic representation of body and soul depicted in Simmetria is an abstraction that mediates a deeper, ‘traditional’ Aristotelian ‘notion of corporeality manifested as embodiment’.70 It is a view of corporeality that is to be distinguished from that of Plato, which is founded on the complete separation of body and soul.
Figure 2. Albrecht Dürer: Illustration of the female body in 'Della simmetria de i corpi humani, libri quattro' (1591)
67 The Encyclopedia Britannica describes hylomorphism as a compound word derived from the Greek hyl!, ‘matter’, and morph!, ‘form’. It refers to the metaphysical concept that underpins Aristotle’s natural philosophy which views the natural body as a combination of ‘potential’ primary matter and ‘actual’ substantial form. Retrieved January 4, 2014, from http://www.britannica.com.ezproxy1.canberra.edu.au/EBchecked/topic/279305/hylomorphism. Closely bound with hylomorphism, Entelechy is the causative, intrinsic force, essence or ‘soul’ that makes the actual form derived from potential matter come into being. It is fundamental to all living organisms. Retrieved January 4, 2014, from http://www.britannica.com.ezproxy1.canberra.edu.au/EBchecked/topic/188810/entelechy. 68 Hardie, ‘Aristotle’s Treatment of the Relation Between the Soul and the Body’, 61. 69 Ibid. 70 Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, 35.
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Vesely declares that any attempt to understand analogous relationships in isolation from the unified structure of the natural world, risks formulating simplistic assumptions. Accordingly, he claims that it is superficial to assert, for example, that an architectural element derives its proportions and form from the human body. The difference between the ontological realities of cosmos, body, and architecture makes any analogous relationship incomprehensible without a mediating link or structure.71 According to Vesely, it is the architectural concept of proportion that is key to understanding this process of mediation, since before this concept could be expressed numerically it was understood as analogia, or analogy. This metaphorical understanding of proportion originates in the Pythagorean and Platonic doctrines where the notion was seen initially as the relationship between the ‘one and the many’.72 In the metaphysical universe, the macrocosmic pattern of the whole is reproduced in the microcosmic pattern of the parts, and understanding is gleaned by drawing inferences from one to the other. For Vesely, this deeper meaning of proportional analogy signifies embodiment, since proportion is no longer understood in terms of narrow, static numerical, or musical definitions, but is revealed dialectically in an open and dynamic process that involves the mediation and participation of existents (the Many) in the unity of the cosmos (the One).73 Thus, proportional analogy becomes a broader metaphor for the order contained within the universe,74 a concept crystalised in the idea of ‘Vitruvian man’.
While Vitruvius’ connection of architecture and number symbolism to a ‘natural’ universal order can be construed from the Pythagorean doctrine, these concepts originate from Stoicism.75
71 Ibid. 72 Ibid., 37. 73 Ibid., 38. 74 Stephen Frith, ‘A Primitive Exchange: On Rhetoric and Architectural Symbol’, Architectural Research Quarterly 8, 1 (2004): 43. 75 The Stoic doctrine embraced the premise that everything real was corporeal, and that material bodies were the only things that truly existed. Early Stoic definitions of a body took the form of syllogisms such as, ‘Everything which either acts or is acted upon is body’. In seeking to define a ‘body’ the Stoics and Epicureans looked to Plato, who had listed the attributes of bodies as length, breadth, and depth. However, the Stoics went further, combining a mathematical concept of body with a physical concept of existence and the properties of bodily interactions. Since a body was ‘that which is extended in three directions with resistance’, bodies could be defined mathematically in terms of: 1 (point or number); 2 (line or length); 3 (surface or breadth); and, 4 (body or depth)—with each increase in number adding a further dimension. The definition: ‘This thing acts [or “is acted upon”]. Therefore, this thing is a body’ (and various derivative versions of this definition) were used to ‘prove’ diverse markers of body which included the corporeality of sound, God, knowledge, vice, virtue, dancing and the soul. The Stoics adduced corporeality of the soul with a series of proofs. Chrysippus argued that since only bodies could come into contact with one another and therefore separate it followed that, since a soul separated from the body upon death, it must also be a body. In yet another proof it was determined that, if the essential material of a thing is body (or corporeal), the thing itself must be body, and since the soul was comprised of pneuma (a corporeal substance) the soul must also be a body. The diverse range of
14 Stoicism also goes some way to explaining why Vitruvius advanced the notion of writing the body of architecture, and also explains how the body metaphor becomes linked to the Augustan program of cultural renewal.76
Vitruvius’ third and fourth books are devoted entirely to the construction of temples; these structures were considered essential to the realisation of Augustus’ aims.77 Vitruvius begins the first chapter of Book III with a discussion on the First Principles of Symmetry. Symmetria, he declares at the outset, must be a primary consideration when composing the design of a temple.
The composition of a temple is based on symmetry, whose principles architects should take the greatest care to master. Symmetry derives from proportion, which is called analogia in Greek. Proportion is the mutual calibration of each element of the work and of the whole, from which the proportional system is achieved. No temple can have any compositional system without symmetry and proportion, unless, as it were, it has an exact system of correspondence to the likeness of a well-formed human being.78
Symmetria was one of six fundamental architectural principles described by Vitruvius.79 The axioms: ordinatio, dispositio, distributio, symmetria, eurhythmia and decor can be translated, somewhat reductively, as order, arrangement, economy, symmetry, proportion and propriety.80
Stoic ‘bodies’ extended to activities such as walking and running. By establishing what constituted a body the Stoics were also able to make the counter argument that anything that lacked the markers of the body was incorporeal and therefore nonexistent. Accordingly, ‘place’ and ‘void’ were classified as incorporeal. David Hahm, The Origins of Stoic Cosmology (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1977), 4, 10–12. 76 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 8–10. 77 Augustus presided over a building boom in Rome, constructing at least eighty-two temples. His aim was to implement a cultural program that could support the revival of religion, morals, and custom. McEwen writes that the program was designed to give visibility to the power of Augustus through architecture. For the Romans religio was worldly and public, and so it became necessary for the city-state to honour gods by means of laws and customs (Private religio was referred to as superstitio). Cicero clearly summarises the underlying requirement for the Augustan program when he notes; ‘those who held political power controlled access to the gods; those who controlled access to the gods held political power’. Ibid., 183–188. 78 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 47. [Book III, 1.1.] 79 Vitruvius’ reliance on Greek sources is evinced in his borrowing of Greek terms. He transfers the Greek word symmetria [συµµετρία] meaning; ‘commensurability, in comparison with, measured by the standard of, symmetry, due proportion, one of the characteristics of beauty and goodness’, directly into Latin. Henry G. Liddell et al., A Greek-English Lexicon: Revised and Augmented Throughout by Sir Henry Stuart Jones with the Assistance of Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). 80 Vitruvius also transfers the Greek term eurhythmia [εὐρυθµία], ‘a beautiful arrangement, proportion, harmony of the parts’, directly into Latin. Other terms are adaptations of Greek words and concepts. The Latin term ordinatio (a setting in order) is drawn from the Greek taxis [τάξις] (arranging or arrangement), and dispositio (a regular disposition, arrangement in oratory, or composition) is drawn from the Greek diathesis [διάθεσις] (composition or arrangement; the placement of individual parts within a whole). See Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V: 25. [Book I.I.1.] and Jerome J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 358, 166, 174. Vitruvius explains that distributio (a division or distribution) is a translation of the Greek term oeconomia [οἰκονοµία]. Lewis and Short define oeconomia as, ‘the management of household affairs, domestic economy; hence, a proper division, arrangement, economy, of an oration, a play, etc.; post-Augustus.’ See Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V: 25. [Book I.I.1.] and Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. Decor (what is seemly, becoming; comeliness, elegance, grace, beauty, ornament) and its variant decorum (that which is seemly, suitable, fitness, propriety) are both formed from decet (to add grace or be right). Although decor is the only concept that Vitruvius does not link to a Greek equivalent it is broadly recognised that the word and its correlate decorum, from which it evolves, derive from the Greek prepon
15 Mark Wilson Jones, drawing on the scholarship of Jerome Pollitt and Carl Watzinger, points out that these six concepts can be grouped into those that account for the processes of design, and those that account for the attributes they produce.81 Accordingly, he suggests that ordinatio gives rise to symmetria, dispositio produces eurhythmia, and distributio results in decor. Wilson Jones sees this as support for his view that the foundation of Vitruvius’ architectural theory lies with the last three principles—symmetria, eurhythmia, and decor.82 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz recognises the same bi-partite division, although he suggests instead that the distinction turns on the difference between the three concepts concerned with utility and suitability, and the three concerned with aesthetics.83 For the ancients, aesthetics or beauty (venustas) had a broader definition than is generally recognised today. According to Tatarkiewicz, Vitruvius embraces this broader definition in De architectura, for ‘symmetria … deals with the objective conditioning of beauty [rational qualities], eurhythmy with its psychological conditioning [sensual qualities], and decor with its social conditioning [social qualities]’.84 For Vitruvius, venustas, by means of its proportions and symmetries, not only lent authority to a work, but bestowed ‘glory’ on the architect.85 While acknowledging the status and importance of venustas, Vitruvius claims that architecture must also take into account firmitas (strength or durability) and utilitas (use or convenience).86 Thus, Vitruvius’ theory of architecture balances the requirement for both a functional and strictly formal beauty.87
Wilson Jones claims that symmetria is the most important of Vitruvius’ architectural concepts as it is the principle most frequently and explicitly referred to, as well as an idea deeply rooted in ancient Greek philosophical and artistic thought.88 Symmetria’s semantic origins derive from the
[πρέπον] (that which is seemly, fitness, propriety). Prepon is founded on the root word prepo [πρέπω] ‘to be clearly seen; to be conspicuous’. See Henry G. Liddell and Robert Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889)., Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. and Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology: 343. 81 Both Wilson Jones and Pollitt note that this idea has its beginning in a proposal outlined by Carl Watzinger, ‘Vitruvstudien’, RhM 64 (1909): 215. See Mark Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 40. and Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology: 164–167. 82 Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture: 40. 83 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics: Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Jean Harrell, 3 vols., vol. 1 (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 273–274. 84 Ibid., 274. 85 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 84. [Book VI, 8.9.] 86 ———, The Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Morris Hickey Morgan, 2nd ed. (New York: Dover Publications, 1960), 17. Book I, 3.2. 87 Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, ‘The Great Theory of Beauty and Its Decline’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31, 2 (1972): 278. 88 Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture: 40.
16 Greek sym (coming together) and metron (measure).89 For the ancients, symmetria (commensurability) did not translate as bilateral sameness. Vitruvius explains that symmetria is achieved when structural elements are correctly proportioned and those proportions have common measurable relationships that bind them together as a whole.90 In other words, symmetria produces coherence in a work, where coherence, according to Stoic doctrine, is the defining characteristic of a body.91
Coherence is derived by means of ratio,92 which governs precisely how proportional elements should be arranged.93 Writing in the third century BCE, Chrysippus expanded the Stoic doctrine regarding the cohesion of bodily elements. He distinguished between the symmetry generated when elements of a body combined harmoniously to produce good health, and the symmetry of structures that regulated the proportions that made a body beautiful. Chrysippus, as Vitruvius, drew on the writings of the ancient Greek physician and philosopher Galen who declared that beauty resided ‘in the proportions … of the parts, that is to say, of finger to finger and of all the fingers to the palm and wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and of all the parts to each other, as set forth in the Canon of Polykleitus’.94 The classical Greek sculptor Polykleitus and his fellow sculptors strictly adhered to this numerical canon with its fixed proportions in order to represent ‘men’ not as they were, but ‘as they appeared’.95
Vitruvius sets out in similar detail the ideal proportional relationships revealed by Nature in the well-shaped human body.
For Nature composed the human body in such a way that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowermost roots of the hairline should be one-tenth [of the total height of the body]; the palm of the hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger
89 Ibid., 41. 90 Thomas N. Howe, ‘Commentary’, in Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas N. Howe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150. 91 For the Stoics, the coherence of the universe was founded on the notion that human beings were intimately connected with cosmic Nature (God). This relationship was based on a shared rationality since the human faculty for intellect (logos) was embodied in the greater universe. Because of this shared rationality, human actions and cosmic events did not exist as two separate orders of reality but were intrinsically bound. It followed that, as the universe was rationally organised, it was able to be understood by means of rational explanation. Long explains: ‘The coherence of Stocism is based on the belief that natural events are so causally related to one another that on them a set of propositions can be supported which will enable a man to plan a life wholly at one with Nature or God’. Achieving this ‘oneness’ was, for the Stoics, the ultimate goal of human existence. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics (London: Duckworth, 1974), 108. 92 According to McEwen, ratio is the Latin word most similar (although not entirely equivalent) to the Greek word logos. McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 60. 93 Ibid., 196. 94 Galen cited in Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics: Ancient Aesthetics, 1: 55. 95 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 110.
17 should measure likewise; the head from the chin to the crown, one-eighth; from the top of the chest to the hairline including the base of the neck, one-sixth; from the centre of the chest to the crown of the head, one-fourth. Of the height of the face itself, one-third goes from the base of the chin to the lowermost part of the nostrils, another third from the base of the nostrils to a point between the eyebrows, and from that point to the hairline, the forehead should also measure one-third. The foot should be one-sixth the height, the cubit, one-fourth. The other limbs, as well, have their own commensurate proportions, which the famous ancient painters and sculptors employed to attain great and unending praise.96
Having derived a proportional system of measures from the body, the human figure becomes Vitruvius’ referent for the symmetria on which temples are to depend if they are to share the body’s coherence.97 These derived units of measure and their relations allowed the dimensions of an entire structure to be calculated from the thickness of a column, in the same way that Polykleitus and other ancient sculptors were able to establish the dimensions of an ideal man from the size of his foot or finger.98 However, the idea of linking body symmetry to the symmetry of temples was not, according to McEwen, inherited from ancient Greece but is entirely attributable to Vitruvius; it was a wholly Roman notion.99 It was the architect’s task to imitate nature, not literally, but analogically.100 The aesthetic value of the temple constructed in this way was objectively established by the laws of Nature rather than subjectively determined by individuals. The individual was only able to discover, not invent these laws.101 Tatarkiewicz suggests that by using Nature as a model for architecture, Vitruvius created an interdependence between body and architecture that went beyond any narrow definition of analogy—a notion that aligns with the deeper concept of analogia.102
Vitruvius subsequently expands his narrative on symmetria. His proportional embodied measurements become canonised once they are allied with the figure of a man circumscribed in the geometry of a circle and a square. It is generally accepted that the ‘Vitruvian man’ of Book III is the same well-formed being whose proportions inform the treatise’s earlier chapters.103
96 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 47. [Book III, 1.2.] 97 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 197. 98 Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics: Ancient Aesthetics, 1: 273, 255. 99 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 197. 100 Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture: 41. 101 Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics: Ancient Aesthetics, 1: 278–279. 102 Ibid., 275. See also Vesely, ‘The Architectonics of Embodiment’, 38. 103 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 196–197.
18 Vitruvius describes a man lying on his back in passive repose, his navel corresponding with the centre point of the circle that encompasses him.
In like fashion the members of temples ought to have dimensions of their several parts answering suitably to the general sum of their whole magnitude. Now the navel is naturally the exact centre of a circle of the body. For if a man lies on his back with hands and feet outspread, and the centre of a circle is placed on his navel, his fingers and toes will be touched by the circumference. Also a square will be found described within the figure, in the same way as a round figure is produced. For if we measure from the sole of the foot to the top of the head, and apply the measure to the outstretched hands, the breadth will be found equal to the height, just like sites which are squared by rule.104
The man’s outstretched arms not only touch the circle, but mark out the width of a square equal to his height. His navel, which marks both the centre of the body and the centre of the circle, becomes a metonymic device that ‘shifts’ the body to geometry, and thus ‘shifts’ Nature into architecture.105 For McEwen, this prostrate man that allows himself to be submissively traced in this way becomes the source of all geometry.106 Moreover, she suggests that it is the architect, with the architect’s tools, the compass and set square, that recognises and derives the geometry from this suitably proportioned, outstretched man, to effectively transform him into an ‘architect’s template’.107
The decision to use language rather than illustrations to describe ‘Vitruvian man’ was consistent with a Stoic preference for words over drawing.108 Vitruvius claimed that writing fixed memory, and further, that it was the primary discipline required for an architect’s polymath education.109 The architect and the writer had similar obligations, that is, to ‘[entail] trust, mutual obligation and good faith’, or autoritas.110 More broadly, the Stoics considered language the basis for reasoning, or ‘articulate thought’, which granted humans access to the greater order (logos— Greek, or ratio—Roman) of the cosmos.111 Since language was regarded as the primary means of accessing the order, or ratio of the universe, and Vitruvius wanted to connect architecture to that
104 Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V: 161. [Book III, 1.3.] 105 Diana Agrest, ‘Architecture from without: Body, Logic, and Sex’, Assemblage, 7 (1988): 30–32. 106 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 157. 107 Ibid., 157, 160, 197. 108 Patrick Healy, ‘The Stoical Body’, in The Body in Architecture, ed. Deborah Hauptmann (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2006), 117. 109 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 21–24. [Book I, 1.1–1.18.] 110 Healy, ‘The Stoical Body’, 118. 111 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 61.
19 exact same universal order, it was logical that he would harness language as the means to do so.112
The ultimate criterion for a Stoical body’s existence, longevity, and good health, was its unifying coherence. And, since the circle with its external surface or boundary equidistant from the centre was considered the most coherent of all forms, this act of inscription made Vitruvian man congruent with the coherence and indestructibility of the greater universe.113
Jung describes the circle as the archetypal symbol of the psyche, and the square as the archetypal symbol of earthbound matter, the body and reality.114 In the language of symbolic patterns, combining the circle and the square with the human body suggests that heaven and earth are united within the human form.115 This idea, which is also visually encapsulated in Tibetan mandalas, is found in many mythologies and religions, and has a long history.116
The Stoics, as the Pythagoreans, regarded four, which was related to ten through the tetraktys, as the numerical sign of cosmic order.117 The number four was symbolically represented with the Pythagorean tetrad, which promoted harmony and unity through the reconciliation of opposites.118 The tetrad was, for both the Pythagoreans and the Stoics, a coherent pattern that ‘subsists throughout the universe’.119 And so Vitruvius’ arrangement of a man ‘squared’ within a circle makes ‘tenness’, or universal perfection, synonymous with the geometry of the body. McEwen makes the point:
Like the circle that bounds Vitruvian man, whose ten extended fingers and toes are touched by the line the compass makes as it goes around him, ten is both the coherent circular totality of things and the fourfold ‘squaring’ that makes that totality a constant for all peoples in all places.120
It was only a ‘man well shaped by symmetry’ that could generate the geometry of the square inscribed within the circle. Transforming him into a template becomes a means of effectively
112 Ibid. 113 Ibid., 160. 114 Carl G. Jung, Man and his Symbols, ed. Marie-Louise von Franz, et al. (London: Aldus Books, 1964), 249. 115 György Doczi, The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture (Boston: Shambhala, 1985), 93. 116 Ibid. 117 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 45–46, 160–161. 118 S. K. Heninger, ‘Some Renaissance Versions of the Pythagorean Tetrad’, Studies in the Renaissance 8 (1961): 14. 119 Ibid., 18. 120 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 161.
20 conferring the coherence of the body into architecture.121 The pleasure that a spectator derived from venustas, or the visible appearance of beauty in an architectural work, was evidence of this coherence.122
Although symmetria produced an abstract beauty, this did not necessarily translate directly into a beautiful appearance. In other words, symmetria could not be relied upon to serve as the exclusive means of achieving coherence in architecture.123 While symmetria was a primary consideration, it was also deemed important that structures appear symmetrical: to this end, Vitruvius introduces the principle of eurhythmia—to mediate between proportion and form.124 Eurhythmy, ‘the beautiful appearance and fitting aspect of the parts once they have been put together’ was the ultimate aim of the architect.125 Eurhythmy expressed the idea that immanent characteristics, or qualities, could be attributed to shapes, and by extension to constituent elements. In this way, for example, the proportional relationship of 1:6 found in the Doric column provided eurhythmy by imparting the quality of ‘masculine strength’.126 Since the primary intention of the architect was to achieve a convincing appearance, or visible coherence of form through the adjustment of proportions wherever necessary, the conclusion can be drawn that, ultimately, qualities were considered more important than quantitative symmetry.127 This idea grants primacy to the relationship between the spectator and the architectural work. It links architecture and its effect on the viewer to oratory and ‘persuasion’.128
Speaking bodies
The connection between oratory and architecture goes deep to the structural heart of De architectura. At the beginning of Book I Vitruvius writes:
In all things, but especially in architecture there are two inherent categories: the signified and the signifier. The signified is the proposed subject of discussion, it is signified by a reasoned demonstration carried out according to established principles of knowledge.129
121 Ibid., 197. 122 Ibid., 210. 123 Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture: 43. 124 Ibid. 125 Vitruvius, Book I, 2.3. Cited in McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 198–199. 126 Howe, ‘Commentary’, 150. 127 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 199. 128 Ibid. 129 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 22. [Book I, 1.3.]
21 Vitruvius adopted the terms signifier and signified from oratory, where signifying verba (words) and signified res (matter) were united to form a speech.130 While it is generally accepted that the terms refer to the division between practice (fabrica)131 [signified], and theory (ratiocination) [signifier],132 McEwen offers an alternate view based on Stoic language theory.
The Stoics identified three elements in any process of signification: the signified, the signifier, and the actual thing being referred to.133 In oratory the utterance was the signifier, the ‘specific state of affairs indicated by the spoken word’ (the word’s meaning) was the signified, and the existing thing was the external reality.134 Both the utterance and the existing thing were considered bodies, but the signified ‘state of affairs’ was considered an ‘incorporeal’. This incorporeal was referred to as a lekton, or Lekta (plural), and its role was to mediate between utterances and existing things.135 A lekton’s existence was wholly dependent on the duration of thoughts and sentences, but it could, nevertheless, affect how these appeared or were perceived.136 McEwen suggests that it was Vitruvius’ acceptance of this rhetorical concept that compelled him to anchor his theory of architecture in writing. More particularly, it led him to shape his theory into a body (rather than bringing it into shape or Being), in order to make it real or corporeal and prevent it from ‘[evanescing] together with the thought or utterance with which it coexisted’.137 Thus, De architectura ‘effects what it signifies’ [a body]. By means of its written form, it represents the embodiment of architectural theoretical knowledge (ratiocinatio).138
It is generally recognised that, in both its method and structure, De architectura references the art of rhetoric.139 Richard Patterson considers the rhetorical format of De architectura, Vitruvius’ greatest achievement.140 The rhetorical treatise form, whose purpose, according to Cicero, was ‘to
130 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 79. 131 The Latin term fabrica also refers to the ‘workshop of an artisan who works in hard materials’, and ‘the art, trade, or profession of such an artisan’. Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. 132 Howe, ‘Commentary’, 135. 133 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 76. 134 Ibid., 76–77. 135 Ibid., 77. 136 Ibid. 137 Ibid. 138 Healy, ‘The Stoical Body’, 129. 139 Richard Patterson, ‘What Vitruvius Said’, The Journal of Architecture 2, 4 (1997): 357. 140 Patterson claims that Vitruvius modelled the chapters of De architectura on the format of a rhetorical treatise, that is, with the same ascending scale of complexity. Patterson illustrates this claim with a summary of the implied topics that he believes Vitruvius utilises in Book 1: I. The work of the Architect II. Nomenclature
22 divide the entirety of a practice into its general classes’, had the effect of rendering the work meaningful to a public audience, and so provides a basis for achieving the same aim in relation to architectural discourse.141 It was through the engagement of a ‘speech community’ that Vitruvius was able to ultimately achieve his objectives.142 Patterson observes that it was De architectura’s rhetorical format, rather than its metaphysical underpinnings, that subsequently yielded a communicative framework for architectural practice whereby the construction of cities and buildings moved into the public domain.143
Vitruvius cites Cicero’s De oratore, along with Varro’s De Lingua Latina as works he particularly admires.144 According to McEwen, the purpose of Cicero’s De oratore was to shape the power of speech into a ‘communicable body of knowledge, by giving it a ratio drawn for the most part from Greek teaching’. Vitruvius shared this aim.145 However in oratory, ratio alone (as with Vitruvius’ symmetria) was not considered sufficient to persuade.146 What was critical to the art of persuasion was the orator’s effect on the audience. Plutarch cites eurhythmia as the principle that establishes the strength of the persuasive bond between speaker and listener, the same principle that Vitruvius believed was necessary to ‘visually persuade’ an architectural audience.147
In addition to eurhythmia, Vitruvius appropriates a number of other rhetorical terms and adapts them to key architectural principles, these include: ordinatio (order), dispositio (arrangement), and decor (from the rhetorical term decorum—to suit the dignity of the building). Vitruvius’ appropriation of these terms reveals that he himself must have had rhetorical training, but also, and more importantly, provides him with a direct means of engaging the Roman elite in an architectural dialogue. Although the Roman elite would have had limited understanding of classical Greek architecture they would have received training in oratory, and so this discipline
III. The Parts of Architecture IV. The Choice of a Site V. The Demarcation of Civic Boundaries VI. The Interior Structure of a Settlement VII. The Location of Communal Facilities Ibid., 360. 141 Ibid. 142 Healy, ‘The Stoical Body’, 117. 143 Patterson, ‘What Vitruvius Said’, 360. 144 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 109. [Book IX, Preface 17.] 145 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 140–141. 146 Ibid., 199. 147 Ibid.
23 becomes a means of bringing architectural theory (and its terms and techniques) into standard discourse where previously it had remained to one side.148 Patterson suggests that Vitruvius drew on rhetorical language and ‘rhetorical devices to systematise and present the heterogeneous aspects of building practice, to bring Cicero’s model of argument into the armoury of the architect’.149 Vitruvius’ debt to Cicero extends to the moral concept of decor, or ‘appropriateness’. This he marshaled as a central tenet in determining architectural merit, as it was this quality that most readily marked the presence of coherence.150
Cicero’s De officiis sought to define the ideals of appropriate public behaviour, which, as with the corporeality of bodies, could also be evaluated according to their measure of coherence.151 In this treatise he refers to the ‘whole body politic’, the ‘whole body of citizens’, and constituent ‘bodily members’,152 to ultimately account for how society coheres through law, or officium— ‘the behaviour befitting one’s place in the collectivity’.153 Cicero believed that moral law unified a civil society which he referred to as the res publica, the Roman commonwealth, or ‘body politic’. In its ideal state this ‘body politic’ was a unified human body.154
Classified by the ancient Greeks as one of four virtues of style, decorum (from the Greek prepon, ‘propriety’) came to be regarded as a governing virtue since it was only when ideas were appropriately embodied and presented through the observation of decorum that a speech could be effective.155 Decorum was a concept realised through its effect on others.156 It was the approval of an audience that lent an oration acceptance as well as authority.157 In his treatise De oratore,
148 Patterson, ‘What Vitruvius Said’, 358. 149 Ibid., 362. 150 Ibid., 357. 151 Healy, ‘The Stoical Body’, 126. See also McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 59. 152 These terms are used throughout De officiis. Marcus Tullius Cicero and Walter Miller, De Officiis (London: Heinemann, 1928), 247, 289. [Book II, xxi, Book III, v.] 153 Cicero cited in McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 59. Cicero’s requirement for coherence is highlighted in Part III of De officiis when he harnesses the analogy of a diseased body to argue for the elimination of Caesar’s supporters following the emperor’s assassination. Cicero reasons that this would constitute a moral action because the elimination of such individuals would be akin to removing a diseased limb from a body in order that the whole body might survive. In other words, such an action is moral because it is in the interest of the greater good. Cicero and Miller, De Officiis: 299. [Book III, vi.] 154 McEwen, Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture: 59. 155 Walter H. Beale, Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry and Literary Humanism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 163. Refer to notes 80 and 165 in this section for an enlarged description of the concept of prepon. 156 Anne Leen, ‘Cicero and the Rhetoric of Art’, The American Journal of Philology 112, 2 (1991): 237. 157 Howe, ‘Commentary’, 151.
24 Cicero explicitly connects decorum with the broader virtue of practical wisdom, or phronesis.158 He takes this concept further in De officiis, by linking decorum with the virtue of temperance.
In [propriety] we find considerateness and self-control, which give, as it were, a sort of polish to life; it embraces also temperance, complete subjugation of all the passions, and moderation in all things. … For to employ reason and speech rationally, to do with careful consideration whatever one does, and in everything to discern the truth and to uphold it— that is proper.159
Cicero believed that an orator’s actions were bound by the morality of decorum, which demanded that a speech (or action) be appropriate for the situation. To achieve this, an oration had to be tailored to suit each particular circumstance and take into account the social context, the demography of the audience, and class distinctions. At the same time orators had to uphold the moral obligations contingent upon their social position.160 This attention to moral duty was obligatory since an orator pronounced on moral precepts such as ‘justice, truth, right, and goodness’.161 With the power of speechmaking came ethical responsibility. Walter Beale suggests that Cicero’s ‘doctrine of decorum combines ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical principles in a single moment. Living well and writing well are, in this respect, not only connected but merged into one another’.162 Symmetria is implied in Cicero’s correlation of the structure of language (style) with the structure of behaviour (virtue).163 It was realised when the practice of language, as distinct from the disciplines and subjects that language encodes, produced behavioral change, such as improved intellect, wisdom or morality.164
Decor is the term that Vitruvius adapts from Cicero’s decorum to address the appropriateness of content, ethics and style in architectural works. According to Vesely, this was Vitruvius’ only explicit reference to the representative content of architecture. However, Vesely considers decor an impoverished adaptation of its original rhetorical form.165
158 Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: 276. 159 Cicero and Miller, De Officiis: 95, 97. [Book I, xxvii.] 160 Gary Remer, ‘Rhetoric as a Balancing of Ends: Cicero and Machiavelli’, Philosophy and Rhetoric 42, 1 (2009): 19. 161 Tatarkiewicz, History of Aesthetics: Ancient Aesthetics, 1: 264. 162 Beale, Learning from Language: Symmetry, Asymmetry and Literary Humanism 159. 163 Ibid., 166. 164 Ibid., 1–2. 165 Despite a common ancestry, Vesely claims that decorum remains closest in meaning to the original Greek prepon. For prepon, which belongs to the ‘domain of appearances’ (to be seen clearly), represents ‘a harmonious participation in the order of reality as well as the outward expression of that order’, and so, denotes an essential merger wherein representation embodies a truth. Vesely observes that Vitruvius frequently subordinates the qualitative concept of decor to its quantitative equivalent distributio, or to the
25 Vitruvius deemed the conditions for decor realised when a building program met all requirements according to tradition (statio), custom (consuetudo), and natural circumstances (natura).166 In this context, decor becomes an authoritative set of rules that ensures a work demonstrates the social, religious, or economic status that propriety demanded.167 And so, temples to ‘manly’ gods were to be fittingly constructed from columns with ‘manly’ attributes, and grand houses correctly built with grand entrances.168 These highly prescriptive rules of identity and likeness based on precedent did not allow for exception.169 For Vitruvius, a discord or lack of coherence would result from blending ‘racially’ exclusive Ionic and Doric elements in a single temple design.170 Tim Anstey notes that these Vitruvian rules of decorum had a conceptual flaw. Since exceptions could not be tolerated, it was impossible to resolve a dilemma that resulted from an architectural solution that complied with one requirement (for example consuetude), yet could not be reconciled with one or the other of the two remaining requirements (natura or statio).171
The difference between Cicero’s decorum and Vitruvius’ reduced decor is highlighted with the comparison of a shared exemplar. Vitruvius proclaims that ‘correctness of tradition will be expressed if, when buildings have magnificent interiors, their vestibules have been made equally harmonious and elegant …’.172 It has been suggested that Vitruvius gleaned this idea from Cicero, in particular from the following excerpt in De officiis:
But since I am investigating this subject [propriety] in all its phases (at least, that is my purpose), I must discuss also what sort of house a man of rank and station should in my opinion, have.173
[I]n the home of a distinguished man, in which numerous guests must be entertained and crowds of every sort of people received, care must be taken to have it spacious. But if it is not frequented by visitors, if it has an air of lonesomeness, a spacious palace often
other qualitative attributes symmetria and eurhythmia. In other words, Vitruvius introduces a tension between what is right and its outward expression (aesthetic meaning). Instead, decorum, for the most part, retains a bond between morality and propriety as evinced with Cicero’s declaration that decorum is ‘inseparable from moral goodness’. Vesely notes that from the classical era through to the end of the Baroque it was not the Vitruvian concept of decor that exerted influence over representation, but decorum. Dalibor Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 364–366. 166 Ibid., 364. 167 Wilson Jones, Principles of Roman Architecture: 43. 168 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 25. [Book I, 2.5–2.6.] 169 Tim Anstey, ‘The Dangers of Decorum’, Architectural Research Quarterly 10, 2 (2006): 132. 170 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 25. [Book I, 2.6.] 171 Anstey, ‘The Dangers of Decorum’, 132. 172 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 25. [Book I, 2.6.] 173 Cicero and Miller, De Officiis: 141. [Book I, xxxiv.]
26 becomes a discredit to its owner. This is sure to be the case if at some other time, when it had a different owner, it used to be thronged.174
Cicero notes that decorum in architecture is not simply achieved by building ‘grand houses’ with ‘grand entrances’, but is deeply connected to the observer’s sensory and emotional impressions, the notion of temporality, and the way in which the building mediates between the owner and a broader audience.175 Although Cicero, as Vitruvius, maintains an underlying belief in propriety that is based on Stoic morality, Cicero recognises shades of grey or caveats that preclude certainty.176 In yet another departure from Vitruvius, Cicero writes that, in order to be persuasive the orator must find the style that best fits the context:
This art, if indeed it be an art, contains no directions for discovering truth but only for testing it. … For this oratory of ours must be adapted to the ears of the multitude, for charming or urging their minds to approve of proposals, which are weighed in no goldsmith’s balance, but in what I may call common scales.177
According to Anstey, Cicero regarded the judgment of appropriateness to be one of the most difficult tasks in oratory, yet Vitruvius reduces decor to a simple set of ‘rules and illustrations’.178 Moreover, the persuasive art that was so necessary to achieve the orator’s aims and intent, acknowledged the ‘value of the “un-fitting”’; it had to understand when to inject surprise or the unexpected into an oration in order to avoid dullness.179 This strategy encompassed a technique adopted by orators to track and recall their speeches. The orator would conceptually divide the speech into a series of memorised places or loci, which were then addressed in sequence. Images were elaborated at select points along the way to make each oration particular and distinctive. For images to ‘strike the emotions and awake recall’, they had to be ‘unnatural, contradictory, [or] against expectation’. In other words, to achieve the aims of oratory a place for monstrosity was created that ran counter to the strict, morally defined principle of decor.180
174 Ibid., 143. [Book I, xxxiv.] 175 Anstey, ‘The Dangers of Decorum’, 132. 176 Ibid. 177 Marcus Tullius Cicero, Harris Rackham, and E. W. Sutton, De Oratore: In Two Volumes (London: Heinemann, 1967), 311, 313. [Book II, xxxviii.] 178 Anstey, ‘The Dangers of Decorum’, 132. 179 Ibid., 137. 180 Ibid., 133.
27 Monsters
In his paper Body Troubles, Robert McAnulty notes that the Vitruvian (canonical body), and later humanist emphasis on the hierarchical centrality of the human figure, which directly projects human bodies onto artefacts, implies a positional separation, or distance between subject and object. At the heart of this separation (despite mediation through analogia) lies the belief that the unified, bounded body is entirely constituted prior to the world and that it is able to impress itself upon an undifferentiated external domain.181 However, the beginnings of a contemporary way of thinking, one that eschews dualism, can be found in a parallel monstrous discourse that shifts the human body to the periphery or boundary, providing an ever-present counterpoint to the hegemony of classical isomorphism.
As Mark Dorrian so neatly summarises, ‘At all points where anthropomorphism exists, such as in architecture, literature, and political constitution, the grotesque and monstrous threaten’.182 Notably, many aspects of pre-Enlightenment monstrous discourse converge with recent scholarship that seeks to re-engage the body in ways that resist Cartesian dualism. The monstrous metaphor, which takes on a new gloss during the Renaissance, where it figures broadly in humanist discourse, not only straddles the subject–object divide, but offers a strategy for engaging the body in, as Frascari describes it, the ‘construction and the construing’ of non-trivial architecture.183
Vitruvius was the first to document the monstrous topos in relation to architectural discourse; it emerges in the context of his mythopoetic account. He broaches the subject in two ways, by offering cautionary advice regarding the avoidance of monstrous creations, or irrational mixtures, and in seeming contradiction, by sanctioning the use of assemblage and fragments for the purpose of invention—albeit only indirectly and on merely a few occasions.184 In doing so
181 Robert McAnulty, ‘Body Troubles’, in Strategies in Architectural Thinking, ed. John Whiteman, Jeffrey Kipnis, and Richard Burdell (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 181–182. 182 Dorrian initially equates the grotesque with monsters but later separates these categories by assigning alterity to the monster. Mark Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 16, 3 (2012): 314. 183 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 11. 184 Alina Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 49.
28 however, he provided Renaissance architects with a conceptual link to the monsters of classical literature.185
It is in recounting the Corinthian capital’s mythical origins that Vitruvius most openly endorses the process of combining, or mixing forms as a strategy for invention. The story recalls how a young Corinthian girl, overcome by disease, had died leaving her nurse to pack her most treasured belongings into a basket. The basket was subsequently placed upon her grave and weighed down with a stone tile. However, these objects were placed above an acanthus root and, as spring came to pass, the plant was compelled to send its shoots to the perimeter of the basket. As the tendrils emerged from the ground they became entangled in the objects. When the sculptor Callimachus passed by the grave he noticed the entangled arrangement—one that embodied the oppositions of nature/artefact, design/accident, life/death. He was so struck by the ‘nature and form of this novelty’ that he harnessed the vision as a model for designing the form and symmetry of a new capital.186
Callimachus’s invention was that he recognised the potential for metamorphosis in the encountered objects that had formed a chance assemblage, and then, in a deliberate artistic act, mimetically transformed the vision through the medium of stone into a new architectural form.187 Although the story endorses mixing as an acceptable method for inventing new architectural forms, it does not elaborate a strategy for combining heterogeneous parts since the objects are merely found in their assembled arrangement.188 Yet, Payne claims the importance of invention for Vitruvius can be construed from the story’s prominent location within the text—at the beginning of Book IV, one of two books on temples that recounts the origins of the Doric and Corinthian canonic orders. The origins of the Corinthian capital sit in stark contrast to the divine origins of the Doric column.189
185 ———, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, in Disarmonia, Bruttezza e Bizzarria nel Rinascimento, ed. Louisa Secchi Tarugi (Florence: Franco Cesati, 1998), 285. 186 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 55. [Book IV, 1.10.] 187 Alina Payne suggests that the artifice associated with this act lies in the erasure of the found objects’ original reference, since they subsequently solely reference the new form. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 30, 49–50. 188 ———, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, RES. Journal of Aesthetics and Anthropology 34(1998): 30. 189 ———, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 285–286. And Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 54. [Book IV, 1.3.]
29 Vitruvius offers the story of the Corinthian capital as an example of a good mixture, while plainly distinguishing it from bad mixtures. He denounces any mixing or embellishment in the Doric entablature as a break from convention,190 although he accepts that the Ionic and Doric elements that are found in combination in the Corinthian order, constitutes a good mixture.191 More emphatically, Vitruvius cautions against the irrational mix of motifs used in Pompeian frescoes— images that would subsequently come to be labelled grotesque.192
But these paintings, which had taken their models from real things, now fall foul of depraved taste. For monsters are now painted in frescoes rather than reliable images of definite things. Reeds are set up in place of columns, as pediments, little scrolls, striped with curly leaves and volutes, candelabra hold up the figures of aediculae, and above the pediments of these, several tender shoots, sprouting in coils from roots, have little statues nestled in them for no reason, or shoots split in half, some holding little statues with human heads, some with the heads of beasts. … Now these things do not exist nor can they exist … How … can a reed really sustain a roof, or a candelabrum the decorations of a pediment …193
These grotesque images depict impossible structures; they combine elements in a way that defies tectonic logic and reason. In other words, they misrepresent architecture since the likeness does not denote a truth based on the Natural order. Vitruvius’ vignette on the dangers of mixing resonates with the Roman poet Horace’s cautions regarding monstrous mixing. These are recorded in his guide to poetic writing, Ars poetica (circa 19 BCE).194
In ancient rhetorical theory the three principle aims of the orator were to instruct, to please, and to move the emotions of an audience—doceo, delecto, moveo.195 In poetry, as in oratory, ornament
190 ———, Ten Books on Architecture: 25. [Book I, 2.5.] 191 Ibid., 54. [Book IV, 1.2.] 192 It was not until the Renaissance that the monstrous ornament depicted in ancient Roman frescoes, which had been so disparaged by both Vitruvius and Horace, acquires the label ‘grotesque’. It was the subterranean setting of the excavated ancient Roman frescoes of the Domus Aurea during the second half of the fifteenth century, rather than the images themselves, that resulted in this denotation. Harpham suggests it was a naming mistake ‘pregnant with truth’ for the term had associations with burial, hiddenness and secrecy, and so was sympathetic with ornament’s representational purpose which was to not only reveal, but to also conceal. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 25–27. 193 Vitruvius Pollio, Ten Books on Architecture: 91. [Book VII, 5.3–5.4.] 194 Horace was a Roman Stoic, and while Vitruvius does not attribute his views regarding monstrous mixtures to the poet, Payne contends that Vitruvius would have read the poet’s works along with the works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Ovid. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 9. See also ———, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 286. 195 In classical rhetoric decorum demanded that rhetorical styles be suited to their purpose. A low or plain style was suited to instruction. This style was devoid of tropes and only utilised rhetorical figures sparingly. A middle style was ‘rich in ornament’; it included both tropes and rhetorical figures and was employed in sonnets and pastoral poetry. An ‘elevated’ and ‘impressive’ high style was designed to move audiences emotionally. It was reserved for tragedies, epic poetry, and concluding speeches. Thomas O. Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 748.
30 added vividness and emotion and so made the poem more compelling, eloquent, and persuasive.196 However, Horace, influenced by Aristotle’s notion of decorum,197 also recognised the necessity for establishing boundaries in relation to the production of creative works. In combination, he outlined a powerful position on the dangers of mixing while, importantly, providing a link between mixtures and the idea of artistic freedom, or invention.198
Although Horace acknowledged that ‘people have always given painters and poets alike a fair chance to venture what they pleased’, in other words, he recognised that a certain artistic license was permissible, he begins Ars poetica with a condemnation of hybrids—a view that generally came to be understood as a warning against the dangers of excess. He harnessed grotesque imagery as a prime exemplar of an undesirous consequence.
Suppose: a painter starts from a human head, he joins it to a horse’s neck, he inserts a variety of feathers on limbs assembled from any and everywhere, and so, repulsively, a woman of appealing form above ends in a black fish … could you contain your laughter, friends?
Believe me … the resemblance will be striking between the picture and any book in which the types of things contrived, like a sick man’s dreams, are empty of substance, no single form relating head and foot.199
For Horace, a wild and uncontrolled artistic imagination produced fantastic results that defied reason and obscured meaning.200 Throughout the text he cautions against the mixing of categories, asking instead that each character be allowed ‘to speak and act in a manner appropriate to his or her station in life’—or appropriate to decorum.201 Frances Connelly suggests that, for Horace, the monstrous grotesque was emblematic of the ‘threat posed by the profane, the alien, the feminine and the wild’.202
196 Frances S. Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 30. 197 In The Rhetoric Aristotle insists on the requirement for prepon, for the rhetorical style, as in poetry, must be appropriate to the subject. And so, ordinary ideas ought not to be expressed with an ornamental style, nor trivial matters conveyed with complex language. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology: 345. 198 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 283. 199 Horace, The Art of Poetry, trans. B. Raffel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974), 43. 200 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 27. 201 Ibid. 202 Ibid., 27–28.
31 Once there existed men of wisdom with the power and insight to separate public from private things, sacred from profane, to prevent marriage with aliens, to give rights to husbands, to build cities, to engrave laws in wood.203
Ellen Oliensis echoes this view. She claims that while Horace’s grotesques deliberately resemble the hybrid monsters of Classical literature, most particularly the Scylla and the Centaur, it was the sexually aggressive female Scylla, rather than the male Centaur, that was considered most indecorous.204 This gendered response was bound with the idea that the female body signaled the violation of unity and order,205 an idea consistent with Aristotle’s theory of generation which was founded on the belief that the female was a monstrous transgression of the normative male.206 The Scylla exemplified ‘unbridled lust’ and ‘the triumph of the “lower” [sensate] body’ over reason, bringing deformity and bestiality to the fore. She was at once ‘morally and aesthetically deformed’ that is, ‘the antithesis of decorum’.207 Oliensis claims that decorum was always an expression of power whether ‘aesthetic, sexual, political, [or] moral’, for it ‘enforces subordination: of parts to whole, woman to man, desire to reason, individual to state’.208 While a woman was considered ornamental when submissive, she transformed into a monster when the boundaries of identity and propriety were breached.209
Connelly emphasises that the need for the sublimation of ornament and the license that gave it substance, centred on its sensuous appeal. The figures of speech that were so essential to the art of persuasion appealed to the senses rather than logic, ‘they evoked a bodied response that could distract, even overpower reasoned argument’, hence their danger.210 The dialectic of ornament and argument that aligns with the opposition of body and mind also aligns with the opposition of the feminine and the masculine. Ornamental excess, which was considered a negative attribute, was deemed feminine, whereas the more valued capacity for reasoned argument was deemed
203 Horace (396–399) cited in ibid., 27. 204 Ellen Oliensis, ‘Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace’s “Epodes”’, Arethusa 24 (1991): 108. Combining canine, marine and human parts, the evil, mythical Scylla took many forms in classical literature, including that of a ‘fair breasted’ female (from the waist up) with a monstrous fish tail and baying dogs at her waist. George M. A. Hanfmann, ‘The Scylla of Corvey and Her Ancestors’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 41 (1987): 259. While Horace considered hybrid horse–human mixtures dubious figures, such as when a painter ‘puts a horse’s mane on a man’s neck’, these creatures were described in more positive terms when possessed of an upright, whole human body and a distinct horse attachment, as with the mythical centaurs. Geoffrey S. Kirk, The Nature of Greek Myths (London: Penguin Books, 1974), 195. See also Horace, The Art of Poetry: 9. 205 Oliensis, ‘Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace’s “Epodes”’, 108. 206 Aristotle’s generation theory is discussed in more detail in the section ‘Subversion of the Natural Order’. 207 Oliensis, ‘Canidia, Canicula, and the Decorum of Horace’s “Epodes”’, 108. 208 Ibid., 107. 209 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 28. 210 Ibid., 30.
32 masculine.211 And so, in Western culture the monstrous grotesque continuously revealed the ways in which it was intimately bound with the sensing, ornamental body and notions of the feminine.212
211 Ibid. 212 Ibid., 116.
33 Milieu
Since ancient times, monsters have delineated the discursive space that represented the voids or limits of human knowledge; they signified the terrifying disorder that was thought to exist beyond reasoned experience.1 Early maps depict a cosmographic world and, although cartography of the sixteenth and seventeenth century had begun to shift away from this worldview and started to reinforce the duality of self as subject and knowledge of the world as object, these ‘ambivalent’ centuries were still troubled by liminal monsters.2 While the fear and threat of monstrous creatures was, in a sense, mitigated by their removal to the furthest edges, paradoxically they remained seductive (hence their attraction for explorers), for the sites they inhabited were seen as places of personal transformation.3
Frascari points out that, just as transformative monsters inhabit the margins of medieval texts and maps, they are situated in, and transform, the spatial boundaries of architectural works. He explains that within these liminal spaces meanings are ‘misplaced’ and ‘a passage to the other’ is created in built form.4 Mirroring this spatial marginalisation, David Wills’ notes that the word ‘prosthesis’ first appears in the English language in the margins of Thomas Wilson’s The Art of Rhetorique (1560) at a time when classical and medieval forms of knowledge were not just being re-arranged; they were being deconstructed and, following this, artificially (or prosthetically) reconstructed.5 According to Wills, the appearance of the word ‘prosthesis’ as a foreign ‘ornament’ in Wilson’s treatise relegates it from the outset as a sign of difference:
1 Karen Piper, Cartographic Fictions: Maps, Race, and Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 6. 2 Ibid., 6–7. 3 Ibid., 16. 4 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 22. 5 Wills claims that the deconstruction and reconstruction of knowledge that occurred post-Renaissance was analogous to a prosthetic re-attachment. David Wills, Prosthesis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 218–219.
35 [T]he sign and index of nonassimilation, the originary dehiscence that ruptures the integrity of language and meaning itself. This nonentry signifies precisely a form of foreignness that is revealed to be always already attached to the body lexical and philological.6
Wills describes two sets of terms borrowed from rhetoric that have since been applied to other disciplines. The first set relates to geometry and includes, ‘trope’, ‘parable’, ‘hyperbole’, and ‘ellipsis’, figures that are spatially defined through ‘curving departures’ from linearly structured discourse. The second derives from the margins of Wilson’s Rhetorique under the heading ‘Figures of a Word’, and includes ‘prosthesis’, ‘aphaeresis’, and ‘syncope’. These terms, which all refer to the processes of adding and removing parts from prosaic word bodies, eventually came to be associated with medical procedures and conditions, and on this basis were absorbed and applied within a wide range of disciplines.7 Wills notes that while the terms pertaining to geometry alter the ‘flow of discourse’ through stretching significations from a static axis, the terms relating to medicine affect the morphology of the word and thus tend to break the flow of discourse.8 He suggests that the rhetorical figures described by Wilson, of which the word-part ‘prosthesis’ is paradigmatic, conform to a dynamic action akin to ‘the force of a shift of rails’ rather ‘than a detour’.9 However this thesis contends that such a clear distinction is reductive, for the prosthesis can, in fact, configure ‘a detour’, and it is this enigmatic formulation and its relation to rhetorical language that imbues the figure with expansive, expressive power.
While the medical definition of prosthesis did not appear in English dictionaries until 1704, medical artefacts and monsters were first dramatically juxtaposed in the surgeon Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et des prodiges (1573).10 Paré cites prosthetic body parts designed to replace eyes, ears, noses, and hands, as proof that art can imitate nature.11 Moreover, he describes a series of surgical techniques that mimic the operations of the rhetorical prosthesis.12 This leads Wills’ to
6 Ibid., 226. 7 Ibid., 247. 8 Ibid., 247–248. 9 Ibid., 248. 10 Ibid., 218. 11 Paré was also the first to describe the effect of ‘false feeling’, the phenomenon of sensing the presence of a missing or ‘phantom’ limb. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 56–57. 12 Citing Paré, Wills writes: ‘For Paré surgery is quite simply the discipline of the prosthetic: from the very beginning its operations are five in number: “To take away that which is superfluous; to restore to their places, such things as a displaced; to separate those things which are joyned together; to joyne those which are separated; and to supply the defects of nature” (Collected Works 4). But that which presents itself as a supplementary operation, designed to remedy the imperfections of nature,
36 declare that in Paré’s text ‘the monster, the mutant, the criminal, and the amputee share the same discursive space, a space that is also that of prosthesis’.13 However, these figures do not share a discursive space for long, for in Paré’s treatise the monster has already begun a metamorphosis that will see it transform from a sign of wonder to medical anomaly and so, effect a disappearance. The prosthesis, on the other hand, undergoes a shift that will see it understood simply in terms of its new medicalised form.
The term monster evolves from the Latin monstrum, ‘a divine omen indicating misfortune, an evil omen, portent’, from which the verb form monstro, ‘to point out, exhibit, make known, indicate, inform, advise, teach, instruct, tell’, derives. The complexion of meanings related to monsters and their actions are inherited from the root word moneo—‘to remind, put in mind of, bring to one's recollection; to admonish, advise, warn, instruct [demonstrate], teach’.14 Augustine played on the monster’s enigmatic etymology. In City of God he suggested that monsters are so called because they ‘show’ and ‘portend’.15 In ancient times the monster was seen as both a sign of an impending calamitous event, and ‘an apparition of something utterly other and numinous’: at once able to invoke ‘awe and awfulness’.16 Hersey emphasises that the purpose of the monstrous figure was ‘to make the point: monstranda sunt, demonstrant, demonstrantur, they are to be shown, they show, and they are shown’.17 Sarah Miller describes these aberrant figures as ‘texts of flesh’ whose meanings are not their own but one the ‘reader’ disseminates.18 In other words, monsters are symbolic figures whose purpose is ‘to be read’.19 However, although signifying hidden agency, monsters also reveal the process of signification and the relationship between that process and events.20
Classical monsters (or embodied forms of the grotesque) emerged whenever systems of proportion and the abiding requirement for decorum, which saw the systematic organisation of all must at the same time admit of the artificial as unnatural, of what is counter to nature, a perversion and a monstrosity’. Wills, Prosthesis: 241–242. 13 Ibid., 242. 14 Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. 15 ‘They say that they are called “monsters”, because they demonstrate or signify something; “portents”, because they portend something; and so forth’. Aurelius Augustine, The City of God, trans. Rev. Marcus Dods, vol. II (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1871), 432. 16 Richard Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters: Interpreting Otherness (London: Routledge, 2003), 34. 17 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 134–135. 18 Sarah A. Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2. 19 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4. 20 Wes Williams, Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 7.
37 things according to their hierarchical order and appropriate spacing (ratio and proportion), were overturned.21 Monstrous figures challenged the unified and coherent body through disruption of its boundaries: through merging, transgressing, destabilising, and overflowing bodily limits. By eroding the integrity of the bodily boundary, monstrous figures blended with their productive worlds, collapsing all distance.22
While the rhetorical use of tropes and figures as ornaments of speech fixed the monstrous grotesque for the first time (discursively) in Vitruvius’ architectural ornament, monstrous images and their associated methods of construction had their genesis much earlier—in ancient sacrificial ritual. The monstrous grotesque achieved broad cultural penetration.23 Monstrous discourse was not restricted to architecture, art, literature and rhetoric; it also exerted influence over medical theories of generation. According to Bakhtin, it was during the Greek classical era that the grotesque became marginalised and a marker of low culture.24
During the Renaissance, rhetorical ornament was metaphorically associated with ‘dress’.25 This was an association that bound the social and aesthetic character of rhetoric intrinsically with decorum.26 However, toward the end of the sixteenth, and during the seventeenth centuries a new form of rhetorical style emerges. In this, ornamental tropes and figures were seen as ‘indexes’ of the soul, or a means of self-expression.27 Viewed in this new light, ornament strengthened its commensurability with skin, since both were seen as expressive surfaces capable of revealing an inner condition, or soul, an idea that was made manifest architecturally in the ornamental façades of Sebastiano Serlio.28 While notions of dress and skin seemed to separate classical and
21 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 313. 22 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 26. 23 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 30. 24 Ibid., 30–31. 25 In a double analogy both architecture and skin were metaphorically (in pre-modern times) related to dress, for skin was seen as the bodily garment that housed the soul, while dress was associated (through rhetoric) with the architectural wall. Claudia Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World, trans. Thomas Dunlop (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 24. Further intertwining skin and architecture by means of the secondary analogy of dress, Benthien notes that, in German, house and skin share the root word Sku which means ‘to cover’ or ‘protect’. Ibid., 245 n.248. The anthropomorphic relation between body and architecture that recognised the ‘face’ in the façade would, in Alberti’s De re aedificatoria, also associate the ‘skin’ with walls and ‘bones’ with structure. Leon Battista Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, trans. Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988). 26 Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric: 750. 27 During the Renaissance an individualistic concept of style, as an index of the soul or incarnation of thought and mind, emerges. It was opposed to the traditional elocutionary concept of style as dress of thought (exornatio) that was associated with rhetorical decorum. While the individualistic concept of style was not commonly used during the Renaissance, as it remained predominantly an age of imitation, it was taken up by anti-Ciceronians who argued that if you could not express yourself, your style would stand as a false image of your personality. Robert Burton embraces this idea in Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). Ibid., 750–751. 28 This idea is described in more detail in the section ‘Sebastiano Serlio’.
38 seventeenth century rhetoric, at a deeper affective level the two forms were bound through the rhetorical notion of touch—an idea that bound both forms to skin.
As noted earlier, the principal aim of ancient rhetoric was to harness the power of words in order to ‘touch’ and therefore ‘move’, rather than merely please an audience.29 The effect was to reduce the distance between the orator and an audience; to invite the listener to emotionally participate in a speech in the same way an ornamental façade invited spectator participation.30 The affective power, or ‘touching’, evoked with rhetorical ornament (whether by means of oratory, or the ornamental façade) created a space that overlapped with the space inscribed by early modern porous skins.31 For humoral physiology, which relied on touch to detect temperature and texture, was founded on a corporeal concept of physiology with its roots in Stoic sensory-perception, which also drew a topological space about the skin surface.32 And so, mediated through touch, early modern porous skins, architectural ornament, and the ornamental rhetorical speech came to share a spatium that runs counter to the space of Cartesian optics and rational perspective.
Skin, touch, ornamental surfaces, and monstrous ontologies were woven into more than one relationship during the early modern period, for all were undergoing transformation. As the authority and influence of the medical sciences strengthened, the wondrous monster became naturalised and the human skin envelope was sealed to form a structure of separation. While these transformations come to pass, and indeed dominate early modern scholarship, Stephanie Shirilan asserts that during this period a marginal body of literature, one that undertakes a reading against the grain, demonstrates that monsters continued to signify and trouble the closure of facts, including closure of the skin boundary.33
29 Lynn Enterline, ‘Afterword: Touching Rhetoric’, in On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 246. 30 In humanist architecture it was historia that provided an emotional connection, for its purpose was to rhetorically ‘touch’ the spectator and thus invite participation in the work. Harry F. Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 11. 31 The early modern period referred to here, and throughout this dissertation, encompasses the period in European history that falls between the end of the Middle Ages (circa 1500) and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (circa 1800). 32 Carla Mazzio writes; ‘it is the resistance of touch to specificity, conceptual stasis, and rational models that is arguably at the heart of Renaissance representations of touch’. According to Mazzio, touch becomes marginalised during the Renaissance because its locus is indeterminate or diffused throughout the entire body. Carla Mazzio, ‘Acting with Tact: Touch and Theatre in the Renaissance’, in Sensible flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 162. 33 Stephanie Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, English Studies in Canada 34, 1 (2008): 61.
39 As with the ideal body and its grotesque ‘other’, pre-modern skin was subject to a double reading. The classical aesthetic canons of antiquity that continued to dominate throughout the Renaissance referenced a body that was idealised, closed, stable and complete. The skin surface that belonged to this body was smooth and opaque, linear and two-dimensional, a form that encased hollow volumes.34 In contradistinction, Renaissance grotesque realism transfigured all the canonical principles. Grounded in the corporeal material realm, it was a notion given form by Mikhail Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World.
The grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming. The relation to time is one determining trait of the grotesque image. The other indispensible trait is ambivalence. For in this image we find both poles of transformation, the old and the new, the dying and the procreating, the beginning and the end of the metamorphosis.35
Barbara Duden, echoing Shirilan, submits that the epistemological framework that shapes the modern perception of the body as an isolated object did not fully emerge until late in the eighteenth century and that, up until this time, there was a ‘profound discontinuity’ that separated bodily discourse.36 So while considerable scholarship has focused on the early modern period as a time during which the body became bounded, the early-modern skin remained a porous ontological interface. Shirilan contends that early modern skin was not so much a structure of separation, or the ‘battered precipice between the self and non-self’, but a structure that highlighted the spatial contiguity between bodies and objects through the medium of touch.37 For Shirilan, early modern recognition of the fluid nature of the skin membrane was evinced through an absence, rather than presence of direct references. Skin could not be described in concrete terms because it was not envisaged as a concrete and stable element. Hence it was only possible to know this skin indirectly by means of analogy, allegory, and the history of touch.38 Allied with the marginal ontology of early modern skin was a monstrous ontology that was similarly unstable, fluid, and ambiguous, and thus also made present indirectly.
34 Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World: 26, 38. 35 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: 24. 36 Barbara Duden, The Woman beneath the Skin: A Doctor’s Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlop (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 1. 37 Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 62, 64. 38 Ibid., 60.
40 While the modern skin envelope is generally understood as a closed and superficial structure, both literally and figuratively, more recent scholarship has again focused on skin as a site of interaction, or interface between the self and the world.39 This expansive conceptualisation of skin is sympathetic with Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical ‘flesh’, in which the world and body intertwine. It is a notion that is captured with the following excerpt from Juhani Pallasmaa’s Eyes of the Skin:
We behold, touch, listen and measure the world with our entire bodily existence … Our domicile is the refuge of our body, memory and identity. We are in constant dialogue and interaction with the environment, to the point that it is impossible to detach the image of the Self from its spatial and situational existence.40
Michel Serres, in his Philosophy of Mingled Bodies, also describes the intimate relationship between the skin and the world; he sees this as a relation that is mediated through the structures of both ornament and membranes:
Cosmetics and the art of adornment are equivalent expressions. The Greeks in their exquisite wisdom combined order and adornment in the same word, the art of adorning and that of ordering. ‘Cosmos’ designates arrangement, harmony and law, the rightness of things: here is the world, earth and sky, but also decoration, embellishment or ornamentation. Nothing goes as deep as decoration, nothing goes further than the skin, ornamentation is as vast as the world. Cosmos and cosmetics, appearance and essence have the same origin. … Every veil is a magnificently historiated display.41
The constitutive and transformative nature of the ornamental skin interface that has been invoked since ancient times by monsters is also invoked, as this dissertation reveals, with a complex reading of the contemporary prosthetic figure.
39 Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World: 7. 40 Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses (West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 64. 41 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 32.
41 Metaphor
Stephen Frith notes that rhetoric and architecture share a symbolic heritage, and also a dependence on metaphor to communicate meaning. The decorous architectural façade, as the rhetorical speech, relies on the ability of an audience to be ‘persuaded’ of its ‘appropriateness’ through the shared reading of commonly recognised signs. In architecture, as in language, metaphor1 is the primary agent of exchange.2
Metaphors, or more particularly ornamental metaphors, attain an essential status in the recollective philosophy of Enlightenment rhetorician Giambattista Vico (1668–1744).3 Grotesques, which Vico labels ‘poetic monsters’, were seen as archaic bearers of embodied, communal meaning.4 Since these figures represent the genesis of language and acculturation, Connelly submits that Vico’s philosophy is one that has alterity at its core.5
Ornamental metaphors
Composed in Italian, rather than Latin, Vico’s New Science (1730) was published at a time when Cartesian rationalism and empiricism were beginning to exert dominance in Western thought. Dependent on the faculties of judgment, concept formation, abstraction, and reason, these
1 While the metaphors that adorned speech during the early modern period were considered inventive, magical, and enigmatic, their relevance diminished during the seventeenth century with the progressive rise of the rational sciences. Kunze chronicles the way in which this trend has shifted in recent times. Donald Kunze, Thought and Place: The Architecture of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), 27–30. 2 Frith, ‘A Primitive Exchange: On Rhetoric and Architectural Symbol’, 43. 3 Connelly summarises: ‘Ornament can define the simplest arrangement of patterns and associations (certain kinds of emblems or grotesques, for example) created apart from (and prior to) the reflexivity required for mimesis’. She adds, ‘[ornament] creates order and constructs meaning through concrete properties of things and experiences, as opposed to argument, which does the same things through the abstracted properties of things and experiences. … ornament speaks to the body, memory and imagination; argument speaks to the eye and the mind’. Frances S. Connelly, ‘Embodied Meaning: Giambattista Vico’s Theory of Images’, New Vico Studies 17 (1999): 70–71. 4 Ibid., 73, 78. 5 Ibid., 73.
43 intellectual methods were applied to all scholarly domains. Vico was principal among a counter- Enlightenment movement of humanists who opposed the prevailing intellectual hegemony, perceiving it as unsuitable for understanding and guiding human affairs.6 Vico’s radical alternate vision stood outside the Western philosophical tradition of his time, but also superseded traditional humanism.7 He claimed that, in order to arrive at self-knowledge, it was necessary to recollect poetic origins, since all ways of knowing were derivative of an original poetic wisdom.8 According to Vico, poetic wisdom was to be found in embodied images, ‘or imaginative universals’, derived from the imagination (fantasia) and made manifest in myths and fables.9 And so, as Verene notes, Vico countered the embrace of Western rationalism by placing ‘the image over the concept, the speech over the argument, and the mythic divination over the fact’.10
Vico’s poetic wisdom was constituted in the first two of three ages in human cultural development, which moved sequentially from the divine, to the heroic, and finally to the human age.11 It was in the third age of humans, as reasoning, philosophical thought, and concept formation became possible, that the ‘imaginative universal’ of the first two ages was replaced with the ‘intelligible universal’. Since the first language to emerge was poetry rather than prose, Vico describes the first humans as ‘poets’, a term etymologically related to the word for ‘creators’.12 He also refers to the first people as beasts, giants, and gentiles and so, according to
6 John D. Schaeffer, ‘Commonplaces: Sensus Communis’, in A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 284. 7 Luft explains that although Vico begins with the humanist tradition, and so continues to value the ability of humans to construct their social world (i.e. retains an anthropocentric worldview), he ‘takes his anthropology beyond subjectivism and epistemic concerns’. She claims that Vico ‘grasps the poetic nature of humans and envisions a poiesis that, while assuming the centrality of human activity, conceives it as ontologically constructive of linguistic and social practices, the very being-of-humans in the world’. Sandra R. Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science Between Modern and Postmodern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 121. Lollini also argues for Vico’s ‘more than human humanism’, which he believes derives from the attachment to ‘place’ that emerges with the first humans. Massimo Lollini, ‘Vico’s More than Human Humanism’, Annali d'Italianistica 29 (2011): 383. 8 Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science Between Modern and Postmodern: 186. 9 Connelly, ‘Embodied Meaning: Giambattista Vico’s Theory of Images’, 73–74. 10 Donald P. Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 30. 11 While Vico defines three ages, he does not see this as the extent of human development. He envisaged that subsequent ages would come into existence. Ibid., 203. 12 Vico muses on the first poets: ‘From all this it appears to have been demonstrated that, by a necessity of human nature, poetic style arose before prose style; just as, by the same necessity, the fables, or imaginative universals, arose before the rational or philosophic universals which were formed through the medium of prose speech. For after the poets had formed poetic speech by associating particular ideas, as we have fully shown, the peoples went on to form prose speech by contracting into a single word, as into a genus, the parts which poetic speech had associated. Take for example the poetic phrase, “the blood boils in my heart” based on a property natural, eternal and common to all mankind. They took the blood, the boiling and the heart, and made of them a single word, as it were a genus, called in Greek stomachos, in Latin ira and in Italian collera. Following the same pattern, hieroglyphics and heroic letters were reduced to a few vulgar letters, as genera assimilating innumerable diverse articulate sounds; a feat requiring consummate genius. By means of these vulgar genera, both of words and of letters, the minds of the peoples grew quicker and developed powers of abstraction, and the way was thus prepared for the coming of the philosophers who formed intelligible genera’. Giambattista Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition
44 Massimo Lollini, emphasises that the ‘origins of humanity’ lie with a ‘borderline condition, the bestione, a monstrum’.13
For Vico, the tropes of metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, when combined together with the poetic devices of ‘monsters’ and ‘metamorphoses’, provide ‘the logic’ for attaining poetic wisdom.14 Of these devices, Vico describes metaphor as the ‘most luminous and therefore the most necessary and frequent’, adding that every metaphor formed through poetic logic is ‘a fable in brief’.15 When these metaphors or ‘imaginative universals’ were juxtaposed and combined into non-relational amalgams in order to denote new multivalent meanings, ‘poetic monsters’ were formed.16 The disparate combinations that constituted ‘poetic monsters’ represented an entire material thing, or action. They did not abstract from experience, but at all times were bound within their ‘textual moment’; they remained open ended, and according to Connelly, filled with a ‘rich, allusive potential’.17
Vico’s first humans possessed enhanced sensory perception and therefore the most sublime imagination. This had been gifted to them by Providence to compensate for their limited ability to reason, thereby ensuring their survival.18 Heightened imaginations granted the first people the power to create poetry that gave ‘sense and passion to insensate things’.19 Moreover, because
(1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’, trans. Thomas Goddard Bergin and Max Harold Fisch (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), para. 460. 13 Lollini, ‘Vico’s More than Human Humanism’, 390. 14 For Vico: ‘Metonymy of agent for act resulted from the fact that names for agents were commoner than names for acts. Metonymy of subject for form and accident was due to the fact that … they did not know how to abstract forms and qualities from subjects. Certainly metonymy of cause for effect produced in each case a little fable, in which the cause was imagined as a woman clothed with her effects: ugly Poverty, sad Old Age, pale Death’. Further, ‘Synecdoche developed into metaphor as particulars were elevated into universals or parts united with the other parts together with which they make up their wholes. Thus the term … tectum, “roof”, came to mean a whole house because in the first times a covering sufficed for a house’ Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 406–407. Synecdoche, where an expression harnesses a part to stand for a whole, has its philosophical equivalent in the relation between microcosm and macrocosm. Sloane, Encyclopedia of Rhetoric: 746–747. Although Vico identifies four tropes, he claims that irony will not be found in poetic logic, as it requires reflective thinking to distinguish between what is true and false, and so must manipulate arguments to achieve a desired result. Vico claims that the fact that it cannot be included attests to the truthful nature of fables, which could not ‘feign anything false’. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 408. 15 ———, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 404. 16 Vico explains: ‘Poetic monsters and metamorphoses arose from a necessity of this first human nature, its inability, as shown in the Axioms [209], to abstract forms or properties from subjects. By their logic they had to put subjects together in order to put their forms together, or to destroy a subject in order to separate its primary form from the contrary form which had been imposed upon it. Such a putting together of ideas created the poetic monster’. Ibid., para. 410. 17 Connelly, ‘Embodied Meaning: Giambattista Vico’s Theory of Images’, 75. 18 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 384, 334. 19 Ibid., para. 404.
45 they could only come to know things through their sensing bodies, the first metaphors took the form of anthropomorphic projections,20 providing an authentic means (for those in the present age) to trace a metaphor’s lineage.21
Vico submits that the earliest act of collective cognition was born out of a fear response to thundering skies, which gave rise to the god figure Jove of the first age.22 Donald Kunze suggests that the separation of earth and sky was a form of ritual observance that instantiated a topological rather than Cartesian conceptualisation of space.23 The world of the ‘gentiles’ was delimited by ‘mountain summits’ that constituted the heavens and an underworld that extended to the ‘bottom of the furrow’.24 Lollini echoes this view, emphasising that, because the poetic logic of the first ‘children of the earth’ was intertwined with the original places of humanity, it lay beyond historical and logical boundaries. And so, according to Lollini, the beginning of humankind can be interpreted as a ‘poetic cosmography and geography’.25 With the ‘ritual observance’ of these relations, the labyrinth becomes the first, or original architectural form.26
For Vico, the idea of self begins with community.27 The first people interpreted the signs of Jove in commune with their immediate others, and the first language emerged from this shared experience, from the values and knowledge of the first people’s collective culture and place.28 Vico is clear that the first language was one of images, a spatial rather than linear, or reasoning language.
20 According to Vico, ‘It is noteworthy that in all languages the greater part of the expressions relating to inanimate things are formed by metaphor from the human body and its parts and from the human senses and passions. Thus, head for top or beginning; eyes for the looped heads of screws and for windows letting light into houses; mouth for any opening; lip for the rim of a vase or of anything else … Innumerable other examples could be collected from all languages. All of which is a consequence of our axiom [120] that man in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe, for in the examples cited he has made of himself an entire world. So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them’. Ibid., para. 405. 21 Donald P. Verene, ‘Vico’s Philosophy of Imagination’, in Vico and Contemporary Thought, ed. Giorgio Tagliacozzo, Michael Mooney, and Donald P. Verene (London: Macmillan Press 1980), 24 n.29. 22 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 383. 23 Donald Kunze, Thought and Place: Architecture of the imagination in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico, 2nd, enlarged and revised ed. (Boalsburg, Penn.: Lulu.com, 2012), ix. 24 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 113, 546. 25 Lollini, ‘Vico’s More than Human Humanism’, 396. 26 Donald Kunze, ‘Giambattista Vico as a Philosopher of Place: Comments on the Recent Article by Mills’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 8, 2 (1983): 243. 27 Verene, ‘Vico’s Philosophy of Imagination’, 42. 28 Schaeffer notes that Vico frequently refers to sensus communis in the New Science and that, and although the term’s meaning evolves, it comes to stand for ‘the judgments of the community, the power of discriminating between sense impressions, the origin of language and institutions, and the home of community values and assumptions’. Schaeffer, ‘Commonplaces: Sensus Communis’, 285–286.
46 For when we wish to give utterance to our understanding of spiritual things, we must seek aid from our imagination to explain them and, like painters, form human images of them.29
Images bound communities through a shared poetic that, in the age of gods, was a ‘mute language of signs and physical objects having natural relations to the ideas they wished to express’.30 This first mute language took the form of vocalisations (onomatopoeia), which included gesture and bodily expressions. Jurgen Trabant points out that Vico’s first language is mute in two senses: firstly, because it is an idea situated in the embodied mind of the first humans rather than a spoken (or phonetic) language; and, secondly because it was a visual rather than audible language.31 And so, ‘the first sign was a character’ rather than a spoken word.32
The metaphoric association of Jove and a thundering sky, which Vico merges in the original ‘imaginative universal’, was not a relation of similitude but, rather, one of direct identity: Jove was thunder, and thunder was the bodily manifestation of Jove.33 For the first people, ‘thinking [was] identical with signification’.34
Verene notes that Vico’s original perceptual metaphor existed prior to an Aristotelian concept of metaphor, which was defined by the transfer of signification between objects/ideas/concepts based on similitude.35 Since it is only possible to conceive of transferring significations between thoughts subsequent to an original thought, the mind’s first act of transference had to draw meaning from the ‘flux of sensations’ and fix it in a universal.36 Verene submits that Jove is the first instance where something comes into ‘isness’, where only momentariness existed before. He adds that, ‘Jove is in the sense of being something and is in the sense of being related to
29 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 402. 30 Ibid., para. 32. 31 Vico’s concept of ‘muteness’ challenged the European cognitive/linguistic tradition founded on Aristotelianism, which held that phonetic signification followed from the formation of ideas in the mind. Jürgen Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology, trans. Sean Ward (London: Routledge, 2004), 44–45. 32 Ibid., 45. 33 Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 172–173. 34 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 46. 35 Donald P. Verene, ‘Imaginative Universals’, in Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing, ed. Marcel Danesi (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 205. 36 ———, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 173.
47 something’.37 In other words, the ‘imaginative universal’ is a form of knowledge where, as Verene explains, ‘things’ are ‘understood to come to be’: it is an ‘epistemology … of origins’.38
While the language of the first age was predominately visual or mute, the second age consisted of ‘an equal mixture of articulate and mute’ language.39 In the heroic age, linguistic ‘characters’ take the form of powerful pictorial emblems, most commonly displayed on coins and shields. The poet Homer referred to these imagistic signs as semata.40 The metaphoric associations on which these images were based required interaction between the imagination and ingegno (which can be interpreted as ingenuity or invention, but also, ability, skill and intelligence)41 in order to form a connection between percept and perceptual model.42 For Vico, it was ingegno that permitted the connection of ‘disparate and diverse things’, whereas the imagination alone merely repeated and modified memory.43 Thus, according to Trabant, ingegno constitutes ‘the most poetic level of primitive mental capacity’.44 Although the divine age harnesses ingegno to give ‘sense and passion to insensate things’,45 it is during the heroic age that inventive associations achieve their greatest expression, making this age even more poetic than the first.46
The ‘Imaginative universals’ of the heroic age replace Jove with the mythical Achilles as the central figure. While the ‘imaginative universals’ of the divine age relate to natural phenomena or social institutions, those of the heroic age relate to qualities of character such as valor and strength.47 Homer was considered by Vico to be ‘the most sublime of all the sublime poets’.48 Although Homer’s heroes were often ‘wild, crude and terrible’, it was only from this ground that
37 ———, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 206. 38 ———, ‘Vico’s Philosophy of Imagination’, 42. 39 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 446. 40 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 46–47. 41 Ingegno possesses multiple meanings. In addition to those listed in the text, it can also denote understanding or refer to a device, gadget, tool, contrivance or mechanism. Piero Rebora, Dr. Francis M. Guercio, and Arthur L. Hayward, ‘Cassell’s Italian- English English-Italian Dictionary’, (London: Cassell & Company, 1958). 42 Marcel Danesi, ‘Cognitive Science: Toward a Vichian Perspective’, in Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing, ed. Marcel Danesi, Approaches to Semiotics [AS] (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 72. 43 Vico On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians Unearthed from the Origins of the Latin Language (1988b), 96. Cited in Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 47. 44 Ibid. 45 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 404. 46 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 47. 47 Verene, ‘Vico’s Philosophy of Imagination’, 23. 48 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 807.
48 sublime art forms could emerge.49 Vico reasons that a calm, rational, cultivated philosopher could not have produced the ‘frightfulness’ of Homer’s battles, which give the Iliad ‘all its marvelousness’.50
The space of myth, as that of the first people, was also defined by means of topological relations. Merleau-Ponty explains that, because myths are rooted in the body, they shrink the experience of space, making objects proximal and so unite humans with their worlds.51 Mythical consciousness exists prior to the objective notion of a ‘thing’, or truth.52 Consequently, individuals immersed in this form of consciousness are unable to undertake critical reflection, which involves holding objects before oneself, an action that can only occur in geometric space. It is only once humans develop reflective powers that they can consciously conceive of mimetic acts.53 Merleau-Ponty points out that while ‘mythical consciousness’ opens humans to a ‘horizon of possible objectifications’, which are necessary for survival, these ‘objectifications’ do not displace such individuals from the world in which they live, for this is a world where ‘each element has meaningful relations with the rest’.54
Although Vico’s first age was defined by means of the direct correspondence between an idea and its signifier, or lateral contiguity, during the second age this ‘primordial unity’ was replaced with resemblance.55 Roman Jakobson distinguishes between metonymy and metaphor based on whether the participating terms relate to one another contiguously, or by means of similarity.56
49 Isaiah Berlin, ‘Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment’, Social Research 43, 3 (1976): 649. 50 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 827. 51 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘What brings about both hallucinations and myths is a shrinkage in the space directly experienced, a rooting of things in our body, the overwhelming proximity of the object, the oneness of man and the world, which is, not indeed abolished, but repressed by everyday perception or by objective thought, and which philosophical consciousness rediscovers’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), 339. 52 Ibid., 338–339. 53 According to Georges Dumézil, the movement from immersive myth to a more objective or reduced history is not discreet, tidy, or absolute. He determines that a tripartite structure common to the earliest Indo-European myths remains detectable within subsequent societal structures, historical accounts and value systems. Although these ‘transpositions’ occur gradually over time, which allows us to detect the earliest myths in our present history, detection becomes more difficult the further removed we are from our mythical origins. For more detail see Georges Dumézil, From Myth to Fiction: The Saga of Hadingus, trans. Derek Coltman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), viii–ix, 124–125. 54 Merleau-Ponty explains that ‘primitive man lives his myths against a sufficiently articulate perceptual background for the activities of daily life, fishing, hunting and dealings with civilised people to be possible’. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 341. 55 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 47. 56 Jakobson claims that metaphoric terms are related on the basis of similarity, whereas metonymical terms are related through contiguity. He adduces that the ‘richer’ metaphoric process was primarily associated with the literary schools of romanticism and symbolism, whereas ‘impoverished’ metonymy tended to dominate the ‘so-called “realistic” trend’—a notion that is highlighted with the metonymical orientation of cubism. Accordingly, in poetry, metaphor tends to predominate whereas in heroic epics and
49 With this definition in mind, Trabant claims one might be led to believe that ‘as thought becomes increasingly abstract, contiguity gives way to resemblance’, and ‘metonymy and synecdoche dissolve into metaphor’.57 However, he maintains that such a presumption is misleading.58
Vico points out that the first metaphor ‘gives sense and passion to insensate things’,59 and when ‘Man’ does not understand things ‘he makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transforming himself into them’.60 Vico then proceeds to apply the same logic to the sections that follow on metonymy and synecdoche.61 This leads Trabant to adduce that, since the act of transference (transporto), or ‘the primordial sematogenetic process’, is common to all three Vichian poetic tropes, the first metaphor can be construed as an ur-metaphor.62 He suggests that metonymy, synecdoche (as a category of metonymy), and metaphor in the Vichian sense are ‘merely different aspects of the same fundamental thought process. Everything is metaphor: transporto’.63 Although the resemblance metaphors of the heroic age remain far removed from prosaic life, Trabant claims they represent the ‘first step toward the dissolution of the intimate unity of signifier (body) and signified (mind), a process that ultimately leads to the arbitrary sign, which is rooted neither in identity nor resemblance’.64
The ‘imaginative universal’ of the first and second ages represents the germ of all future ideas.65 As imaginative universals emerge they participate in more complex arrangements through further troping. Vico explains that poetic tropes are ‘born entirely of poverty’, when there are insufficient
prose metonymy prevails. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language (The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1956), 76–78. 57 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 50. 58 Jurgen Trabant makes this claim in response to Hayden White (1978) who related Vico’s four tropes (synecdoche, metonymy, metaphor and irony) to stages of semiotic development: with metaphor the semiotic mechanism of divine language; metonymy the mechanism of semiotic transfer from the divine to the heroic age; and, synecdoche the mechanism of semiotic transfer from the heroic to the human age. White argued that, ‘since synecdoche contains the seeds of rationality’, it is ‘responsible for the transition from the poetic age to the age of men’. Trabant notes that while the synecdochic action of elevating particulars to universals is indeed a conceptual prerequisite for transitioning from ‘imaginative universals’ to ‘intelligible universals’, all poetic tropes perform a similar action. On the other hand, irony with its relation to untruth, according to both White and Trabant, marks the decline of semiosis, as it is only made possible once the relation between an idea and its sign has been severed. Ibid., 49–50. 59 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 404. 60 Ibid., para. 405. 61 Ibid., para. 406–407. 62 Trabant, Vico’s New Science of Ancient Signs: A Study of Sematology: 50–51. 63 Ibid., 50. 64 Ibid., 48. 65 Paolo Fabiani, The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche, trans. Giorgio A. Pinton (Florence: Firenze University Press, 2009), 190.
50 or inadequate words, gestures, or signs to describe particular things.66 As the first idea becomes associated with other ideas and the process broadens and evolves, higher order metaphoric associations become ever more distant from their figurative origins. Prose and concept formation eventually follows and a rich, multivalent imagery that once expressed a plurality of ideas diminishes and reduces since it is now possible to denote a concept with a single word.67 Connelly surmises that this shift from ‘imaginative’ to ‘intelligible universals’, or from the image to the word, ‘marked an irrevocable passage from a metaphysics “felt and imagined” to one “rational and abstract”’. She adds that this was not just a ‘process of abstraction, but of disembodiment’.68
According to Vico, once ‘intelligible universals’ emerge, sublimity ends and a form of barbarism arises.69 Barbarism is not produced with the elimination of the imagination, but rather, with the restriction of the imagination to the domains of art and aesthetics.70 When the imagination is dissociated from other disciplines ‘intelligible universals’ are prevented from approaching a unified and coherent whole and true wisdom cannot be realised. Since dialogic reasoning is denied with the separation of ‘imaginative’ and ‘intelligible’ universals, the arts are forced to reference their own ‘independent reality’, or manifest as secondary images of an established concept.71
Vico considered ‘imaginative universals’, and therefore the imagination, the ‘master key’ to his philosophy of the storia ideale eterna (ideal eternal history).72 The imagination, which orders the world, both spiritually and culturally, does not operate adjacent to cognition but rather makes cognition possible.73 Each of Vico’s three ages developed its own unique mode of expression, and while there was a progression toward the capacity for rational thinking it did not follow that there was greater wisdom in reasoning, or that the attributes of one age could be combined with
66 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 456. 67 Fabiani, The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche: 190. 68 Connelly, ‘Embodied Meaning: Giambattista Vico’s Theory of Images’, 76. 69 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 1106. 70 Verene submits that Vico’s imagination or fantasia ‘is not a power of mind operating as an adjunct to cognition [but] is a primordial power of mind that makes cognition possible’ and therefore, ‘ fantasia is the power to make something true through the shape of metaphor’. It is the ‘making imagination’. Verene, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 204–205. 71 ———, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 219. 72 ———, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 204. 73 Ibid.
51 those of another.74 For Vico, each age stood on its own, thus refusing the simple opposition of mythos and logos75 and rendering as nonsense the notion that an abstracted or ‘ideal’ age such as the Enlightenment could be recuperated.76
Vico’s philosophy begins with ‘the uncertainty of the human condition’, which is its ‘constitutive principle’. For Vico, the distinction between subject and object becomes transcended for, when we study the social world we are studying ourselves.77 Sandra Luft points out that Vico’s ‘ontology’ is founded on historical process and the hermeneutic, ‘in which the man who does not understand makes the things out of himself and becomes them by transferring himself into them’.78
Since the first communal thoughts or ‘imaginative universals’ begin with a sense of place, so too, must the act of recollection.79 Thus, Vico’s New Science follows in the recollective tradition of the memory theatre of Giulio Camillo.80 (Figure 3)
74 Berlin, ‘Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment’, 650–651. 75 Renger, ‘Between History and Reason: Giambattista Vico and the Promise of Classical Myth’, 46. 76 Berlin, ‘Vico and the Ideal of the Enlightenment’, 651. 77 William J. Mills, ‘Positivism Reversed: The Relevance of Giambattista Vico’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 7, 1 (1982): 5. 78 Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science Between Modern and Postmodern: 184. See also Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 405. 79 Verene, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 209. 80 The invented Memory Theatre of architect Giulio Camillo Delminio (circa 1480–1544) was perhaps the most famous memory device to emerge from the Renaissance. The arrangement and configuration of Camillo’s theatre represented the world and the eternal nature of its existents. It was the means by which a person could form a magic memory that enabled them, as divine microcosm, to connect with the divine macrocosm. Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Ark Paperbacks, 1984), 129–144. The accumulated knowledge contained within this theatre was presented in the form of images, hermetic signs, and symbols, as well as texts ‘endowed with allegorical and magical significance’. Don Gifford, Zones of Re-membering: Time, Memory and (un)Consciousness, ed. Donald E. Morse (Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 2011), 55. The viewer was positioned at the centre of the stage, a point from which they could survey the stepped tiers that represented ‘all that the mind could conceive and all that was hidden in the soul—all of which could be perceived at one glance with the inspection of the images’. Yates, The Art of Memory: 158. Frascari suggests that Camillo sought to arrange the entire encyclopedia of universal knowledge ‘as a human body’, an imago mundi embodied in an imago corpori. The linking of the theatre as a corporeal tool for accessing imaginal knowledge was possible because the human body, as a divine image, was perceived as a ‘theatre of wisdom’. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 25–26.
52
Figure 3. Reconstructed image of Camillo's Memory Theatre
However, unlike Camillo’s theatre, which represented a system of eternal places for all reality, Vico’s New Science constructed a memory system limited to all human reality.81 Once an individual learns that the human world can be understood as a ‘set of eternal patterns of rise, maturity, and fall’ they can begin a process of recovering particulars by means of ‘recollective imaginative universals’.82 The recollective imagination was not an act of remembering or empathising but, rather, recovery of the sense of the ‘imaginative universal’ as an image of language.83 In other words, the recollective universal was unable to be accessed directly by means of a reasoning mind. Through Vico’s axioms (recollective universals), an individual could be led back to the ‘poetic wisdom’ of the first humans, ‘the originating powers of speech in the image’, and those original places where humanity communed. In our present age the ‘intelligible universal’ has transmuted into the ‘technical universal’, and perhaps more recently into the ‘virtual universal’, which will likely transform into future forms.84 For knowledge to be complete all universals are required.85 Yet, despite the capacity for recollection, Vico believed that certain
81 Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 190. 82 ———, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 210. 83 ———, ‘Vico’s Philosophy of Imagination’, 42–43. 84 ———, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 203. 85 Ibid., 192.
53 aspects of human thought and existence would always remain beyond human comprehension, and so, complete understanding is not possible.86
Vico’s epistemology and ontology
At the time of his writing, Vico’s ideas and approach were considered radical, and therefore largely dismissed. Accordingly, his philosophical influence has remained modest. That said, Vico’s ideas have come under renewed attention in recent times as they offer a means of eliciting non-reductive strategies for deriving cultural meaning in a way that is consistent with contemporary pluralism.87 Vico’s philosophical approach has come to be linked with a range of disciplines including semiotics, linguistics, phenomenology, structuralism, literary theory, myth analysis, as well as theories of art and architecture.88
The imaginative nature of metaphor, affect, imagery, narrative discourse, and the cognitive and communicative potential of tropes that Vico highlights, is in sympathy with work being undertaken by behavioural and cognitive scientists such as Lakoff and Johnson.89 Johnson, reacting to the Romantic view of the imagination which was limited to concepts of invention, fantasy and novelty, and hence the problematic binary of imagination versus reason, posits ‘enriching’, and thus complicating, dualism with an embodied concept of imagination.90 Frank Nuessel notes that although there is no evidence of Lakoff and Johnson being directly influenced by Vico, their ‘approach to language and imagination is undeniably Vichian’.91 According to Johnson, human beings experience the reality of their world through ‘patterns of … bodily movement, the contours of [their] spatial and temporal orientation ’, and by the way in which they interact with objects. Linked to stages in an individual’s development, embodied experiences subsequently evolve into abstract meanings and patterns of understanding, or ‘image
86 Danesi, ‘Cognitive Science: Toward a Vichian Perspective’, 69. 87 The term ‘pluralism’ is used here in the sense described by Vittorio Gregotti in Inside Architecture. Gregotti points out that pluralism has acquired a ‘legitimating role that appears liberating but actually preserves the status of convictions that are too uniformly shared’. He claims the ‘suspension of dialectical reflection’ compromises the ‘materiality, duration and stability’ on which architecture has been founded, and this has had the effect of reducing architecture to ‘mere decoration of the “society of spectacle”’. Gregotti suggests that context, connection to land and history, offer opportunities to establish new points of reference which, provided that they resist a ‘nostalgic yearning for ideological certainty’, may offer an ‘escape from the intangibility of vulgar pluralism’. Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996), 35–39. 88 Verene, Vico’s Science of Imagination: 28. 89 Danesi, ‘Cognitive Science: Toward a Vichian Perspective’, 76. 90 Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), xiv, 140. 91 Frank Nuessel, ‘Vico and Current Work in Cognitive Linguistics’, in Giambattista Vico and Anglo-American Science: Philosophy and Writing, ed. Marcel Danesi, Approaches to Semiotics [AS] (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995), 131–132.
54 schemata’, which allow humans to make sense of, and order their experiences.92 Schemata can be extended via metaphorical projections, including metonymy and narrative structures, to draw inference, meaning, and understanding from other domains.93 In this way Johnson allocates a central position to the embodied imagination; it becomes a means of structuring cognitive thought and deriving self-knowledge, and so metaphor attains an essential epistemological status. However, while Johnson (together with Lakoff) conceive a socially scientific and psychological basis for the metaphorical structuring of the cognitive process, Vico and subsequently Frascari, look instead, at the metaphoric process itself, that is, how to achieve self-knowledge through ‘rather than “about”’ metaphor.94
Vico’s philosophy of the New Science provides the foundation for Frascari’s theoretical approach to deriving architectural meaning in Monsters of Architecture. Fantasia or the ‘making imagination’, which incorporates the verum-factum principle, or ‘the true is the same as the made’, produces the ‘imaginative universal’ that lies at the heart of Vico’s philosophy.95 It is a notion that Frascari considers pivotal to the processes of constructing and construing ‘non-trivial’ architecture.
In highlighting the importance of the architectural detail in deriving meaning, Frascari makes reference to ideas of Vittorio Gregotti. The architectural detail is, for Gregotti, an essential expressive element in quality architecture that binds the architectural object to ‘the specifics and differences’ of its constituent physical, historical and cultural place. In other words, the detail constitutes a communal sign.96 Communion can be realised only if there is integrity between the tectonic and expressive details, for otherwise details are reduced to the type of ‘stylistic quotations’ commonly found in poor examples of contemporary practice. Gregotti advocates for
92 Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason: xix. 93 While Johnson claims ‘Metaphor is perhaps the central means by which humans project structure across categories to establish new connections and organisations of meaning and to extend and develop image schemata’, he notes that metonymy, synecdoche and narrative structure are also forms of projection crucial to the development of meaning. Ibid., 171. 94 April E. Pierce, ‘Towards a New Romanticism: Derrida and Vico on Metaphorical Thinking’, Thesis Eleven 123, 1 (2014): 18– 20. 95 Verene, ‘Imaginative Universals’, 205. 96 Vittorio Gregotti, ‘The Exercise of Detailing’, in Theorising a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 497.
55 an articulate (ornamental) language that permeates every aspect of the architectural project—an idea that he claims is evident in the works of Leon Battista Alberti.97
Gregotti relates architectural language to the reading of texts. However, his notion of textual reading is not based on the ‘questionable’ transference of linguistic features into architecture but, instead, is founded on recognition that both architecture and texts are embedded in the cultural fabric of their origins, and that a critical reading of shared structures offers an authentic means for deriving understanding.98 In expressing sympathy with this idea, Frascari emphasises that details are ‘the knots of the fabrication of architectural texts’, or the semiotic tools that mediate the relation between the construing and construction of architecture and that they permit the reading of ‘architectural narrations’.99 As with Vico’s material ‘making’ of mythical grotesques, Frascari points out that expressive details are formed when fantasy and memory guide the architect’s imagination in a hermeneutic process so that symbolic images or emblems are elicited from the materials of architecture.100 This process emulates Vico’s unifying principle of verum (construing/the true)–factum (construction/the made).
Frascari describes an inscription designed by Carlo Scarpa that is carved into a stone embedded in the entrance gate to the Tolentini building of the Instituto Universitario d’Architettura di Venezia, as a ‘poetic monster’. (Figure 4) The inscription combines the school’s acronym, I.V.A.V. with the words ‘verum factum’ thereby forming an ironic hieroglyph that poetically unifies the artefact (facts of the building—the stone gate) with the real (the cultural context—the teaching and learning of architecture).101 Verum–factum is a conceptual union that Frascari considered chiasmic; it is understood here in the sense described by Merleau-Ponty. The union inscribes a space of exchange ‘between the phenomenal body and the “objective” body, between the perceiving and the perceived’.102 Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘chiasm’ possesses a strong
97 Gregotti points out that for Alberti, ‘the memory of the original links between ornament and construction [were] always there to testify to the integrity of architecture’. Ibid. 98 ———, ‘Mimesis’, 13. 99 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 11. 100 Ibid., 12. Glossing Hans Blumenberg (1985), Frascari suggests that the corporeality of myth offered a ‘breathing space’ from the ‘absolutism of reality’. This would however be lost, not with the secularisation of architecture as this did not leave tradition behind since traces remained, albeit hidden or deformed, but, with process of de-mythification. This process, which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment, left no place for myth or story telling, not even as a point of departure. Consequently, Frascari believes a ‘kernel of knowledge’, and with it corporeality, was removed from the architectural project which up until then had bound representation and function. This had the effect of narrowing the focus of architecture to function alone. Ibid., 9. 101 Ibid., 54–56. 102 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 215.
56 affinity with the ontology of the grotesque. The fleshy, disordered, heterogeneous, dynamic, fluid and ambiguous figure of the monstrous grotesque which exceeds boundaries, is simultaneously inside and outside, and so blends with its world and resists rational framing.103 The grotesque figure represents the simultaneous embodiment of identity, alterity, and difference; moreover, it possesses an ambiguous inter-subjectivity, for it is both interconnected and heterogeneous. 104 As a culturally inscribed figure, the grotesque is always in a state of becoming; and, because it is defined by what it does rather than what it is, it operates in a transitive modality.105
Figure 4. Carlo Scarpa: The entrance gate to the Tolentini building of the Instituto Universitario d’Architettura di Venezia (1985)
Kunze harnesses the language associated with Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm to reflect on Vico’s first metaphors. According to Kunze, Vico’s imaginative universals are a ‘middle term’, or, the
103 Sara Shabot Cohen, ‘The Grotesque Body: Fleshing Out the Subject’, Thamyris/Intersecting: Place, Sex and Race 15(2007): 58. 104 Ibid., 63. 105 Frances S. Connelly, ‘Introduction’, in Modern Art and the Grotesque, ed. Frances S. Connelly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 4.
57 rhetorical equivalent of the paradoxical, philosophical ‘middle ground’ essential to mediating the divide between humans and their world.106 While not directly treating the concept of metaphor, Merleau-Ponty does so indirectly in the context of his thinking related to artistic expression and poetry.107 He submits that all forms of creative expression signify ‘the carnal other side of the flesh’, of a ‘brute’, or ‘wild’ being, ‘a visible trace of the indirect symbolic texture of the invisible reality’ from which expression emerges.108 In other words, creative expression draws from a shared primal matrix: the ‘flesh’ that is prior to concept formation and constitutes the ground that ultimately connects individuals to all the things of their world and to each other. Creative expression, and by extension the creative metaphor, becomes a means of opening up new horizons or fields of understanding ‘in a continuous birth’, and it does so through a form of communion.109 Merleau-Ponty affords special significance to painting in this regard, claiming it represents the penultimate means of accessing the sensual primordial (pre-reflective) ground that exists prior to bifurcation of body and world.110 He writes in Cézanne’s Doubt:
If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching … The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a coloured piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition.111
In order to highlight the mediating character of artistic expression, Merleau-Ponty cites a comment made by Cézanne who proclaimed a desire to paint the tablecloth ‘of fresh-fallen snow’ described by the writer Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850).112 Cézanne recognised that in order to reveal the mysterious, invisible qualities of this cloth he had to focus on correctly rendering those
106 Donald Kunze asserts that the divide between object and subject occurred early in the history of Western thought, and consequently so did the idea of the ‘liminal middle’, for otherwise the world would have been carved into two irreconcilable orders. He notes that the middle ground has always possessed a ‘complex geography’, one that is inherently paradoxical by virtue of the fact that it draws from two opposed orders. In mythical times liminal unity, which connected the world of gods and the world of men, was achieved by uncovering the source of the original separation. This middle ground was ‘composite and contradictory’ in nature and coined by the word ‘utopia’—a composite term that, according to Kunze, denoted both ‘a good place’ (eu-topia) and ‘no place’ (u-topia). Kunze suggests that ‘metaphor’ is the rhetorical equivalent of ‘utopia’. Kunze, Thought and Place: The Architecture of Eternal Places in the Philosophy of Giambattista Vico: 25–27. 107 Jerry Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1991), 120. 108 Richard McCleary, ‘Translator’s Preface’, in Signs (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), xxii–xxiii. 109 Ibid. 110 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘Cézanne returns to just that primordial experience from which [distinctions of soul and body and thought and vision] are derived and in which they are inseparable’. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in The Merleau- Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University, 1993), 66. 111 Ibid., 70. 112 Balzac cited in ibid., 66.
58 elements that were visible.113 Cézanne emphasised that any attempt to render the invisible qualities directly would have resulted in failure.114
If I paint ‘crowned’ I’m done for, you understand? But if I really balance and shade my place settings and rolls as they are in nature, you can be sure the crowns, the snow and the whole shebang will be there.115
With this example Merleau-Ponty signals that a mediating visual metaphor is able to provide access to the intangibles within the tangible, and so instantiate the primal order of ‘flesh’.116
Both Vico and Merleau-Ponty were opposed to a position that separates the conscious subject from the world of experience; both considered the intelligible world a product of the sensible world, and thus the ‘reasoning mind’ an embodied construct. While in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty posits perception as a mediating concept that dissolves the distance and difference between mind and body, this concept undergoes a shift with the notion of ‘flesh’ that emerges in his posthumously published incomplete work The Visible and the Invisible. Here, Merleau-Ponty’s primary focus is ontological, on the ground, or ‘flesh’ that connects body and world. He describes the relation between subject and object as chiasmic, or reversible, such that the flesh of the world and body wrap back onto, and into, each other’s realms of perception. This means that individuals can feel themselves being sensed by things just as they make things visible and tactile through intertwining with them.117 This concept dissolves the boundary between body and world (given both partake of the condition of the flesh), but it is also an expansive notion, in that it allows humans to include sentient as well as nonsentient phenomena within their sensorial fields.118 Merleau-Ponty’s concept of corporeality is not based on isolated individual experience, but is a concept that emerges from individuals’ shared experiences, including their cultural interactions, habits, and activities. Vico’s poetic language and Merleau- Ponty’s notion of perception both have their origins in sensory experience and the bodies of others with whom individuals intertwine, and thus draw upon to form their own sense of
113 Ibid. 114 Ibid. See also Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor: 121. 115 Paul Cézanne cited in Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, 66. 116 Gill, Merleau-Ponty and Metaphor: 121. 117 See, in particular, ‘The Intertwining–The Chiasm’. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 130–155. 118 Yannis Hamilakis, Archeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 68.
59 identity.119 This bodily openness and inter-changeability creates an ambiguous existence: the self is continuously being refigured, redefined, and even undone through interactions with others.120
Theories of metaphor
The semiotician Umberto Eco notes that, of the volumes written about metaphor, few have added ‘anything of substance to the first two or three fundamental concepts stated by Aristotle’.121 Although Aristotle was the first to formally articulate a theory of metaphor, it was a concept already essential to classical rhetoric and had long been used as a poetic device.122 While Aristotle’s structural definition of metaphor held for both domains, the way in which the trope functioned within each mode of discourse was particular.123 The principal aim of metaphor in oratory was, as has been discussed, to persuade and influence an audience; however, its principal purpose in poetry was to ‘mimic’ the human condition in ‘tragic art’.124 More fundamental were differences of intent. Aristotle divided his theory of rhetoric into three main parts: a theory of argumentation (heuresis), founded on the ‘invention’ of arguments and proofs; a theory of style (lexis); and, a theory of arrangement (taxis).125 Aristotle’s rhetorical theory rests heavily on the principle of argumentation (Books I and II), which linked rhetoric, via logical argument, to philosophy.126 Paul Ricoeur points out that while rhetoric sought to invent or find proofs, poetry
119 Lollini, ‘Vico’s More than Human Humanism’, 393–394. 120 Jennifer Biddle, ‘Inscribing Identity: Skin as Country in the Central Desert’, in Thinking Through the Skin, ed. Sarah Ahmed and Jackie Stacey (London: Routledge, 2001), 190 n.110. 121 Umberto Eco and Christopher Paci, ‘The Scandal of Metaphor: Metaphorology and Semiotics’, Poetics Today 4, 2 (1983): 217–218. 122 Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 48. 123 ———, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughin, and John Costello (London: Routledge Classics, 2003), 12. 124 Ibid. 125 Aristotle describes the tripartite structure of oratory in the introduction to Book III.
‘There are three things which require special attention in regard to speech: first, the sources of proofs; secondly, style; and thirdly, the arrangement of the parts of the speech. We have already spoken of proofs and stated that they are three in number, what is their nature, and why there are only three; for in all cases persuasion is the result either of the judges themselves being affected in a certain manner, or because they consider the speakers to be of a certain character, or because something has been demonstrated. We have also stated the sources from which enthymemes should be derived—some of them being special, the others general commonplaces’. Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric: 345.
Burkett points out that it is in Books I and II that Aristotle outlines the first canon, ‘invention (heuresis) of “thought”, (1403a6) through the use of “places” or strategies (topoi) for discovering the material and formal means of persuasion’, and in Book III the theories of lexis and taxis. John Walt Burkett, ‘Aristotle, “Rhetoric III”: A Commentary’ (Doctor of Philosophy, Texas Christian University, 2011), 2. Notably, the Latin equivalent for lexis is elocutio and the Latin equivalent for taxis is dispositio. 126 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 8–9.
60 sought to discover the essence of human action by means of a truth elicited from fiction, myth, and tragedy.127
Ricoeur draws the distinction between the triad of poiesis-mimesis-catharsis, which characterised poetry and the triad rhetoric-proof-persuasion, which characterised traditional oratory.128 While argumentation with its link to philosophy was pivotal to classical rhetoric, it was precisely this element that was later omitted from modern rhetorical treatises as rhetoricians became principally concerned with the characteristics that differentiated metaphor from other figures of speech. According to Ricoeur, this would render the art ‘an erratic and futile discipline’ by the middle of the nineteenth century, reducing it first to a theory of style, and eventually to a theory of tropes.129 While Aristotle’s theory of metaphor serves as an originary source from which all theories of metaphor (in a sense) derived, or have been formed in response to, paradoxically it also contains the germ that would lead to the erosion of classical rhetoric. This erosion had its beginning with Aristotle’s focus on the substitution of the word to explain the transfer of meaning in the making of metaphor.130
Aristotle writes, first in Poetics and then later in Rhetoric, ‘Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’.131 This definition aligns with Dante’s subsequent description of metaphor as a beautiful lie that embellishes a truth, although Dante would later recognise that both poetry and philosophy rely on metaphor to express truths that cannot otherwise be understood.132 With Aristotle’s definition, it is the word not its meaning that is transferred from an original, to a new context. Because the literal meaning of the word or ‘name’ remains unchanged when placed in its new context, it constitutes a deviation that allows for the creation of metaphor.133 Although initially Aristotle uses the word ‘metaphor’ as a generic reference for all rhetorical forms, he subsequently (in Poetics) alludes to a typology of figures. Adopting (metaphorically) the language of scientific taxonomy, Aristotle classifies types of
127 Ibid., 13. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid., 8–9. 130 Dominick Lacapra, ‘Who Rules Metaphor?’, Diacritics 10(1980): 17. 131 Aristotle, Poetics (1457b), cited in Richard P. McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle, 2nd, revised and enlarged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 699. 132 This description is recounted in Dante’s Convivio (1304–1307). Lansing suggests that the concept of metaphor and allegory (an expanded metaphor) and their relation to truth, which appears in Dante’s later works, may have been influenced by Dionysius for whom ‘luminous darkness’ could only be described by means of ‘paradoxical terms’, as this combination of terms ‘both hide and reveal the divine mysteries’. Richard H. Lansing, Dante: The Critical Complex (New York: Routledge, 2003), 129–130. 133 Paul Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, Critical Inquiry 5, 1 (1978): 145.
61 transference as, ‘… either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy’.134 The goal of transference was to decorate rhetorical discourse in order to please and seduce an audience, but also to economically fill lexical gaps in language.135 Since there are always more ideas in a society than there are words to describe them, it was, and remains, necessary to ‘stretch the signification’ of existing words beyond their common usage.136
The first three categories of Aristotle’s process of transference involved the reassignment of attributes from one class of things to another by finding sufficient similarity between classes to conceive an association. Aristotle’s suggestion that in order to comprehend metaphor it is necessary to grasp the similarity in things that are different, or that do not immediately suggest themselves, implies that cognition, or reasoning plays a role in this transference.137 Aristotle’s fourth type of figure, referred to as proportional or analogical metaphor, does not fit with the previous categories. It belongs to a form of metaphor that relies directly on comparative imagery [i.e. A: B what C: D or A is like B]; a form that includes similes which Aristotle labelled a ‘species of the genus’ metaphor.138 However, while analogy invokes comparison in the form of an enigma, simile suggests the comparison in advance by means of ‘setting [it] forth’ (or prosthesis). The prosthesis of a simile creates an expectation in the audience or reader that must be fulfilled by a phrase that answers it, thereby drawing two or more ideas together to allow for the transference that makes metaphorical meaning.139 Aristotle’s metaphoric transference ‘types’ later formed the basis for distinguishing between, or classifying various figures of speech.140
Aristotle’s definition of metaphor includes three distinct ideas; ‘a deviation [of the word] from ordinary usage’; the ‘borrowing of a word from an original domain’; and the ‘substitution [of] an absent but available ordinary word’.141 Ricoeur claims that while Aristotle correctly identified the concept of deviance, he incorrectly attributed this concept to the level of the word, or
134 McKeon, Introduction to Aristotle: 699. 135 Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, 145. 136 ———, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning: 48. 137 John Kirby, ‘Aristotle on Metaphor’, American Journal of Philology 118, 4 (1997): 536–537. 138 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 27, 223. 139 Kirby, ‘Aristotle on Metaphor’, 544. 140 Carl R. Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23. 141 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 21.
62 denomination.142 Aristotle saw the signification of each word (its commonly understood meaning) in isolation.143 Resemblance was necessary, as it provided the basis for understanding how the figurative meaning of a word could be used as a replacement for the substituted word’s literal meaning.144 This idea formed the basis for the ‘substitution’ theory adopted by pre twentieth-century rhetoricians such as Pierre Fontanier, where the figurative term does not contribute any new information, but merely serves as an embellishment of an absent literal term that could be brought back at any time.145 This has the effect of trivialising metaphors and is a principal reason for the eventual rejection of ‘substitution’ theory.146 Eco submits that there is no value in a substitutive theory of metaphor that replaces one way of saying something with a more pleasant way of saying it; rather, there is only interest in a theory of metaphor that is an ‘additive … instrument of knowledge’.147
Ricoeur claims that, while Aristotle correctly identified many aspects of metaphor, it has been necessary to shift from his mistaken focus on the semantics of the word to the semantics of the sentence or utterance, because it is only within this broader context that a word acquires proper meaning. Referencing the works of I. A. Richards, Max Black, Monroe Beardsley and their successors, Ricoeur is supportive of an ‘interaction [as opposed to substitution] theory’ of metaphor, in which metaphoric meaning is produced through the interaction between a sentence, subject, and predicate.148 In this circumstance deviance occurs when the rules that prescribe how the predicate should be ordinarily used are broken, and the metaphorical statement is allowed to create new semantic meaning, or ‘sense’.149 The transition between two semantic fields, from literal incongruence to metaphorical congruence is, as with substitutive theory, dependent on semantic proximity or resemblance, which draws heterogeneous ideas together in what Aristotle referred to as the epiphora of the metaphor.150
142 ———, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, 145. 143 ———, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning: 48. 144 Ibid., 49. 145 Sanford Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, The Journal of Religion 63, 3 (1983): 296. 146 Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 21–22. 147 Ibid., 38–39. 148 ———, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, 145. 149 Ibid., 145–146. 150 Ibid., 147.
63 Despite a focus on the role of resemblance, there are several indications that Aristotle believed that the figurative terms used to make metaphors held the potential to offer new insights into reality.151 Employing a visual metaphor to describe how metaphor works, Aristotle wrote that a good metaphor has the ability to ‘set things before the eyes’. According to Aristotle, figurative language allows humans ‘to see’ one thing in relation to another (in the manner of proportion), and so metaphor might not always be simply a matter of perceiving resemblance, but perhaps offers something deeper, the possibility of generating new understanding. This suggests that Aristotelian metaphor had the potential to be more than ‘mere ornament’; it could involve cognition and possibly provide clarity and illumination.152
The imagination is involved in the ‘picturing function’ required to comprehend metaphorical meaning. Ricoeur believes that this picturing function ‘makes discourse (logos) appear’.153 The adoption in classical rhetoric of the expression ‘figure of speech’, a phrase used interchangeably with metaphor, puts pay to this view. A ‘figure of speech’ evokes the notion of a discursive body that displays ‘forms and traits’ that would normally relate to the human figure. In other words, metaphor (understood in the general sense) allows discourse to assume a ‘quasi-bodily externalisation’, thereby making it appear.154 Further to this, Aristotle directly relates the ‘seeing’ quality of metaphor to the practice of philosophy. In The Rhetoric he writes, ‘Metaphors should be drawn from objects which are proper to the object, but not too obvious; just as for instance, in philosophy it needs sagacity to grasp the similarity in things that are apart’.155
In Poetics Aristotle writes that the skill in making good metaphors is not one that can be learned, but rather a gift.156 This suggests that metaphors can vary in quality, contingent on the creator’s level of ability.157 In metaphorical discourse ‘dead’ metaphors are distinguished from ‘live’ metaphors, where live metaphors are inventive and novel. According to Interactive theory, live metaphors create new semantic relationships, or meanings generated at sentence level through the tension between words, or literal and metaphoric interpretations.158 These new semantic
151 Hausman, Metaphor and Art: Interactionism and Reference in the Verbal and Nonverbal Arts: 23. 152 Eco and Paci, ‘The Scandal of Metaphor: Metaphorology and Semiotics’, 235. 153 Ricoeur, ‘The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling’, 144. 154 Ibid. 155 Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1926), 407. [Book III. xi. para. 4.] 156 Aristotle, The Poetics, trans. Samuel Henry Butcher (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2015). § I, I. iv. 157 Kirby, ‘Aristotle on Metaphor’, 534. 158 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning: 51–52.
64 innovations have no pre-existing established status within a language. They exist because of an unusual, or unexpected predicate that creates the discord required to extend sentence meaning. The enigmatic relation between the terms of a live metaphor goes beyond any resembled association. These metaphors require intellectual and imaginative effort for both their creation and interpretation, and so they become a cognitive instrument that contributes toward a new understanding of reality. In this sense, a live metaphor possesses a special truth for, according to David Cooper, it presents the active essence of a subject that is not reducible to a literal truth, and so ‘[produces] in us a proper sense of how Being is’.159 Metaphors can ‘die’ with repetition as metaphorical meanings are absorbed within a language—a notion exemplified with the catachresis ‘table leg’.160 Yet, a dead metaphor or catachresis that offers no new insight into reality can be reinvigorated when shifted from one semiotic system to another.161 Eco emphasises this point when he writes: ‘the “deadest” trope can work “like new” for the “virgin” subject’.162 He illustrates this claim with reference to Amedeo Modigliani’s painted female portraits which, he believes, visually reinvent the expression ‘swan neck’.163 Evidently, the divide between the ‘liveliest’ and ‘deadest’ metaphors is a dynamic one that does not always permit easy categorisation.
Ricoeur
Ricoeur’s theory of metaphor is closely linked to his interpretive theory of the literary text. He believes that similar processes are involved in both the illumination of metaphors and the interpretation of texts, although they apply at different levels of discourse—from the word, to the work, to the strategy of discourse. Historian and theorist Harry Mallgrave interprets this expressive metaphoric range with an architectural exemplar that begins with the way sunlight falls across a wall and extends to the ‘spiritual transcendence of a Gothic cathedral’.164 Ricoeur considers the explication of metaphor a paradigm for explaining the literary text at the level of its immanent ‘sense’, but writes that it is necessary to proceed from the whole text to fully understand metaphor. In other words, text understanding is the key to understanding metaphor,
159 David E. Cooper, Metaphor, Aristotelian Society Series, Vol. 5. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 222. 160 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning: 52. 161 Eco and Paci, ‘The Scandal of Metaphor: Metaphorology and Semiotics’, 255. 162 Ibid. 163 Ibid. 164 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 182.
65 and interpretation is required to achieve text understanding.165 Interpretation of the literary text involves an investigation into the power of the text to reference the world, and by extension permit self-reflection.166 This referential aspect of literary discourse replaces the shared situational reference that is gleaned in the immediate moment by interlocutors in spoken discourse.167
Ricoeur’s approach to the literary text involves four interrelated phases: the distance between the written work and the writer’s subjective intention; the objective structure or formal design of the text; the world it makes reference to; and, the reader’s appropriation of the text.168 In written, as opposed to spoken discourse, the distance between the writer’s subjective intentions and the immanent sense (objective meaning) of the work—between the ‘utterer’s meaning’ and the ‘utterance meaning’—is broadened.169 Ricoeur believes this distancing legitimises an autonomous study of the text without the need to reference the writer or any original historical context. The notion of distancing represents a departure from the ‘Romantic hermeneutics’ of the nineteenth century that looked to connect the past with the present through an understanding of the writer’s psyche and the historical context of the work.170 Ricoeur advocates a shift in focus from understanding the subjective processes, or the ideas in the mind of ‘the other’ (that sit behind the text), to understanding the imaginative world revealed by the works (that are displayed in front of the text).171 In this context the writer simply becomes an artisan who shapes the form of the text according to the syntactic and stylistic rules and conventions that govern its production. The writer’s individuality is evinced, not by their intentions, but through an objective ‘style’.172
Ricoeur’s interpretation theory links two rival traditions, structuralism and hermeneutics. His framework depends on the objective semiological structures and procedures, which he sees as a necessary step in explaining the immanent ‘sense’ of the text. It is this immanent understanding that establishes the basis for a hermeneutical determination of the work’s ‘stable’ or constant
165 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, New Literary History 6, 1 (1974): 103–104. 166 Ibid., 101. 167 Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, 295. 168 Ibid., 291. 169 Ibid., 292. 170 Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 106. 171 Ricoeur notes: ‘This is what Gadamer calls “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverchmelzung) in historical knowledge’. Ibid. 172 Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, 293.
66 meaning. The constant meaning of the text is irreducible to either the subjective intention of the writer, or subjective appropriation of the text by the reader: its meaning lies beyond the limited vision of both.173 This idea applies equally to built works and any metaphoric associations that might be conceived by the architect.
As literary texts create (mimic) new ‘possible’ worlds, which are both similar yet different from the real world inhabited by the reader, they allow for an exploration of otherwise unimagined possibilities. The reader is able to self examine habitual thinking, actions, and feelings as they participate in the textual world.174 Interpretation is the dialectical interaction that occurs as the reader comprehends the projected world of the text and their self-understanding grows in response.175 For Ricoeur ‘interpretation is the process by which the disclosure of new modes of being … gives to the subject a new capacity of knowing himself’ and so ‘the reader is consequently enlarged in his capacity of self-projection by receiving a new mode of Being from the text itself’.176 The basis for Ricoeur’s hermeneutics is ontological rather than subjective, as it was for the Romantics. Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle moves between a subject’s mode of Being and the mode of Being revealed by the world of the text.177 Ricoeur reasserts the referential function of both metaphor and imaginative fiction in response to the formalist disconnect between the imaginative work and an external reality. By connecting structuralism with hermeneutics, he offers a counter to the tendency of twentieth century art and critical theory to detach works from their cultural contexts.178 This tendency finds expression with architects such as Mies van der Rohe, whose declared rationalist aim was to pursue architectural forms that were direct and pure products of the industrial manufacturing process independent of any metaphoric or referential inference.179 Mies and his contemporaries regarded technologically determined forms without ornament or pretension as superior to ‘aesthetic’ forms.180 However Maurice Lagueux, who reinterprets Nelson Goodwin’s general theory of reference in relation to architecture, argues that despite these declared aims Mies deliberately references metaphorical
173 Ibid., 294. 174 Ibid., 295. 175 Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 101. 176 Ibid., 107. 177 Ricoeur explains: ‘In that way the hermeneutical circle is not denied, but it is displaced from a subjectivistic to an ontological level; the circle is between my way (or my mode) of being—beyond the knowledge which I may have of it—and the mode (or the way) of being disclosed by the text as the work’s world’. Ibid., 108. 178 Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, 297–298. 179 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 375. 180 Ibid., 374–375.
67 qualities through the process of ‘exemplification’.181 This idea finds is expression in the Chicago Lake Shore Drive apartments (1949–1951), where Mies deliberately applies I beams that serve no structural purpose to the external surface of the building. The beams are attached to supporting columns and extend from the apex of the structure to the base of the lower level windows. They are applied ornamental devices which, according to Lagueux, have been designed to enhance the building’s manifestation of ‘structural purity’. (Figure 5) These devices therefore metaphorically enhance qualities already embodied within the structure, although they could as easily reference qualities that the structure does not possess.182
Figure 5. Mies van der Rohe: Lake Shore Drive apartments (1949–1951) Chicago, first floor mullions
181 Maurice Lagueux, ‘Nelson Goodman and Architecture’, Assemblage, 35 (1998): 29. 182 Ibid.
68 The twentieth century abandonment of traditional representation by painters (and realistic novels by writers) in favour of a new art that disconnects the imaginative text/artwork from ordinary experience, as with rationalist architecture, permitted the development of critical theories that focused almost exclusively on the intrinsic structure of the imaginative work.183 Sanford Schwartz suggests that Ricoeur’s theory finds a way to mediate between the formalist focus on the otherness of the text to the point of complete detachment, and theories that are so focused on the text that they are unable to see its ‘peculiar logic’.184 Ricoeur’s idea of a second order reference that is established by the text (imaginative work), and the self-understanding that proceeds from this, is an idea shared by the writer T.S. Eliot who eloquently posits that art ‘illuminates the actual world, because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it’.185 The constitutive dialogue between self and world generated through expressive (creative) art forms was also recognised by Merleau-Ponty, and made tangible with his concept of reversibility. It is a notion he succinctly captures in Cézanne’s Doubt with a quote from Cézanne who declared that ‘The landscape thinks itself in me … and I am its consciousness’.186
Creative metaphors, as the literary text, possess a referencing function in that they form new realities by challenging the established order of conventional semantic structures. New metaphoric realities function heuristically to challenge habitual ways of thinking.187 And so, the metaphor possesses in miniature the same mimetic character as the literary text—a shared purpose.188 However, unlike the literary text, the brevity of metaphor at the local level of the sentence does not permit dialectic interaction with a world reference and any subsequent self- reference. It is only when a metaphor is explicated at the level of the whole text that its referencing function at the level of interpretation is revealed.189 This was understood by Aristotle and made manifest with his concept of mimesis in the Poetics. Aristotelian mimesis cannot be equated with Plato’s concept of mimesis—an action that Plato believed led to the production of
183 Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, 298. 184 Ibid., 298–299. 185 Eliot, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism: 106–107. 186 Cézanne cited in Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, 67. 187 Schwartz, ‘Hermeneutics and the Productive Imagination: Paul Ricoeur in the 1970s’, 296. 188 Ibid., 296–297. 189 Ricoeur claims that metaphor is too brief a discourse ‘to display the dialectic between disclosing a world and understanding one’s self in front of this world. Nevertheless this dialectic points toward some features of metaphor which the modern theories … do not seem to consider, but which were not absent from Greek theory of metaphor’. On the notion of subjectivity in relation to self-understanding, Ricoeur writes that while ‘the reader understands himself [or herself] before the text, before the world of the work’, this is ‘the contrary of projecting oneself and one’s beliefs and prejudices … to let the work and its world enlarge the horizon of my own self-understanding’. Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 108, 107.
69 ‘deceitful’ copies, or impoverished imitations of reality. In a significant departure, the Aristotelian idea of mimesis was creative, wherein the copy held the potential for generating an aspirational representation of the real.190
Poets at the time of Aristotle composed tragedies and fables using intricate plots and metaphoric imagery with the ultimate aim of mimicking human action. Tragedy was the paradigm of the poetic work.191 According to Ricoeur, tragic poems possessed both sense and reference. The sense of the poem was created through its mythos or plot, which shaped the body of the tragedy, providing both its structure and form. Mythos orchestrated and unified the work’s component parts, which included characterisation, settings, and diction (lexis). Lexis (including words whose functions diverged from common usage, such as metaphor) therefore, could only make sense in relation to mythos, which in turn could only make meaningful sense when the purpose of the poem (mimesis) was realised. It was through mimesis that the referential aspect of the poem was revealed, for mimesis was not regarded as a duplication of the real world, but as a creative re- construction (poiesis) that revealed, through tragedy, an imitation of human action that was greater and ‘nobler’ than that experienced in ordinary life.192 Mimesis in this sense could be considered a ‘metaphor of reality’.193
In The Poetics, Aristotle extended his concept of mimesis to include the productive arts which, like tragic poetry, required objects as models for imitation. Imitated objects did not have to be tangible; they could include processes and other intangibles. Further, imitation could reveal things as they may be found in the present, past, or future.194 And so, there was an implication that the entelechy of an object could be fulfilled through imitation.195 For Aristotle, all human creativity (poiesis) was an imitation, or representation (mimesis) of human action (praxis).196 Joseph Rykwert notes that from Aristotle onwards, painting, sculpture, and poetry came to be
190 Referencing Ricoeur, Cooper claims that Aristotle’s mimesis was ‘a “special” kind of metaphorical truth’, or as Ricoeur explains, a ‘revelation of the Real as Act’. Cooper, Metaphor: 221. Pérez-Gómez notes that Aristotelian mimesis did not refer to imitation but, instead, ‘the expression of feelings and experiences through movement, musical harmonies, and rhythms of speech: an acknowledgement of the body’s intermediate location between Being and becoming’. Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008), 48. 191 Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 108. 192 Ibid., 108–109. 193 ———, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. John B. Thompson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 292. 194 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 127. 195 Ibid. 196 Ibid., 46.
70 collectively known as the mimetic arts.197 Although architecture was not explicitly mentioned in The Poetics, Vesely believes that, as a discipline ‘deeply embedded in the ethos of life and closely linked with the other arts, particularly with painting and poetry’, its inclusion could be presumed.198
As with the literary metaphor, the simple inclusion of a rhetorical device in an architectural program does not guarantee that the work will be endowed with a capacity for illumination. Charles Jencks, in his guide to postmodernism, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977), responds to what he saw as modernist architecture’s social failure—its inability to communicate with those who ultimately use and inhabit built forms, as well as its inability to connect more broadly with history and the urban context. Mallgrave notes that Jencks promoted the use of culturally meaningful signs such as metaphor, irony and paradox in order to redress the ‘semantic muteness or metaphorical silence’ of modernism.199 Meaning was not only conveyed through continuing engagement with new technology, but crucially, to include ‘old patterns’ and thus produce a multicoded, multivalent architecture. Jencks’ ‘plural’ approach was designed to account for the complexities of the modern human condition. This approach made full use of all communicative methods and absorbed all codes, including conflicting codes, in an attempt to create a ‘difficult whole’.200 The spectator would then engage with the building through a reading of its cultural, and historically understood signs made manifest by means of rhetorical devices.
Among the architectural examples Jencks cites (almost all of which are formally defined, or works understood as objects) to support his theoretical position is Earo Saarinen’s TWA terminal in New York. Jencks claims this work can be read as a metaphor for flight.201 However, according to Mallgrave, this example together with others reveals that architectural metaphors— as metaphors encountered in other domains—exist on many levels, from the banal, shallow, and superficial to the profound.202 Mallgrave observes that it is only at the end of the text when Jencks employs political allegory to account for the ‘sleeping monster sprawled on the roof’ of Antonio Gaudi’s Casa Battlo (1904–1906) in Barcelona, that Jencks comes close to raising an
197 Ibid., 127. 198 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 367. 199 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 182. 200 Charles Jencks, ‘Post-Modern Architecture’, in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. Michael Hays (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 309. 201 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 182. 202 Ibid.
71 architectural metaphor to the embodied level of classical Greek drama,203 or the world referencing plane described by Ricoeur.
A criticism of highly abstract semantic references or self-conscious symbolism in contemporary buildings is that they can only be recognised by small numbers of individuals, hence their value must be questioned.204 Further, the semantics of language alone, even when metaphorical, cannot fully explain the emotional power that may be contained within a poem, for as Vico and Merleau- Ponty correctly point out; it is the sensible body that precedes the rational body. Since human beings engage with the world corporeally in the first instance, Mallgrave asserts that the power of metaphor must be found beyond the ‘conceptual propensities of our linguistic affectations’.205 In other words, it must be found beyond the intellect—in the sensing body.
203 Ibid. 204 Ibid. 205 Ibid., 184.
72 The ornament of Leon Battista Alberti
The theory of mimesis was reinvigorated during the fifteenth century, and became a guiding principle for humanist scholars and artists. It was revealed through the practice of choosing and following exempla.1 Drawn from Greco-Roman antiquity, exempla provided a repertoire of imitative models that were originally used in oratory but later applied to all disciplines.2 Exempla were selected on the basis of worthiness. They were harnessed to guide the management of public and private life, and offer paradigms for the development of scientific and artistic methods. Renaissance art, knowledge, and moral reflection were all measured against ancient Greek and Roman norms, although the degree to which Renaissance models should faithfully imitate ancient exempla was a matter of continuous debate.3 Initial reverence for the precise reading of ancient models would embrace the doctrine of imitatio, which manifested in a tendency toward duplication, or similitude. However, this tendency eventually yielded to a new form of mimesis that recognised the historic passing of time. In other words, imitative mimesis gave way to metaphoric mimesis—where the paradigms related to various exempla came to be understood analogically rather than literally.4 This revision arose from an understanding that the present could not be strictly modelled on the past, and associated with this, a belief that exempla should relate more closely to the new humanistic world order.5 For humanist ideas had to reconcile the
1 Rykwert, The Dancing Column: 127. 2 Michel Jeanneret and Caroline Warman, ‘The Vagaries of Exemplarity: Distortion or Dismissal?’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59, 4 (1998): 565–567. 3 For more detail see ibid., 565–579. 4 François Rigolot, ‘The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59, 4 (1998): 561. 5 Ibid., 558–559. The humanistic world order would embrace a broad range of ancient philosophies, for humanists believed the value and purpose of philosophy was not to be found in slavish devotion to a ‘single, coherent philosophical position’, but through considering all positions a ‘source of wisdom and inspiration’. This plural approach to influences applied to diverse disciplines. Humanists undertook personal journeys in search of coherence, meaning, and self-expression, rather than a singular search for an ultimate truth. During this period there was also renewed emphasis on the philological interpretation of texts as humanists attempted to understand the writer’s original intent and language. James Hankins, ‘Humanism, Scholasticism, and Renaissance Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. James Hankins (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 41–42, 45.
73 established ideas of late antiquity and medieval notions together with the teachings of Christianity.6
For the Renaissance humanist, ‘Man’, by virtue of ‘his’ divine creation, occupied a privileged place within the cosmos. This idea translated into a preoccupation with the human body.7 The ‘humanist’ body was considered an object of beauty, as opposed to a base, or poor imitation of an Ideal Platonic form. It was against this background that the writings of Vitruvius and his anthropomorphic concept of architecture were rediscovered and transfigured into a unified architectural theory by Leon Battista Alberti. In keeping with Renaissance humanism, Alberti framed his architectural theory specifically in relation to other core humanistic disciplines, and thus bound his treatise to the liberal arts and to notions of speculation and mimesis, rather than the mechanical arts of construction.8
Alberti’s architectural treatise De re aedificatoria encapsulated humanist ideals by means of a ‘double analogy’, whereby architecture was not only viewed as a ‘metaphor for the human body’ but, inversely, the body was seen as a ‘metaphor for architectural design’.9 Alberti first identified the two concepts that were pivotal to his work on architecture in an early treatise on painting, De pictura. Drawing on the domains of mathematics (linear perspective) and oratory De pictura was developed with the intention of elevating the status of painting. In this work, Alberti harnesses the same core disciplines that would subsequently underpin his treatise on architecture.10
While De pictura describes a theoretical foundation for art based in geometry, this was a geometrical paradigm that could not simply be understood mathematically, for its primary objective was to draw humans into closer harmony with the perfect order of the divine universe.11 Alberti opens De pictura with a humble disclaimer declaring that his ‘commentaries’ were
6 Emergent thinkers (many of whom were branded heretics for challenging Christian orthodoxy) and their associated philosophies included: Marsilio Ficino who revived Neo-Platonism; Pico della Mirandola who developed a theology based on Cabala and other esoteric philosophies; and, Giordano Bruno who, influenced by Arab astrology, Neo-Platonism, and Hermeticism, developed the idea of cosmic pluralism and the art of memory. Hankins submits that, by considering all philosophies a potential source of esoteric wisdom, the ‘new’ philosophers were able extend themselves beyond the limits of the natural world, an idea that saw the ‘aims of the philosopher’ equated with ‘those of a magician’. ———, ‘Introduction’, 5–6. 7 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 9. 8 Dodds claims that, by his actions, Alberti had begun to distinguish between theory and practice, a distinction that would subsequently contribute to the ‘opacity of technique endemic of contemporary architectural production’. George Dodds, ‘On the Place of Architectural Speculation’, Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 46, 2 (1992): 83. 9 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 9. 10 Ibid., 10–11. 11 Ibid., 11.
74 written ‘not by a pure mathematician but only … by a painter’.12 However, this modest introduction belies an ambitious aim, for Alberti’s treatise on painting, as with his subsequent discourse on architecture, sought to ‘elevate’ the discipline above the level of ‘artisanship’.13
With De pictura Alberti realised the work that Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) had begun on perspective.14 Utilising the principles of proportion and ratio, Alberti outlined a simple method of sectional projection that extended from a distant, lateral vanishing point. From this geometry he developed a horizontal perspectival grid, and from this grid, generated a three dimensional spatial structure. Vesely points out that this disembodied mathematical construct needed to become re- embodied through imaginative reinterpretation before it could be understood as a pictorial representation of the visible world. In other words, the participant had to imaginatively project themselves into the space in order to understand, or relate to it and derive meaning.15 Vesely claims this was achieved by means of metaphorical, rather than rationally derived proportion.16 The translation of poetic content into the language of geometry was integral to Alberti’s perspectival model related to painting, and the human body was instrumental in achieving this aim.17
Alberti introduces his second fundamental concept, historia, in the second half of De pictura. Both the ancients and humanists harnessed historia to their rhetorical art. The term referred to narrative accounts, or stories essential to the discipline. However, historia also embodied the principle of morality for, they demonstrated the way in which individuals ought to conduct themselves, and so served as an exemplar of appropriate behaviour in accordance with decorum.18 Notably, it was the reconciliation of truth and morality that created a dilemma for some humanists. While historia followed ancient precedent, whereby history was considered the embodiment of truth, on occasion, humanist moral objectives determined that a less abstract form of narrative (or story) would be more instructionally effective.19 Alberti addresses this tension
12 Leon Battista Alberti and Rocco Sinisgalli, Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 22–23. 13 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 11. 14 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 147. 15 Ibid., 148. 16 Ibid., 154–155. 17 Ibid., 151. 18 Anthony Grafton, ‘Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 8 (1999): 41. 19 Ibid., 65.
75 when he includes the concept of historia in his treatise on painting and imbues it with contemporaneous meaning.
To Alberti ‘The very great achievement of a painter is not a colossus, but the historia’.20 In making historia central to his discourse on painting Alberti sought to bind the discipline to the liberal arts that were foundational to the humanist scholarly enterprise.21 He recounts in De re aedificatoria,
I look at a good painting (to paint a bad picture is to disgrace a wall) with as much pleasure as I take in reading a good story [historia] both are the work of painters: one paints with words, the other tells the story with his brush.22
The purpose of historia in painting, as with rhetoric, was to instruct and improve the spectator, an aim Alberti lays claim to when he declares ‘I would have nothing on the walls [paintings, painted panels, reliefs] or floor that did not have some quality of philosophy’.23 For Alberti, instruction could be achieved regardless of whether content came from mythical, factual, or sacred realms. It was the style, execution, and purpose of historia that was important, not its correspondence to factual truth.24 Anthony Grafton describes Alberti’s historia as moving embodiments of the truth’ rather than strict historical accounts.25 Thus, historia had shifted from a mode that literally narrated biblical events to one that was metaphoric: the narrative was to serve an instrumental purpose, to function as an exemplar of a more general truth.26 Mallgrave submits that while perspective provided a visual link between the artist and the pictorial field, it was historia that provided an emotional link via empathy; this allowed the work to rhetorically ‘touch’ the spectator and thereby invite participation.27
Historia was a physiognomic expression; it not only required precise visual representation,28 but also an exact representation of content.29 It was through historia that bodily parts were
20 Alberti and Sinisgalli, Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition: 55. 21 Grafton, ‘Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context’, 42. 22 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 220. [Book 7.10.] 23 Ibid. [Book 7.10.] 24 Grafton, ‘Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context’, 65. 25 Ibid., 64. 26 With humanist secularisation, allegory replaces biblical stories as the principal mode of narration. Hans Belting, ‘The New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento: “Historia” and Allegory’, In Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Studies in the History of Art 16, edited by Herbert L. Kresler and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Washington, D.C., 1985): 154. 27 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 11. 28 Historia referred to the achievement of grace and beauty in a work of art. Typically, the historia took the form of large-scale (typically life size) public artworks that depicted no more than nine or ten figures engaged in a complex active display. The
76 structurally included into the proportions of the painted surface, generating a hermeneutic relationship between fragment and whole.30 Vesely suggests the Renaissance derived its own symbols based on humanist philosophy, and that these were transmuted via the abstract language of geometry into representational systems.31 Because architecture was seen as a ‘paradigm of embodiment and spatiality’ by virtue of its foundation in geometry, it was considered a privileged visual element in the pictorial representation of perspectival space.32 While medieval depictions of architectural space were fragmented, with structural elements arranged thematically in a symbolic typology, the integration of architectural elements into Renaissance perspective space was coherent and unified. Architectural imagery and enclosed rooms were used to define pictorial depth, and so transformed a vertical, medieval order of reality into a horizontal, Renaissance reading of reality; a reading whereby the corporeal world was symbolically depicted as near, and the divine world as remote and infinite.33 Thus, Vesely adduces Renaissance perspective was no mere technical structure but was, rather, possessed of deep ontological and cultural significance.34
With Alberti’s theory of proportion, the fundamental nature of the centralised human body separates from that of Vitruvius. At a metaphysical level, Alberti fuses Vitruvius’ pagan idea, which related the proportions of the ideal body to the geometry of the circle and square, together with an Augustine notion of Christ.35 For Augustine, Christ, being both sacred and human, mediated between man and God. Consequently, Christ’s body was considered a symbol of ‘corporeal perfection’, a ‘microcosm of heavenly perfection and universal harmony’.36 John models would vary in age, gender, dress and attitude, possess perfectly proportioned faces and members and, importantly, be decorously represented and arranged. They participated in a single story, with the exception of a single individual that would beckon the spectator to participate in the action. Alberti and Sinisgalli, Leon Battista Alberti: On Painting: A New Translation and Critical Edition: 55–65. Alberti writes: ‘It seems opportune then that in the historia there is someone who informs the spectators of the things that unfold; or invites with the hand to show; or threatens with severe face and turbid eyes not to approach there, as if he wishes that a similar story remain secret; or indicates a danger or another [attribute] over there to observe; or invites you with his own gestures to laugh together or cry in company. It is necessary, in the end, that also all [the occurrences] that those painted [characters] made with the spectators and with themselves, concur to realise and explain the historia’. Ibid., 63. 29 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 150–151. 30 Vesely emphasises that proportional relationships undergird the position and relation of all objects within the pictorial field of the Renaissance painting. Ibid., 151, 154–155. 31 Ibid., 150–151. 32 Ibid., 140. 33 Ibid., 142–143. 34 Ibid., 143. 35 Wittkower notes: ‘builders of the Middle Ages laid out their churches “in modem crucis”—their Latin-Cross plan was the symbolic expression of Christ crucified. The Renaissance, as we have seen, did not lose sight of this idea. What had changed was the conception of the godhead: Christ as the essence of perfection and harmony superseded Him who had suffered on the Cross for humanity: the Pantocrator replaced the Man of Sorrows’. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Alec Tiranti, 1988), 39. 36 Robert Tavernor, ‘Contemplating Perfection through Piero’s Eyes’, in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 80.
77 Onians suggests that the fusion of Vitruvian and Christian ideas that underpins Alberti’s concept of anthropomorphism is most clearly expressed in relation to the column. Onians claims etymological support for this view asserting that, while Vitruvian names for the parts of the column only obliquely reference the body, Alberti makes the connection plain.37 Moreover, Alberti brings Vitruvius’ anthropomorphic concept of the column to life by relating the metaphor more closely to the proportions of real humans, an idea derived from an established medieval (Milanese) architectural practice whereby columns incorporated into sacred structures were conceived as embodiments of the twelve Apostles.38 Further evidence that Alberti took his authority from the Christian teachings of Augustine is revealed with the biblical reference in De re aedificatoria that links the proportions of the body to the proportions of Noah’s Ark: ‘The commentators of our sacred writings … noted and judged that the ark built for the Flood was based on the human figure’.39 (Figure 6)
37 John Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 148–149. 38 Ibid. In his account on The Life of Constantine, Eusebius writes that the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, which was one of the earliest churches constructed under the Christian emperor Constantine, housed a circular structure located directly over Christ’s tomb that was supported by twelve columns embodying the twelve apostles. Eusebius of Caesarea, The Life of the Blessed Emperor Constantine, in Four Books, from 306 to 337 A.D (London: Samuel Bagster and Sons, 1845), 10. This idea finds expression in a number of churches constructed during the time of Constantine, including his own tomb located in the church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople. Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 70. 39 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 309. [Book 9.7.] This quote references Augustine’s writing, in which he declares that the proportions of Noah’s ark correspond to the human body, and therefore the body of Christ. The door located in the side of the Ark by which the animals enter in order to be saved is ‘emblematic’ of the wound Christ received ‘whence flow the sacraments by which the believers enter the kingdom’. Lynn Thorndike, ‘The Attitude of Origen and Augustine Toward Magic’, The Monist 18, 1 (1908): 63.
78
Figure 6. Benito Montano: 'The Ark' (1593). The image combines the idea of the Ark based on the proportions of man with the story of the Flood as an allegory of Man's redemption. Hence, the Ark is depicted as the coffin of Christ.
Alberti humanistically reinterprets the Vitruvian idea of proportion. Vitruvius related fractional parts of the body back to the whole in keeping with his concept of symmetria, but Alberti developed techniques that allowed him to relate the parts of the body to a relative whole. In De statua, a treatise on sculpture completed after De pictura, Alberti describes two tools, the finitorium and exempeda, which were designed to measure bodies of varying height (and circumference). Utilising these tools, it was possible to establish the proportional relationship of the part to the whole for any individual and compare them irrespective of discrete differences. These relative measures could reveal beauty in any harmoniously proportioned body; a revelation that Alberti referred to as similitude. Once similitude was disclosed through measurement it could be imitated.40
The relations between architecture, geometry, the body and perfection explored by Alberti and his contemporaries converge in the perspectival painting, The Flagellation of Christ (circa 1455) by Piero della Francesca. (Figure 7) In 1953 Rudolf Wittkower and B. A. R. Carter deconstructed and analysed the composition of this painting and revealed that a single module had been used in its design.41 It was Christ’s perfect height of six Roman feet that constituted the measure from which the spatial arrangement of architectural forms contained within the painting was derived.
40 Robert Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 39. 41 ———, ‘Contemplating Perfection through Piero’s Eyes’, 85.
79 Moreover, the same measure was used to determine the relative location of the peripheral figures.42 And so, Christ is not only situated at the centre of the painting, but also represents the source of its composition.43 According to Robert Tavernor, the humanist’s faith in the paradigm that recognised the body as a microcosm that reflected the divine order of a greater macrocosm suggests that The Flagellation could be read ‘more profoundly, as a declaration on sacred beauty in body and architecture’.44 The perspectival structure of The Flagellation does not depict a literal view of reality, but a symbolic one. Della Francesca created a space in which an architecture that is proportionally constructed reveals the same universal laws of beauty as the perfectly proportioned figure of Christ—and so the image unites body and building.45
Figure 7. Piero della Francesca: 'The Flagellation of Christ' (circa 1455) Oil on canvas
The fifteenth century viewer would not have had to intellectually interpret the way in which della Francesca employed Alberti’s methods to construct a symbolically significant composition.
42 Ibid., 86. 43 Robert Tavernor elaborates: ‘Christ’s figure is the divine source from which emanates all power, order, geometry, number, and measure; he embodies the heavenly perfection and truth that mankind should emulate on earth. As the centre and measure of everything, Christ signifies universal truth’. Ibid., 93. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid.
80 Gleaning historia from visual cues (or symbols) contained within the painting, this viewer would have understood that Christ, as the ideal human, was the embodiment of universal beauty and truth, and consequently would have sensed rather than reasoned the pervasive mathematical order derived from this.46 In this way, painting not only offered a means of making intellectual content visible, but of making an ideal reality accessible and coherent.47 However, this mode of thinking was relatively short lived.48 Alberto Pérez-Gómez writes, ‘Art was considered the privileged form of metaphysics—metaphysics made into matter … but the physical configuration of the new human world had to conform to the mathesis that linked microcosm and macrocosm’.49
Perspective space reduces the broader context of reality to a fixed viewpoint, an idealised pictorial moment. Vesely claims that the ability to conceive (and understand) such a subjective ‘particularisation’ of reality was predicated on a microcosmic–macrocosmic worldview. When this worldview shifts, the symbolic forms that have come to express it are no longer valid. According to Vesely, this results in the macrocosmic–microcosmic relationship being expressed in ‘obscure metaphors’ and ‘abstract concepts’, and produces the preconditions for a shift toward a subjective representation of reality that is both ‘inward-looking’ and self referencing.50
The move toward modern relativism was heralded with the illusionistic perspectives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.51 Vesely cites Donato Bramante’s trompe-l’oeil, the ‘false choir’ from the church of Santa Maria presso San Satiro (1482–1486) as an illustrative example. Both the ‘false choir’ and The Flagellation adopt the architectural construct of the imaginary room. However, the architectural space depicted by Bramante is a fully realised space with no connection to anything beyond its frame; it is closed and complete. By contrast, the architectural space depicted by della Francesca expands beyond the frame; it is an open and dynamic spatial and symbolic construct. While della Francesca’s image elicits truth and understanding hermeneutically through a ‘dialogue’ between the spectator and symbols contained within the painting, Bramante’s illusionistic perspective is comprehended in a form of ‘monologue’.52 And so, according to Vesely, a traditional theocentric worldview in which earth and Man are situated
46 Ibid., 86. 47 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 150–151. 48 Ibid., 162. 49 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 9–10. 50 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 181. 51 Ibid., 184. 52 Ibid.
81 at the centre of the universe, and are instrumental in the production of cosmic harmony, has begun to move toward a more abstract cosmic worldview.53
The two foundational narratives (geometria and historia) that Alberti embraced in relation to painting and sculpture were carried through to his writing on architecture. While, as with his treatise on painting, the human body was central to both themes, Payne points out that, until recently, it was principally Alberti’s mathematical and, or geometrical narrative, as opposed to the rhetorical–aesthetic narrative, that shaped the contemporary view of Renaissance architectural theory.54 This view is evinced in the (still) influential work Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism by Rudolf Wittkower (first published in 1949) whose theory of humanistic aesthetics was primarily derived from the ancient ideas of Plato, Pythagoras and Euclid.55 Wittkower’s reading of the architecture of the Quattrocento focuses almost exclusively on proportion, which he considered the ‘basic axiom of Renaissance architects’.56 Payne however, asserts that Wittkower problematically formulates his humanistic paradigm through the lens of modernism, in which he was fully immersed. The result is that a nineteenth century aesthetic was imposed upon a reading of Renaissance architecture.57 Payne correctly observes that Wittkower’s theoretical paradigm made little of the role that metaphor, rhetoric, and ornament played in the development of Alberti’s architectural forms, despite the prominence and importance given to these principles in his text.58
Alberti composed De re aedificatoria with a view to attaining perfection in building. Despite mimicking Vitruvius’ division of De architectura into ten books, Alberti arranged the substance of his treatise in approximately two equal parts. This two-part division had no historic
53 Ibid., 191–192. 54 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 7–8. 55 ———, ‘Rudolf Wittkower and Architectural Principles in the Age of Modernism’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, 3 (1994): 333. Hersey claims that despite Wittkower’s focus on Pythagorean number, his interpretation of Pythagorean mathematics was problematic because it was both abstract and reductivist. Wittkower failed to recognise the magic of Pythagorean numbers. These numbers did not merely represent quantities, but were possessed of psychological, moral, and personal qualities. Hersey writes: ‘There were … temples, cities, worlds, heavens of numbers. In such constructs lay their magic’. The Pythagoreans did not simplistically reduce the ratio of 8:6 to 4:3, for such a reduction disregarded the relationship between the two proportions, where 4:3 might be described as the ‘child’ of the ‘marriage’ between 8:6. Clearly, this had implications for Wittkower’s theoretical interpretation of humanist architectural theory, which was almost entirely based on proportion. Hersey suggests that Renaissance architectural theorists understood the magic of number since it had been brought to them through traditional lines. Thus, Alberti and his contemporaries would have understood proportion in the true Pythagorean sense. George L. Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 7–8. 56 Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: 104. 57 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 8. 58 Ibid.
82 (architectural) precedent. Alberti dedicated the first part of his treatise to an examination of the functional aspects of construction (firmitas and utilitas), while the second half considered beauty and its manifestation through ornament (pulchritudo and ornamentum).59 The works of Vitruvius and Alberti, which were separated by a significant distance in time, also embraced fundamental differences in relation to intent. Rykwert points out that while De architectura, the only text on architecture to survive antiquity, focused on the practices of a previous Hellenistic age, De re aedificatoria provided the foundation for a future architecture.60 Payne echoes this view, noting that by modelling his architecture on an earlier historic canon that had already attained perfection, Vitruvius had become bound to the perpetual imitation of unchanging architectural forms.61 Alberti, although drawing on the authority of the ancients, located his treatise in a contemporary context. He was able to avoid the dogma of strict adherence to the imitation of ancient exempla by advocating that such forms be humanistically reinterpreted through a process of inventio which allowed for improvement.62 In this way, Alberti was able to take the view that the present could supersede the past with the appropriate handling of ornament. Although this process granted artistic freedom, moral principles provided guidance for the acceptable appropriation of ornament through which beauty could ‘shine’.63
Alberti’s intentions were bound with his humanist moment in time: bound with his deeply held moral views on civic good and the place of architecture as a contributor, both socially and politically to the health of the state.64 To accomplish success in building architects had to be virtuous and worthy of their calling. An architect needed to possess a deep intellectual understanding of the arts and sciences and combine this with actions that contributed to building a better society.65 It was the place of the architect to reconcile what was appropriate and
59 While this textual divide had no historical precedent, it would come to signal the beginning of a future separation between function and ornament. Ibid., 75. 60 Joseph Rykwert, ‘Theory as Rhetoric: Leon Battista Alberti in Theory and in Practice’, in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 37. 61 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 73. 62 Ibid. 63 Ibid. 64 Ibid. 65 Robert Tavernor, ‘Palladio’s “Corpus”: I Quattro Libri dell’Architettura’, in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise ed. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 234.
83 necessary in a building with a form that physically manifested perfection in order to unite beauty with morality.66
Alberti adopts a particularly Roman view of the world and its history. He substitutes Latin terms for Vitruvian Greek terms and extends this same Roman centric approach to describing and defining architectural elements.67 Through the assertion that the ‘Italian’ (Composite) column found in many antique Roman monuments, such as the Colosseum, possessed Etruscan origins, Alberti was able to lay claim to an evolutionary history equal to that of the Greek orders.68 He considered the Composite column, which was created by combining the Corinthian and Ionic forms, the most evolved of the orders, ‘graceful and thoroughly commendable’.69 According to Alberti, the ancient architectural models of Asia and Greece only reached their ‘glorious maturity’ later in Italy,70 and this maturity derived from an evolution that resulted in moral qualities being realised in Roman architecture.71
As for Italy, their inborn thrift prompted them to be the first who made their buildings very like animals. Take the case of a horse: they realised that where the shape of each member looked suitable for a particular use, so the whole animal itself would work well in that use. Thus they found that grace of form could never be separated or divorced from suitability for use.72
By declaring utility and function the principal objectives for building, restraint was not only exacted over extravagance, but also over excessive economy, and so a moral dimension was bestowed on architectural elegance and beauty derived from these principles. In other words, beauty and form could never be separated from function. Alberti’s preference for ancient Rome and the moral principles derived from this was consistent with the Christian/Aristotelian morality that was pervasive during the Quattrocento.73 Against this background Alberti’s audience can be
66 Alberti writes: ‘A great matter is architecture, nor can everyone undertake it. He must be of the greatest ability, the keenest enthusiasm, the highest learning, the widest experience, and, above all, serious, of sound judgment and counsel, who would presume to call himself an architect. The greatest glory in the art of building is to have a good sense of what is appropriate. For to build is a matter of necessity; to build conveniently is the product of both necessity and utility; but to build something praised by the magnificent, yet not rejected by the frugal, is the province only of an artist of experience, wisdom, and thorough deliberation’. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 315. [Book 9.10.] 67 John Onians, ‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡΕΤΗ: A Study in Their Sources’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 34 (1971): 96. 68 ———, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 150. 69 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 201. [Book 7.6.] 70 Ibid., 157. [Book 6.3.] 71 Onians, ‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡΕΤΗ: A Study in Their Sources’, 98. 72 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 158. [Book 6.3.] 73 Onians, ‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡΕΤΗ: A Study in Their Sources’, 98.
84 distinguished from that of Vitruvius. Vitruvius wrote his treatise seeking patronage and support for an antique tradition, whereas Alberti wrote, to elevate the status of architecture, to have it recognised, as with De pictura, as a liberal art.74 Alberti modelled De re aedificatoria on the rhetorical text. By conflating the two disciplines in this way he sought to equate the purpose and value of architectural theory with the function and status of rhetorical discourse related to humanistic scholarship.75 Alberti not only created the means to appeal to a scholarly, Christian, humanistic audience, as well as a means to derive authority from antique Roman models, but was able to establish a basis from which to integrate morality into the structure of built work.76 Payne suggests that De re aedificatoria was the first Renaissance architectural treatise to attempt to integrate theory and culture—an idea that she believes is supported with Alberti’s exclusive focus on the text and his deliberate exclusion of the pictorial image.77 This view is strengthened by the fact that Alberti’s architectural discourse sought to define a visual discipline at a time when vision was considered a privileged source of truth.78 Thus, Alberti’s intention was not merely to raise the status of architecture but, perhaps more significantly, establish the place of architectural discourse within culture more broadly.79
Both Vitruvius and Alberti drew from the writings of Cicero; however, there are differences in focus that manifest in differences of approach. The two part division of De re aedificatoria echoes the division of Cicero’s De officiis, although the content of the two works is arranged in reverse order.80 While De re aedificatoria deals with the function, structure and utility of architecture in Books I to V, De officiis deals with utilitas (utility) in the second of three books. Moreover, while Cicero deals with honestas (moral rectitude) in Book I (a third book describes how the two concepts are integrated), Alberti explores honestas’ visual equivalent, pulchritudo (beauty), and ornamentum (ornament) in Books VI to IX.81 Onians claims that Cicero would have discussed honestas before utilitas as it was the more important principle involved in making moral decisions. However, he reasons that for the discipline of architecture, utilitas would naturally be addressed before beauty and ornament since the primary objective of building was its
74 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75. 75 Grafton, ‘Historia and Istoria: Alberti’s Terminology in Context’, 40–42. 76 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 150–151. 77 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75. 78 Ibid. See also Françoise Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Denise Bratton (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1997), 105. 79 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75. 80 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 152–153. 81 Ibid.
85 purpose. Onians speculates that it may have been Cicero himself that provided this model for Alberti’s text, as Cicero writes in De officiis that the primary objective in designing a house is usefulness, with visual appearance but a secondary consideration.82 However, Payne makes a compelling case for an alternate view. She posits that Alberti’s statement was not intended as a value judgment, but was merely practical advice pertaining to the sequencing of built work in order to avoid damage to more fragile ornamental elements. She points out that Alberti himself acknowledges this fact when he notes that, ‘the work ought to be constructed naked, and clothed later; let the ornament come last’.83 Payne considers the idea that Alberti viewed ornament as a secondary concept a consequence of the contemporary reader’s adherence to a structurally rationalist perspective—a view that ignores more important factors, such as the strength of the text’s embedded relation to the disciplines of oratory and rhetoric.84 She further argues, that such a reading does not give full weight to the importance of ornament as the site where history is dialectically revealed.85 Despite the topographic location of the discussion of ornament within the text, Payne considers Alberti’s deliberate and originary separation of beauty and ornament from utility as recognition of its elevated status, a status that makes architectural ornament equal to rhetorical ornament.86 Connections with oratory permeate the text structurally, thematically, and functionally.
Alberti describes numerus (number), collocatio (position), finitio (outline), and the governing principle of concinnitas (composition) as principles essential to architectural aesthetics.87 Numerus, collocatio, and concinnitas were also identified by Cicero (De orator) as principles necessary for arranging the selection and structure of ornament in a speech, and so reveal the orator’s eloquence and creative mastery.88 A further powerful rhetorical link emerges with Alberti’s embrace of Cicero’s concept of decorum (De officiis).
Decorum, the moral principle that prescribes human behaviour (action) deemed it both appropriate and necessary for individuals to vary their behaviour relative to a given social context
82 Ibid., 153. See also Cicero and Miller, De Officiis: 141. [Book I, xxxix.] 83 Alina Payne, ‘Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture’, in Body and Building: Essays on the Changing Relation of Body and Architecture, ed. George Dodds and Robert Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 100. See also Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 312. [Book 9.8.] 84 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75. 85 Ibid. 86 Ibid. 87 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 301–303. [Book 9.5.] 88 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75.
86 and in accordance with their status. Thus, in its most abstract form decorum mediated an agreement between inner being (content) and visual appearance (form) to achieve coherence, and in doing so obtain necessary ‘third party’ approval. It was the relation of decorum to appearance that made it a concern for the representational arts and for theories of imitatio.89 However, since decorum reconciled form with content, it also became a concern for theories of expression—in that the content of a speech had to be consistent with the way in which it was expressed. This had implications for theories of style and ornament in both rhetoric and poetics.90 By assigning the principle of decorum to architecture, Alberti ascribed to architecture the same requirement for agreement between form and content applied to human behaviour.91 In this way decorum becomes a moral basis from which to determine the appropriateness of built and decorated forms, and so achieve agreement with the purpose buildings were designed to serve. Alberti writes that ‘The greatest glory in the art of building is to have a good sense of what is appropriate’.92 Despite synergies between the two terms, Vitruvius’ usage of the rhetorical term decor does not possess the weight and prominence that Alberti accords decorum in De re aedificatoria. At the heart of his treatise Alberti makes the requirement for decorum plain.
When even the smallest parts of a building are set in their proper place, they add charm; but when positioned somewhere strange, ignoble, or inappropriate, they will be devalued if elegant, ruined if they are anything else. Look at Nature’s own works: for if a puppy had an ass’s ear on its forehead, or if someone had a huge foot, or one hand vast and the other tiny, he would look deformed.93
This analogy invokes the monsters of Horace, a reference that, according to Payne, would have been readily understood by the Renaissance reader.94 While Alberti considered decorum as important for the visual arts as for the literary arts, his concept of artistic license was more fluid than that expressed by Vitruvius. It is in the application of ornament that Alberti most actively promotes creative invention while simultaneously calling for decorum.
89 Ibid., 56–57. 90 Ibid., 57. 91 Onians notes that Alberti equates ‘the principle of his theory of architectural forms with that of Cicero, who had shown that a man should vary his actions according to his circumstances or his role in life’. Onians, ‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡΕΤΗ: A Study in Their Sources’, 101. Consequently, the imitation of historical precedence is made subordinate to the moral imperative. 92 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 315. [Book 9.10.] 93 Ibid., 310. [Book 9.7.] 94 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 78.
87 Alberti applies the principle of decorum to architecture explicitly when he categorises a range of sacred and secular built forms, associating their type with the degree and mode of ornamentation deemed appropriate.95 In the making of a speech, the time, place and audience determined the correct level of ornamentation. The same considerations applied in determining a building’s functional requirements, a matter dealt with in the first part of Alberti’s treatise.96 Consequently, through decorum Alberti merges the two requirements distributio (program) and decor (ornament in relation to ‘Clients/gods’) and this, Payne suggests, is a revelatory link not evident in De architectura. It is this conceptualisation of decorum that influences Alberti’s notion of invention.97 Alberti allows room for the architect to be creative with forms and their ornament, and so releases the architect from the strict imitation of ancient forms and assemblages. While this freedom is delimited by the requirement for decorum, Alberti permits a degree of freedom that has no precedent.98 He confirms this when he writes that, while the severest restraint is called for in ornamenting private buildings,
[A] certain license is often possible. For instance the whole shaft of a column may be over slender, too swollen, or too retracted at its entasis perhaps, compared to what is strictly permissible in public buildings, yet it should not be faulted or condemned provided the work is not malformed or distorted. Indeed, sometimes it may be more delightful to stray a little from the dignity and calculated rule of lineaments, which would not be permitted in public works. … In doing this the artist must, as far as he is able, guard each part in its noble form by skillfully maintaining the lines and angles, as if he would not want to cheat the work of the appropriate concinnitas of its members, yet seeming to entertain the viewer with a charming trick—or better still, to amuse him by the wit of his invention.99
Payne cites this passage as evidence that Alberti endorsed the use of collaged arrangements that possessed no particular logic. In other words, he permits the monsters that Vitruvius (for the most part) derided. Form is moderated, not by the strict rules of imitation, but by the work’s context and purpose.100 For Alberti, invention is only limited by dignified behaviour, which looked to an
95 Alberti clearly articulates the constrained relation between decorum and ornament: ‘We have already noted the importance of the application of ornament in the art of building. It is quite clear that each building does not require the same ornament. With sacred works, especially public ones, every art and industry must be employed to render it as ornate as possible: sacred works must be furnished for gods, secular ones only for man. The latter, being the less dignified, should concede to the former, yet still be ennobled with their own details of ornament’. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 244. [Book 8.1.] 96 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 78. 97 Ibid., 79. 98 Ibid. 99 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 293–294. [Book 9.1.] 100 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 79.
88 audience to guide its formulation.101 Rykwert claims that Alberti’s façades were more about the urban spaces they addressed than the buildings they clothed.102 However, Payne believes that a future difficulty for ornament emerges from Alberti’s approach. While on the one hand ornament is the site of inventio, or creative expression granted by licentia moderated by appropriateness imported from oratory, it is also the primary site for the appropriation and imitatio of traditional forms.103 The simultaneous address of context and form that manifests in expressive ornament is a theme that, as Payne points out, permeates the treatise as a whole.104
Alberti opens his prologue with a tribute to edification, which establishes building as the penultimate paradigm because, more than any other human activity, it harnesses creativity to meet human demands on three functional levels; namely, those of necessitas (necessity), commoditas (commodity), and voluptas (aesthetic pleasure).105 These principles shape both the physical and conceptual progression of the treatise.
The first three books examine the theory of construction in terms of necessity. A schema for building is progressively laid out; from the idea of conception to the matter from which it is constituted, and subsequently, to the manipulation of matter.106 Alberti’s observations founded in Nature and the authority offered by the ancients shape this theoretical schema. His approach is communicated throughout the treatise by means of an all-pervasive metaphor of corporeality. Alberti considers the act of architectural construction—or edification—a form of bodily reconstruction.107 In his prologue he includes the assertion that:
[F]irst we observed that the building is a form of body, which like any other consists of lineament and matter, the one the product of thought, the other of Nature; the one requiring the power of reason, the other dependent on preparation and selection …108
The architect uses ‘divine reason’ to generate lineamenta (design), which transforms the raw materia (materials) provided by Nature into architectural forms—a transformation that hints at a
101 Ibid. 102 Rykwert, ‘Theory as Rhetoric: Leon Battista Alberti in Theory and in Practice’, 50. 103 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 4. 104 Ibid., 88. 105 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 2–3. See also Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism: 67. 106 ———, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism: 71. 107 Ibid., 106. 108 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 5.
89 metaphysical foundation.109 Drawing on Aristotle’s concept of bodies, generation and matter, the purpose of the architect’s imaginative ‘speculation’ was to facilitate the perfect transformation of man and Nature.110
According to Vesely, the architect employs inventive imagination to conceptualise an ideal world and so lineamenta prescribe a closed domain, or a unified whole, in which ‘nothing may be added, taken away or altered but for the worse’.111 Although lineamenta must precede structura, the two are interconnected. In respect of lineamenta and structura Alberti appears to share the views of Vitruvius, who wrote:
[The] arts are composed of two things—craftsmanship and the theory of it. Of these the one, craftsmanship, is proper to those who are trained in the several arts, namely, the execution of the work; the other, namely, theory, is shared with educated persons.112
However, Alberti’s lineamenta comprise more than just the structural envelope; they also include the logic of internal partitioning.113 He notes,
All the power of invention, all the skill and experience in the art of building, are called upon in compartition; compartition alone divides up the whole building into the parts by which it is articulated, and integrates its every part by composing all the lines and angles into a single harmonious work that respects utility dignity and delight.114
109 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 13. Alberti’s lineamenta, which were made up of lines and angles, delineate the surface of buildings. They form the architectural drawing that determines the ground plan. The measurements of this ground plan, linked by the rules of proportion, would then guide the dimensioning of elevations. Thus, the ground plan is a ‘key’ to the entire structure. Susan Lang, ‘De Lineamentis: L. B. Alberti’s Use of a Technical Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 28 (1965): 333–335. Alberti asserts, ‘It is the function and duty of lineaments, then, to prescribe an appropriate place, exact numbers, a proper scale, and a graceful order for whole buildings and for each of their constituent parts, so that the whole form and appearance of the building may depend on lineaments alone’. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 7. [Book 1.1.] While the concept of lineamenta is related to Serlio’s linee occulte, or hidden lines (a network of invisible connections that link plans and façades with the spaces around them), Serlio will take Alberti’s concept further. With a foundation in Neoplatonic philosophy, Serlio relates this ‘secret’ transparent geometry to hidden human structures and the practice of anatomisation. Sebastiano Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–V of ‘Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva’, trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 48. [Book II 25r.] See also Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance: 85–87. 110 Dodds claims that Alberti distinguishes the ‘activity of the architect from the activity of the artisan’, not by ‘grounding architecture’ in ‘the mechanical art of construction’ but, by grounding it in the ‘liberal art of speculation’. Dodds, ‘On the Place of Architectural Speculation’, 76. For more detail regarding Aristotle’s concept of bodies, generation and matter see ‘Subversion of the natural order’ in the second part, Skin. 111 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 156. [Book 6.2.] This idea might have originated with Aristotle. In discussing the unity of plot, which is the ‘first and most important thing in Tragedy’, Aristotle writes that ‘a beautiful object whether it be a living organism or any whole composed of parts, must not only have an orderly arrangement of parts, but must also be of a certain magnitude … and order’. Aristotle, The Poetics. § VII. See also Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 134. 112 Vitruvius Pollio, On Architecture, Volume I: Books I–V: 21. [Book I, 1.15.] 113 Mallgrave, The Architect’s Brain: Neuroscience, Creativity, and Architecture: 13. 114 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 23. [Book 1.9.]
90 The importance of compartition lies in the necessity for the building to remain seemly. While introducing the concept of compartition early in Book I, Alberti subsequently, in Book VI, emphasises its importance for enabling ornament to ‘shine out’.115 Payne suggests that the ‘shine out’ metaphor used by Alberti links his concept of architectural assemblage with decorum— noting that in Cicero’s De officiis, decorum was described as a ‘shining out in conduct’, an external expression of inner beauty.116 While Alberti relates the term partitio to assemblage and invention in the first part of his work, and the term collocatio when referring to ornament in the second half, both are linked to decorum which functions as an ‘index of coherence and purposefulness’.117
Alberti’s third book on construction presages the material architectural project. Here again, he draws upon the corporeal metaphor to introduce the idea of an architectural tectonics,118 or structural logic, that imitates the human form. Alberti describes features common to all roofs as ‘bones, muscles, infill paneling, skin and crust …’, and identifies structural columns as ‘bones’ to be arranged according to Nature’s rules.119 In a subsequent paragraph on the subject of walls, he contemplates the significance of construction joints, claiming that connections in buildings should emulate the strength and coherence of animals’ bones bound by layers of muscles and ligaments.120
In short, with every type of vault, we should imitate Nature throughout, that is, bind together the bones and interweave flesh with nerves running along every possible section: in length, breadth, and depth, and also obliquely across.121
Exhibiting an economical approach that focuses almost exclusively on the structure of roofs and walls, Alberti generates a set of universal, structural laws which, at the level of necessity, are grounded in Nature.122
115 Ibid., 163. [Book 6.5.] 116 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 81. 117 Ibid., 80, 82. 118 Ballantyne notes that the word ‘tectonics’ derives from the ancient Greek word tekton, meaning carpenter ‘or form-giver’—a derivation that subsists in the second syllable of the word architect. Andrew Ballantyne, Architecture Theory: A reader in Philosophy and Culture (London: Continuum, 2005), 239. 119 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 79. [Book 3.12.] 120 Alberti writes: ‘The physicians have noticed that Nature was so thorough in forming the bodies of animals that she left no bone separate or disjointed from the rest. Likewise, we should link the bones and bind them fast with muscles and ligaments, so that their frame and structure is complete and rigid enough to ensure that its fabric will still stand on its own, even if all else is removed’. Ibid., 81. [Book 3.12.] 121 Ibid., 86. [Book 3.14.]
91 Compartition, extolled by Alberti in Book I, is omitted from Book II and Book III, yet resurfaces in Book IV and Book V when he deals with the concept of commodity.123 The two later books have a different character to the previous three for, since buildings can attend to an unbounded array of social needs and desires, commodity is a limitless construct.124 With a focus on the city, Books IV and V describe an architecture that exists between the level of necessity and aesthetic pleasure (voluptas).125 It is, however, beauty and the production of aesthetic pleasure that is the ultimate objective of architecture, and it is to this aim that Alberti devotes the greatest substance of his writing.
Alberti once again draws on the authority of the ancients, and the ‘building as an animal’ metaphor in the sense that Nature must be imitated and delineated before beginning any speculation on what makes a building beautiful.126 He then determines that beauty is a quality rarely found in Nature. According to Alberti, we are able to recognise beauty, not by whim or ‘fancy, but [through] the workings of a reasoning faculty that is inborn in the mind’.127 Françoise Choay notes that Alberti does not attempt a Neoplatonic consideration of beauty by examining the internal workings of the beautiful subject but, instead, focuses on the external expression of the beautiful object.128
Alberti frames his aesthetic theory within the dialectic of beauty and ornament. Early in Book VI he distinguishes between these key concepts:
[O]rnament may be defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty. … I believe, that beauty is some inherent property, to be found suffused all through the body of that which may be called beautiful; whereas ornament, rather than being inherent, has the character of something attached or additional.129
This description fed the structurally rationalist view held by scholars such as Wittkower that beauty was Alberti’s primary concern while ornament, as an applied form, must have been a
122 Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism: 77. 123 Ibid., 73–74. 124 Ibid., 78. 125 Ibid. 126 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 301. [Book 9.5.] 127 Ibid., 302. [Book 9.5.] 128 Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism: 99. 129 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 156. [Book 6.2.]
92 secondary and diminished consideration.130 As discussed earlier, while the interpretation of Alberti’s aesthetic theory and articulation of the relationship between beauty and ornament has been largely understood in terms of Wittkower’s paradigm, a broader reading of the text, one that re-views ornament within a rhetorical frame, discloses a more complex relationship between Alberti’s conceptualisations of beauty and ornament.
Although the ancients may have imitated Nature, Alberti’s beauty involves a masking principle or selective simulation whereby disagreeable or ugly elements were concealed and finer elements enhanced through ornament. An object that failed to conform to the laws of beauty could be compensated.131 Thus, the inauthentic for Alberti becomes the means to attain true beauty.132 Alberti’s aesthetic offers the means of correction while still maintaining a ‘likeness’; the simulation is completely dependent on an appropriate, public presentation.133
Alberti introduces the principle of concinnitas, the concept that mediates between beauty and ornament, in Book IX. Accordingly, he re-defines beauty as,
[A] form of sympathy, and consonance of the parts within a body, according to definite number outline and position, as dictated by concinnitas, the absolute and fundamental rule in Nature. This is the main object of the art of building, and the source of her dignity, charm, authority, and worth.134
Beauty then, derives from three essential qualities: numerus, finitio and collocatio, attributes whose perfect relationship is governed by the law of Nature—concinnitas.135 Tavernor believes that Alberti merges Vitruvius’ dispositio and symmetria in concinnitas to generate a ‘harmony of style’ in the manner of Cicero’s oratory.136
130 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 75. Wittkower’s descriptive language gives weight to this view. He writes that beauty for Alberti, is infused throughout the building by means of harmony that ‘does not result from personal fancy [such as with ornament], but objective reasoning’. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: 41. 131 Alberti reasons; ‘had ornament been applied by painting and masking anything ugly, or by grooming and polishing the attractive, it would have had the effect of making the displeasing less offensive and the pleasing more delightful. If this is conceded, ornament may be a defined as a form of auxiliary light and complement to beauty’. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 156. [Book 6.2.] 132 Mark Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 106. 133 Ibid. 134 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 303. [Book 9.5.] 135 Ibid., 302. [Book 9.5.] 136 Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 43.
93 For Alberti, concinnitas is the means by which the human mind is able to recognise beauty via the senses. So, while Nature exhibits beauty in diverse ways, concinnitas represents the common denominator, the means of recognising beauty in all its diverse forms.137 Concinnitas is Nature’s law for attributing beauty, but it is also the method that can be employed to achieve beauty in human endeavor.138 Joan Gadol, while also recognising that concinnitas represents an enlarged concept of symmetria, claims that this ‘flows’ from Alberti’s expanded conceptualisation of each of its component categories.
According to Gadol, Alberti singles out finitio for special attention.139 She sources support for this view from De statua. Gadol believes that Alberti’s finitio can be defined as ‘measure’ or the ‘architectural equivalent of the sculptural rule’ developed with the aid of the finitorium.140 Where the finitorium circumscribes the human body in order to obtain a revelatory similitude,141 finitio, as, ‘correspondence between the lines that define the dimensions; one dimension being length, another breadth, and the third height’, represents a relational category that brings forth the harmonious architectural ‘body’ through measurement of its boundary.142 Numerus, which cannot be understood as number in any modern sense, is also expansive for it refers to quantities as well as qualities (reflecting a Pythagorean sensibility), such that nothing can be added or subtracted.143
Alberti states that the purpose of concinnitas is to ‘compose parts that are quite separate from each other by their nature, according to some precise rule, so that they correspond to one another in appearance’.144 However, Tavernor notes that Alberti’s collocatio (position or composition) is not to be confused with a contemporary understanding of planning, but is, instead, a ‘Natural
137 Choay, The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism: 99. 138 Ibid. 139 Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 108. 140 Ibid., 108 n.127. 141 For Alberti, the relative measures obtained with the finitorium and the exempeda could reveal beauty in any harmoniously proportioned body. The similitude produced on the basis of such measures was considered a revelation. 142 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 305. [Book 9.5.] Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance: 108, 110. 143 Drawing on the scholarship of George Hersey, Tavernor contends that numerus (number) is to be read, not as an abstract quantity, but in the Pythagorean sense which since antiquity had linked geometry with solid forms through symbolism and analogia. Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 45. See also Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti: Universal Man of the Early Renaissance: 108. 144 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 302. [Book 9.5.]
94 ordering … such that man, society and cosmos are in complete harmony’.145 Once a building is constructed, its context demands that beauty take on a moral imperative.146
In the same way that Alberti made compositio a central concern for painting, he made partitio and collocatio prominent concerns for architecture.147 Collocatio, or positioning is, like partitio, an assemblage category that refers to a natural ordering which is more than a mere composition of form (of harmonising elemental parts into a whole) as the architectural work has to be suited to its purpose, and to the requirements of patrons, users, and the site.148 As with partitio, the purpose of collocatio is to impart coherence. Collocatio embodies an aesthetic and historical dimension, yet retains a deep relation to number and analogy.149
While the ‘assemblage categories’ partitio and collocatio refer to planning and the invention of ornament respectively, Alberti does not explicitly describe how ornament binds with the structure to form a unified system.150 Instead, conceptual links allude to the relation between aesthetic and tectonic frames. Alberti describes the column as both a ‘principal ornament’,151 and tectonic element—‘a solid, and continuous section of wall … raised … for the purpose of bearing the roof’.152 As a structural element the column satisfies the requirement for necessity, while its representation as ‘bone’, signifies an appropriate and important association with Nature through structural imitation.153 The bodily–tectonic imitation of Nature that is emphasised throughout De re aedificatoria converges with ornamentation of the column.154 Alberti re-invents the Vitruvian proportions of the orders derived from an ideal man inscribed within the circle and square. He, instead, derives the thickness of the column from the average thickness and width of the human torso with its weight bearing capacity and strength.155 This implied, rather than prescribed, relation between structure and ornament as it relates to columns occurs intermittently within the
145 Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 46. 146 Ibid. 147 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 80. 148 Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 46. 149 Marco Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, in Theorising a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 504. 150 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 82. 151 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 183. [Book 6.13.] 152 Ibid., 25. [Book 1.10.] 153 Alberti refers to ‘bones within the wall’. Ibid., 71. [Book 3.7.] 154 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 88. 155 Ibid., 87.
95 text. The subtle nature of the association is illustrated when Alberti describes the profiles concentrated at the base of the column as,
composed of die, tori and scotia. … The tori are thick collars forming part of the base, one below the column itself, the other on top of the die. The scotia is a circular recess like that in the wheel of a pulley, sandwiched between the tori.156
Payne points out that the image of pulleys and wheels evokes a tectonic metaphor of dynamism, with its attendant forces of pressure and resistance.157 Such an expressive image imitates the forces that would naturally occur at this location thus generating a narrative that appropriately imparts logical coherence.158 In other words, ornament remains an expressive form bound with tectonics.159
According to Payne, Renaissance ornament was ‘architecture’s most conspicuous and promising bearer of theory’ as this was the locus where literary theory and the figural arts intersected.160 As with the column, the expressive narrative of the ornamental screen was also compelled to relate to reality and thereby signify coherence. As the site where the building was initially encountered the ornamental façade held special significance for Alberti, for not only did it mediate between the structural form and an intended audience, but it was the first location to reveal the dialogue between the traditions of the past and their appropriate, inventively reinterpreted present.161
Alberti harnesses his ornamental theory to the task of transforming a medieval church in Rimini, the Tempio Malatestiano (circa 1450). Commissioned by Sigismondo Malatesta, who was notorious for his sadism, greed and perversions, Mark Jarzombek suggests that it seems a project that would have been at odds with Alberti’s own highly moral views.162 Alberti’s architectural solution was to encase the Tempio in a way that was both ‘structurally and stylistically independent’ of the existing exterior. The Franciscan brick church was only partially clad with an applied ‘skin’ of large Istrian stone blocks. Along the sides, new arcades were left open to reveal sections of the original walls and windows, and only the lower half of the façade was
156 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 202. [Book 7.7.] 157 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 85. 158 ———, ‘Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture’, 112. 159 Gregotti, ‘The Exercise of Detailing’, 497. 160 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 67. 161 Ibid., 74. 162 Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories: 172.
96 complete.163 Jarzombek claims that the old building refuses to be buried; it remains intact and dignified in repose while ‘haunting’ the new construction and calling it into question. (Figure 8) He submits that the isolation of Alberti’s screen and its incomplete enclosure was a deliberate device conceived to prevent the Sigismondo Court from a profane contamination of a pure and simple church.164 Alberti’s program—a deliberately unfinished, well-proportioned classical body encasing an original gothic structure crowned with a gothic apse—represents an enigma. According to Frascari, the church is ‘an incomplete monster of perfection’ because the ‘incomplete remodelling [becomes] the actual [complete] construction’.165 The Tempio’s conventional presentation conceals or masks an underlying more truthful, intended, monstrous presentation.166
Figure 8. Leon Battista Alberti: Tempio Malatestiano (circa 1450) Rimini, front and side views
For Payne, Alberti’s inventive, ornamental paradigm based on imagination and artistic freedom is constrained by the ornamental paradigm based on appropriation and imitatio of antiquity and the human body in order to create a coherent assemblage, and form a unified whole.167 However, Frascari suggests that it was not Alberti’s primary intention to create a complete, whole, finished
163 Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 51–52. 164 Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories: 172–173. 165 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 51, 53. 166 Frascari claims that architectural monsters such as this, which give guidance, are essentially revelations or enigmas. Ibid., 50. 167 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 4, 6.
97 architecture analogous to the perfection rarely, if ever, achieved in Nature.168 Instead, he claims that Alberti predominantly sought perfection of the architect’s mind and intellect. Alberti alludes to this idea in Book I, and elaborates it in subsequent Books.169
It is quite possible to project whole forms in the mind without any recourse to the material, by designating and determining a fixed orientation and conjunction for the various lines and angles. Since that is the case, let lineaments be the precise and correct outline, conceived in the mind, made up of lines and angles, and perfected in the learned intellect and imagination.170
The part that ornament plays in this process is clearly articulated by Rykwert when he pronounces that ‘the lineaments, which are of the mind, had to be welded to brute matter by some third thing which makes the first comprehensible, or perceptible, in terms of the other: and that is ornament’.171 Ornament is the corporeal site in which the intellectual and material elements of the structure achieve communion.172
Payne acknowledges that, while Alberti sets up a tectonics based on the imitation of the human body without a theoretical frame to connect the wall/column and flesh/bones metaphor with the ornament applied to these structures, the two narratives are connected by the principles of decorum, coherence, necessity, tectonics, anatomy and proportion which concern both.173 However, she considers the absence of a general theory of ornament at a time when ornament was abundantly displayed, and theoretical treatises were being produced at a prolific rate, a surprising omission.174 Gregotti, on the other hand, contends that the classical architectural project included few details because they were a cultural expression and, therefore, well understood in the context of both design and building practice. Moreover, such details were known because their creators operated with a unity of purpose, which cannot be comprehended by taking a contemporary view of history since such a concept has no equivalent today.175 Gregotti also recognises that Alberti’s concept of ornament is an expressive form that is
168 Alberti considered it rare that Nature would ‘produce anything that is entirely complete and perfect in every respect’. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 156. [Book 6.2.] 169 Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, 503, 513 n.519. 170 Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books: 7. [Book 1.1.] 171 Joseph Rykwert, ‘Inheritance or Tradition’, Architectural Design 49, 5–6 (1979): 2–3. 172 Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, 503. 173 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 88. 174 ———, ‘Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture’, 101. 175 Gregotti, ‘The Exercise of Detailing’, 497.
98 possessed of integrity, since it retains a ‘memory of the original links’ to construction.176 It is this connection between tectonics and expressive meaning, and its function as the site where the mental and material merge, that permits Frascari to interchangeably use the contemporary term ‘detail’ when referring to Alberti’s ornament.
The architectural detail, as Frascari observes, is the site of both mental construing and construction.177 It occurs wherever materials and/or building elements are joined. Joints can be material, structural, formal, or mediate a change in function—evinced in the threshold that acts as transitional zone between interior and exterior space.178 Thus, details are an inventive expression of, not only architecture’s structure, but also its function.179 They exist as the smallest ‘units of signification’ in a work, where the order and meaning in such a part can signify and impart order and meaning throughout the entire project.180 As with Alberti’s ornamental historia, details, according to Frascari, ‘tell-the-tale’.
Frascari describes the façade of Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai as the perfect fusion of mental construing and material realisation.181 The façade was devised to connect a number of component properties and make them appear as a single entity befitting the social status of its occupants.182 The exterior surface consists of a stone veneer wrapped at one corner of the structure to create the impression of a weighted, imposing, three-dimensional form.183 The stone surface was applied in two stages. Five bays were completed initially, followed by a further two bays as the new properties were acquired.
The surface of the façade was subtly modulated, as its proximity to the street did not permit deep relief. The colonnaded surface is therefore something of an illusion.184 The façade is defined by seven, three storey bays, delineated by smooth faced pilasters supporting straight entablatures, which are contrasted against a background, channeled, rusticated surface. Tavernor claims that by expressing the rusticated stone wall and pilasters as a single element, Alberti imparted
176 Ibid. 177 Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, 500. 178 Ibid., 501. 179 Ibid. 180 Ibid., 500–501. 181 Ibid., 503–504. 182 Tavernor, On Alberti and the Art of Building: 83. 183 Ibid., 89. 184 Ibid.
99 ‘homogeneity and integrity’ to the surface.185 Each level is treated with a different order and the edifice is finished with a projecting cornice. (Figure 9)
Figure 9. Leon Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai (1446–1451)
The incomplete edge along the seventh bay is curious. (Figure 10) According to Tavernor, it provides evidence for the proposed inclusion of an eighth bay.186 However, Jarzombek compellingly argues that the careful articulation of the incomplete edge is a deliberate device designed to reveal what was concealed beneath the playful sectioning of the parts of the façade. The incomplete edge evokes the image of ruin, a form of fragmentation that offers a link with both the past and the future.187 Frascari emphasises that, despite the obvious incompleteness of the façade, the detailing is such that ‘nothing can be added or subtracted for the worse’. This idea finds support in the fictitious articulation of stone joints, which have been carefully modulated to provide a mathematical solution for relating the elements of the façade. They signal the
185 Ibid., 83. 186 Ibid., 96. 187 Jarzombek, On Leon Baptista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories: 175, 177.
100 importance of making the detailed architecture complete, irrespective of the incompleteness of the work as a whole.188
Figure 10. Leon Battista Alberti: Palazzo Rucellai (1446–1451) Incomplete edge
Thus, Frascari adduces that beauty for Alberti is achieved when the detail and its meaning are ‘set in a precise relationship’ by means of concinnitas.189 This idea reverberates across the centuries in the work of architects such as Carlo Scarpa whose reverence for the treatment of the architectural joint represents, according to Frascari, ‘the perfect realisation of Alberti’s concinnity’. For Scarpa’s details not only serve a functional purpose; they also serve as powerful cultural and historical signifiers.190
However, Alberti’s appropriation of the literary theories of rhetoric and poetics to the visual domain, which becomes the primary means of understanding architectural relationships and the production of architectural forms, establishes the ground for an architectural problematic. As literary forms transform post-Renaissance, their visual appropriations become disassociated from
188 Frascari, ‘The Tell-the-Tale Detail’, 504. 189 Ibid. 190 Ibid., 506.
101 any original purpose and value.191 This had a profound impact on architectural ornament as its value had become intrinsically bound with the theories of rhetoric and poetry, which overshadowed connections with its tectonic roots.192 During the seventeenth century, ornament’s diminishing relevance and semi-autonomous existence eventually resulted in it being understood merely in terms of its historical associations.
For some time ornament has remained at the margins. However, to re-view the monstrous ornamental detail as the inventive, enigmatic site where tectonic and expressive meaning become fused, prescribes a powerful architectural idea. This thesis draws sustenance from this idea. In the contemporary context the detail can still ‘speak’ for architecture; however, its embodied meaning has a different genesis and its signification reflects a new cultural and social paradigm.
191 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 7. 192 ———, ‘Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture’, 102–103.
102
Skin
… nothing extends as far as the skin, ornament has the dimensions of the world … through the skin, the world and the body touch, defining their common border. Contingency means mutual touching: world and body meet and caress in the skin.1
Michel Serres
A picture of a body can never be anything other than specific: it cannot stand for touching, or fleshy existence, or identity or any other general term of experience, unless it does so in its specific skin.2
James Elkins
1 Michel Serres, Les Cinq Sens translated by Steven Connor and cited in Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004), 28. 2 James Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2.
103 Vitruvius and Alberti both reference partite worldviews. The first, founded in inventive ornament and assemblage theories, was ruled by the paradigm of chaos and disorder. It had its beginning in myth where humans exerted limited control over a fate that was largely decided by capricious gods. Autonomy was only possible when the gods were sublimated and chaos brought to order. The second, a rational, ordered worldview, made manifest through the building’s structure was accessed metonymically by means of Euclidean geometry. The idea that geometry, or abstract reasoning, could impose order over chaos and disorder was co-incident with a shift from a worldview dominated by the sense of touch to one in which sight was privileged.1 Serres writes that the earliest geometrical models originated from stories that involved direct measurement, either by placing parts of the body such as the hand, or a measuring device, in contact with an object. In other words, measurement was derived from immediate human experience and restricted to that which was accessible.2
Serres claims that abstract thinking begins with the need to make implicit knowledge explicit. He recalls an ancient Greek account attributed to Thales of Miletus (circa 624 BCE–circa 546 BCE) who, when standing at the foot of a pyramid, speculates as to the height of a further two pyramids that can be seen in the distance. Thales notes their apparent difference in size and wants to test this. While it is not certain when the first sundial originated, the pyramid—as a fixed object— would have marked out the times of the day and seasons according to the length and position of its shadows and so functioned as a clock or gnomon. From the moment Thales becomes aware that, at a particular time of the day, the length of his own shadow was equal to the height of his body he would have understood that he could measure the inaccessible by imitating and extrapolating from that which was measureable. Because Thales was unable to physically measure the height of the pyramid using his own body, or by means of direct instrumentation, he invented a model. This model represents a reduction, ‘a scale, a type of ladder’, albeit one still closely connected to human experience. Serres notes that these early geometrical models, although abstractions, took ‘an indirect route’ to reach beyond direct experience.3
1 Sheets-Johnstone writes that corporeal sensory development ‘begin[s] in tactility and ends in vision’. She asserts that the relational, tactile geometry of topology is ‘more primitive—more fundamental … than Euclidean and projective geometries which operate at a visual remove from the body’. Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 43. 2 Michel Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josue V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 85. 3 Ibid.
105 While direct measurement was primarily achieved with the sense of touch, abstracted scales of measure relied on sight. Serres writes that the ‘ruse of reason’ was that it required a move from ‘practice to theory, to imagine a substitute for those lengths my body cannot reach’.4 Consequently, for the ancient Greeks, theoria or ‘to theorise’ meaning contemplation or insight becomes synonymous with seeing, an idea that would subsequently be extended to philosophy. Thales’ revelation is also notable for demonstrating that time needs to be frozen in order to measure geometrical space.5 At the moment he measured the height of the pyramid Thales negated the shadow, for the shadow, which is a dynamic and ever-changing gnomon had to be transformed into a constant in order to be rendered the mark of an idealised form.6 This leads Serres to adduce that the ‘origin of knowledge acquired through everyday practice is on the side of shadow’, and that the ‘origin of a practice acquired through knowledge is on the side of light’.7 The pre-eminence of sight within the sensory hierarchy of the Western metaphysical tradition would be subsequently consolidated in the writings of Plato and Aristotle.
While abstract mathematical thinking materialises out of a sensual discipline of geometry, with Euclidean geometry still retaining (although a step removed) links to its embodied origins, Frascari believes that descriptive geometry becomes ‘bodiless’ once merged with projective geometry. The highly abstract nature of analytical geometry dissociates mathematics from its synthetic roots.8
Despite the prevailing tendency of classical philosophy to dominate Nature through a rational ordering of reality, Steven Rosen observes that beyond the linear, rational edifice, disorder remained a pervasive and real force9—a condition he describes as apeiron [ἄπειρον], a Greek
4 Ibid., 86. 5 Ibid., 87. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 90. 8 Frascari emphasises that this dissociation has had far reaching consequences for architectural drawing (and ultimately the making of architecture), for a more bodied design process was possible when the architect still used tools to directly mark the page; a process that has been largely lost with computer generated drawing and imagining. He claims that the reduction in the production of non-trivial architecture corresponds with this loss. Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s imagination (Abingdon; New York: Routledge, 2011), 48–51. 9 This classical tendency had its origins in ancient Greece. The separation of culture/rationalism (which the Greeks named nomos [νόµος]) and nature/chaos (from the Greek phusis [φύσις]) is a dualism that predates the sophistic period of the fifth century B.C. E., although the Sophists would re-figure the paradigm and relate it to ethics and law. The Sophist debates crystalised with attempts to understand whether, or to what extent, moral practices, language, laws and beliefs were immutable (determined by nature) or customary (culturally determined); positions were polarized. While there were those that argued that phusis dominates nomos others claimed the reverse. Callicles, a Sophist weighted toward phusis, pointed out that although human laws attempt to make all men equal, nature’s law does not follow, and so, as with animals, it is the stronger that rules. On the other hand, Protagoras argued that morality, law and the arts civilize human beings—an idea that completely reverses the worldview of the
106 term that denotes ‘a boundlessness that defies ordering’.10 Rosen considers apeiron synonymous with Merleau-Ponty’s disordered side of reality, ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being—a primordial chiasmic condition that pre-exists concept formation and is constitutive of all Being.11 Prior to modernism, the classical monsters that signify the presence of apeiron remain (for the most part) concealed, or subversively yet safely situated in the ‘margins and gaps’ that delineate discourse. However, Rosen contends that ‘after being held at bay for over two thousand years’ apeiron returns ‘with a vengeance’ as the pluralism and fragmentation that accompanies the rise to dominance of individualism manifests during the mid-nineteenth century. He posits that it is apeiron that gives form to the ‘dilemma that underlies postmodernity’.12
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘brute’ Being is an idea implicit in Phenomenology of Perception,13 where, in addition to objective Being (transcendence: the sphere of things, and being-in-itself) and subjective Being (immanence: the sphere of consciousness, subjectivity, and being-for- itself), he identifies a ‘third genus’ of Being wherein ‘the subject loses its purity and transparency’.14 While Fred Evans and Leonard Lawler suggest that Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception with its focus on the fundamental relation between the body- subject and world can be considered ‘the culmination of the humanistic tradition within
ancient Greek poets (Hesiod and Homer) who considered the human condition a diminished, savage, semblance of a prior Golden Age of gods. Pamela Huby, Greek Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1967), 8–9. The philosophers Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, while defending nomos, soften the divide between orders; each recognising in their own way that nature or phusis allows humans to be receptive to nomos. Angela Hobbs, ‘Physis and Nomos’, in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Taylor and Francis, 1998) https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/physis-and-nomos/v-1. Although plural debates raged during the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E., with the balance tipping variously in favour of nomos or phusis, the coexistence of both orders remained, for the conflict between them was considered foundational to the human condition. It is this dialectical understanding of the human condition that persists in the Western philosophical tradition. According to Werner Jaeger, it was the distinction made by Socrates (as recounted in Plato’s The Republic) who claimed that a broad education helped the inner man (higher divine self) rule over the man (natural self), which is later elaborated in Plato’s The Symposium with the concept of Eros, that provided Renaissance humanism with a philosophical foundation. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet, vol. II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1943), 195. However, by the end of the seventeenth century, the worldview that makes space for the inclusion of both nature and culture yields to the metaphysics of a universal natural law. With the emergence of physics as a distinct scientific discipline, phusis (and its Latin derivative physis) is severed from its philosophical and cultural associations. 10 First attributed to Anaximander, Rosen states that for the early Greeks apeiron stood for ‘nature in the wild’. It was symbolised by the goddess Apeiron—apeiron being the Greek word for the ‘principle of disorder and disharmony’, or that which is ‘“limitless”, “boundless” or “indeterminate”’. Steven M. Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation (Amsterdam: Rodopi B.V., 2004), 3. Rosen adds, ‘In its sheer boundlessness, apeiron defies containment within the ordering contexts of space and time. To the early Greeks, this posed a considerable challenge. For, in the unconstrained many of apeiron there can be no one; in its chaotic multiplicity, there can be no unity, no stable centre of identity, no indivisible core of being, no individual’. Ibid., xiv–xv. 11 For more detail see the section, ‘Vico’s epistemology and ontology’. 12 Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: xiv–xv. 13 Dillon highlights this link. Matthew Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 153. 14 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 408.
107 modernism’, this subject-body does not exact sovereignty over the world.15 Instead, world and body are engaged in a dialogue that allows for ‘direction and meaning (sens)’ to develop in both.16 The opening of a body onto its world through perception is the foundation for a secondary refinement shaped through personal actions that establishes an individual’s asymmetric relation with their surroundings (Fundierung relation). This foundation or founded relation also underpins the relation between perception and language, which are connected by means of linguistic expression. Similarly, all abstract concepts (such as geometry, mathematics, and time) connect back to the body.17
In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty explains that ‘we take up a position in front of [this world]’ as each individual perceptive experience that we ‘successively live’ is ‘anchored’ in a previous spatial level of experience.18 Following this logic, our very first perception must also depend on the existence of a prior orientation for its spatial particularisation. Thus, Merleau- Ponty reasons that a world must exist anterior to our subjective existence; in other words, there must be a ‘prepersonal’ existence. He refers to this prepersonal experience as ‘primordial’, claiming that ‘it endows every subsequent perception of space with its meaning, and … is resumed at every instant’.19 Merleau-Ponty submits that while ‘primordial’ levels of experience ‘saturate consciousness’ they are unable to be accessed through reflection. However, when this primordial reality is accessed disorder and disorientation prevail so that there is a tendency for human beings to posit a level that is comfortable.20
Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought. That is why they saturate consciousness and are impenetrable to reflection. The instability of levels produces not only the intellectual experience of
15 Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, ‘Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate’, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 2. 16 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘This subject–object dialogue, this drawing together, by the subject, of the meaning diffused through the object, and, by the object, of the subject’s intentions—a process which is physiognomic perception—arranges round the subject a world which speaks to him of himself, and gives his own thoughts their place in the world’. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 152–153. 17 Evans and Lawlor, ‘Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate’, 5. 18 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 295. 19 Ibid., 296. 20 Ibid.
108 disorder, but the vital experience of giddiness and nausea, which is the awareness of our contingency, and the horror with which it fills us.21
Merleau-Ponty himself acknowledges that the subject-body of Phenomenology of Perception remains problematically attached to consciousness,22 and this prevents it from truly ‘[penetrating] the primordial dimensionality of our embodiment’.23 It is in The Visible and the Invisible that the perceiving body ‘fulfills itself in ontology’. In this subsequent text the subject–object dialogue metamorphoses into the ‘hyperdialectic’, a deeper, hermeneutical experience of embodiment that recognises a plurality of relations (enhancing recognition of difference and alterity), and thus ambiguity, rather than a ‘common direction’.24 That said, Matthew Dillon emphasises that the ‘ontological thesis of the primacy of phenomena has to be interpreted in conjunction with its epistemological correlate, the thesis of the primacy of perception’,25 for the ‘perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence’.26
It is with the ontological concept of the ‘chiasm’ (also described as ‘flesh’, brute/wild/savage Being, or ‘the intertwining’) that Merleau-Ponty ultimately challenges Cartesian dualism. In The Visible and the Invisible he describes the chiasm and its property of reversibility as the ‘ultimate truth’.27 Although this chiasm is modelled on the phenomenon of touch, Merleau-Ponty extends the notion to all forms of perception including vision, intercorporeality, language, and art.28 In describing the act of one hand of the body touching the other hand that is touching an object, Merleau-Ponty points out that the sensation of touching and being touched can vacillate at will.29
21 Ibid. 22 In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty notes, ‘The problems posed in [Phenomenology of Perception] are insoluble because I start there from the “consciousness”-“object” distinction—’ ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 200. 23 David M. Levin, The Body’s Recollection of Being: Phenomenological Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 64. 24 Evans and Lawlor, ‘Introduction: The Value of Flesh: Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy and the Modernism/Postmodernism Debate’, 9. See also Merleau-Ponty’s explanation: the ‘hyperdialectic is a thought that … is capable of reaching truth because it envisages without restriction the plurality of the relationships and what has been called ambiguity. The bad dialectic is that which thinks it recomposes being by a thetic thought, by an assemblage of statements, by thesis, antithesis, and synthesis’. Merleau- Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 94. 25 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology: 156. and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. John Wild and James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 13. See also Ricoeur Oneself as Another for Nietzsche’s summary attack on the positivist notion that aligns perception with truth. Ricoeur writes; ‘where positivism says, There are only facts, Nietzsche says, There are no facts, only interpretations’. Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15. 26 Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 13. 27 ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 155. 28 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology: 157. 29 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 9.
109 The actions are reversible, because the sensations are intertwined since both hands are united in the same body. However, there is an asymmetry attached to this model of touch, for the reversibility of touching one’s own body is different from the reversibility of touching an object that is neither sentient nor included in the subject-body.30 Moreover, the two sensations are never coincident: ‘coincidence eclipses at the moment of realisation, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains its hold on the world’.31 The ‘shift’ or spread that opens between these two sensations is described by Merleau-Ponty as,
[a] sort of dehiscence [that] opens my body in two, and because between my body looked at and my body looking, my body touched and my body touching, there is overlapping/or encroachment, so that we must say that the things pass into us as well as we into the things.32
Dehiscence, interruption, shift, gap, difference, and ecart are terms that Merleau-Ponty employs interchangeably to refer to the space of non-coincidence which, together with coincidence or envelopment, are key to his conceptualisation of the reversibility of perception. Gail Weiss describes ecart as the space in which the body image is continuously being transformed through the processes of incorporation and disincorporation.33 Body and object are changed through their perceptual intertwining, and so the flesh is co-constitutive.34 During intertwining distance and envelopment are paradoxically combined for, to perceive an object it is necessary to be separated from it—to stand outside it—and, conversely, to be coincident with an object is to identify as that object. Consequently, difference within unity (or identity) is an inherent quality of Merleau- Ponty’s reciprocity of touch. Dillon emphasises the ontological significance of this relation with the assertion that ‘ambiguous identity-encompassing-difference’ is the only way to avoid the polarisation of dualism.35
Merleau-Ponty associates the perspectival space valorised by Descartes, together with abstract notions of linear time, with a classical ontology that is not truly ontic, neglecting as it does the ‘wild’ side of Being that is both ‘older than everything and of the first day’ or, as Rosen explains,
30 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology: 159. 31 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 147–148. 32 Ibid., 123. 33 Gail Weiss, Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (New York: Routledge, 1999), 126. 34 Ibid., 117. 35 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology: 159.
110 ignoring ‘the embodied, apeironic dimension that constitutes the Being of being’.36 In his working notes for The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty writes:
Take topological space as a model of being. The Euclidean space is the model for perspectival being, it is a space without transcendence, … The topological space, on the contrary, a milieu in which are circumscribed relations of proximity, of envelopment, etc. is the image of a being that, like Klee’s touches of color, is at the same time older than everything and ‘of the first day’ (Hegel), … [Topological space] is encountered not only at the level of the physical world, but again it is constitutive of life, and finally it founds the wild principle of Logos——It is this wild or brute being that intervenes at all levels to overcome the problems of the classical ontology (mechanism, finalism, in every case: artificialism).37
For Merleau-Ponty the isotropic, three-dimensional space of perspective, defined by points, lines, and planes is a construct that is independent and unrelated to lived experience.38 Cartesian space can only be known by ‘[looking] on from above’,39 yet, humans do not survey their worlds from a remote, external vantage point, but instead take up positions within them.40 Although critical of the valorisation of perspectival space, Merleau-Ponty writes that ‘Descartes was right in setting space free’, to ‘first idealise space, to conceive of that being—perfect in its genus, clear manageable and homogeneous’, for it is only from this position that we understand the ‘limits of construction’.41 While it is necessary to be able to take up a position exterior to the subject, Merleau-Ponty claims that Descartes’ error was to ‘erect [perspective space] into a positive being, beyond all points of view, all latency and depth, devoid of any real thickness’.42 Because Being is polymorphous,43 ‘[differing] metrics are neither true nor false and, therefore, the results of these different metrics are not alternatives’.44 Although Merleau-Ponty recognises a plurality of spaces, it is the topological space of encroachment and envelopment shaped by ‘relations of
36 Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: 169. 37 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 210–211. 38 Merleau-Ponty claims that perspectival space cannot account for curved space and, further, to suggest that a single ‘physic- geometrical ensemble’ can account for both types of space is to cast doubt on the nature of space itself for, it assumes space can only be known from the outside. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Dominique Selgard, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 103. 39 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 160. 40 ———, Phenomenology of Perception: 354. 41 ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 174. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Merleau-Ponty and Selgard, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France: 103.
111 proximity, vectors and centres of forces’45 that Merleau-Ponty discerns beneath the perspectival edifice which ‘founds the wild principle of the Logos’ and is ‘constitutive of life’.46
45 Françoise Dastur, ‘World, Flesh, Vision’, in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 30. 46 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 211.
112 ‘Topological space as a model of Being’
Merleau-Ponty describes his concept of the chiasm, or flesh, almost exclusively in topological terms.1 William Hamrick and Jan Van der Veken suggest that Merleau-Ponty selected a topological frame to model the chiasm for: its approximation to curved space, its resistance to the separation of objects from their contexts, and the fact that curved space better ‘speaks’ to the ‘voluminous’ experience of ‘primordial’ space and its enveloping nature.2
Topology emerged as a qualitative branch of mathematics during the nineteenth century. It eschews the static, exact measurement of Euclidean and non Euclidean geometries3 and, in formal topology, studies the properties of objects that remain constant during deformation (homeomorphism), that is through twisting, stretching, compressing or any other distortive action that does not involve tearing the form.4 Topological transformations are not concerned with the relative size, distance, position or shape of objects, but with their spatial relations and connective properties. And so, the topological focus is on continuity, proximity, insidedness and outsidedness, connection and separation.5 However, Mitch Rose and John Wylie correctly
1 These terms include, proximity, separation and connection, envelopment, overlap, encroachment, folding, insideness versus outsideness, and intertwining. 2 William Hamrick and Jan Van der Veken, ‘Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought’, In The Way of all Flesh. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011). 3 Steven Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, Anglistik 15 (2004): 106. Although topology was only established as a formal discipline early in the twentieth century, its emergence was heralded by a number of earlier thinkers. According to Serres, Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), a Swiss mathematician, was the original inventor of topology which was introduced with his problematic of the Seven Bridges of Konigsberg. Euler proved that it was not possible to cross the town’s seven bridges in a continuous walk without a re-crossing. Further, Serres notes that Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who invented contemporary algebra and the theory of structures, had also discovered a discipline he referred to as analysis situs (or topology), ‘the sister science of the ars combinatoria’. Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866) was another pioneering ‘topological’ thinker. His studies focused on the properties of topological and non-Euclidean spaces, as opposed to more conventional three-dimensional spaces. Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 53 n.14, 46, 43 n.57. 4 Consequently, in formal topology, to harness a commonly cited example, a doughnut is equivalent to a coffee cup, for both objects represent continuous surfaces interpenetrated by holes. With topology it is fluidity, vitalism, connections, and relations that are most highly valued. Mitch Rose and John Wylie, ‘Guest Editorial’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24, 4 (2006): 475–476. 5 Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 106.
113 observe that the space of mathematical topology is an ontologically flattened structure, devoid of depth, shadow and mystery. They believe it is necessary to re-introduce notions of perception and subjectivity to avoid privileging a reduced, shadowless, perpetual becoming—a view that this thesis supports.6 Yet, although mathematical topology constitutes an abstraction, the abstraction still retains strong links to the body.7
‘Topology’ derives from the ancient Greek terms, topos [τόπος] (place or position) and logos [λόγος] (discourse).8 Rosen highlights the relation between topos, or ‘place’, and the word posture which has the root meaning ‘to place’, and an extended meaning, ‘the way a thing makes a place in the world’.9 The idea of bodily posture making concrete (or giving imaginal form to) the experience of place is in keeping with the materialisation that occurs with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological model of reversible touch; it is also consistent with Maxine Sheets-Johnstone’s primordial concept of corporeal topology, which begins in the infant prior to ego and/or concept formation.10
Sheets-Johnstone claims that all geometries constitute ‘humanly made ways of spatially construing the world’ but topology remains more closely connected to its bodily origins than projective geometries because topological notions such as proximity, separation, insides and outsides have their beginnings in corporeality rather than mathematics.11 On this basis she divides topology into two classes, the mathematician’s post-concept formation topology, and the infant’s pre-concept formation topology.12 Pre-concept topology emerges from a corporeal awareness of inside and outside, and up and down that leads to the formation of a body that is ‘sentiently felt’. This body ‘knows the world through touch and movement’, it is an ‘experienced and experiencing body’, and a body that ‘links thinking to spatial and sentient-kinetic life’.13 Sheets-
6 In relation to geographical theory, Rose and Wylie assert: ‘[In] prioritising, vectors, trajectories and connections, topological and vitalist geographies present a curiously flat and depthless picture … a surface without relief, contour or morphology. A spanning scene: no shadows cast, no bottomless well, no mysterious caverns. A world where there is much amusement and surprise but little mystery or depth’. They correctly add that the focus on connections and relations, which results in every object being given equal weight and value so that a bee might be considered equal to a street, results in ‘a sort of ontological over flattening’. Rose and Wylie, ‘Guest Editorial’, 476, 477. 7 Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 106. 8 Liddell and Scott, An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon. 9 John Schumacher (1989), 7–18. Cited in Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: 170. 10 Ibid., 170–171. 11 Sheets-Johnstone, The Roots of Thinking: 42–43. 12 Ibid., 43. 13 Ibid., 5.
114 Johnstone’s aim, as Merleau-Ponty’s, is not to valorise the tactile over the visual, but instead to ‘call attention’ to the primordial sensory ground from which topology emerges.14 While rigid geometries impose their order on a dynamic and fluid body, concepts associated with mathematical topology, according to Sheets-Johnstone, match transformational modes to the tactile-kinesthetic, living, moving body.15
Merleau-Ponty and Serres both take the concept of topology well beyond the reduced, plastic, shadowless surfaces associated with the space of mathematical topology. While Merleau-Ponty, as Sheets-Johnston, recognises a pre-concept topology founded on a body subject that is not yet detached from its world, Merleau-Ponty’s focus is ontological rather than developmental.
For Merleau-Ponty, it is topological space with its relational properties of proximity and envelopment that is truly ontological. Although Merleau-Ponty has been criticised for privileging vision over touch,16 implied and inscribed within his topological concept of flesh is recognition of the importance, although not exclusivity, given to touch—that primal sense associated with ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ being. Rosen contends that the topological space of ‘flesh’ that Merleau-Ponty describes in The Visible and the Invisible possesses dimensions equal to the ‘depth’ he describes in Eye and Mind, and on which the transformational experience of painting relies.17 In his final work, Merleau-Ponty describes depth as the dimension of multiple simultaneous views which ‘coexist in degrees of proximity’, while also making plain its intimate connection with the flesh for, as he states, ‘it is because of depth that … things have a flesh’.18
14 Ibid., 44. 15 Sheets-Johnstone notes that during topological deformations generated by a dynamically moving or twisting body the integrity of the self remains unchanged or constant (qualitative homeomorphism). Similarly, deformations wrought during more passive growth and aging do not alter ontological self-identity. Furthermore, structural relations are conserved during deformation; for instance, the head and feet retain their relative bodily positions during kinesthetic changes and more passive growth (or stretching). She submits that qualitative conservation is a fundamental fact of corporeal living that cannot be understood by means of reflection. Ibid., 45–46. 16 See Grosz’ account of the feminist response to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 103–107. 17 Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: 169. However, Sue Cataldi emphasises that Merleau-Ponty’s depth only achieves maturity in The Visible and the Invisible. Relying on the idea of ‘proximity through distance’, depth emerges with Merleau-Ponty’s ‘revised conception of the body as a “perceptible–percipient” and his notion that these two “sides” of Perceptibility of the Flesh, are incompletely “reversible”’. Sue Cataldi, Emotion, Depth, and Flesh: A Study of Sensitive Space: Reflections on Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Embodiment. (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993), 57. Although Merleau-Ponty’s new understanding of depth is made explicit in The Visible and the Invisible, the ideas that underpin this new understanding can be discerned in Eye and Mind, more particularly, in the experience revealed by Cézanne as he painted Mount St Victoire. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 161–181. 18 ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 219.
115 Depth
Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth operates on two levels: it is implicated in perception but also exists at the more profound level of Being. In Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty describes the depth associated with perceptual phenomena by making reference to the topology of the Necker cube, an object whose spatial orientation can be visually shifted through conscious effort to either project an outer surface or an inner surface.19 Faces concealed in one perspective are subsequently revealed in the alternate perspective. The figure is enigmatic; it creates a visual ambiguity whereby two reversing perspectives, which can be seen separately, spatially overlap one another. The event is made possible by their internal relation.20 Depth, in this sense, includes what is perceived as well as perceptual awareness of what is concealed from view (the hidden faces of the cube); it encompasses the object’s ‘voluminosity’.21 According to Merleau-Ponty, the manifestation of any visible object involves concealment of a ‘latent existence’, or horizon that is given to us despite the fact that we cannot ordinarily see it.22 But, just as there is non-coincidence with the subject touching and feeling touched, the two perspective views of the Necker cube do not coincide: boundaries hold and a gap is maintained. Rosen points out that to reversibly shift one’s view does not automatically make depth ontological. He claims that for this to occur the two reversible images must overlap in time and space: the views are not experienced sequentially, nor at once, but through a dynamic merging and separating.23
Merleau-Ponty did not consider depth a third dimension derivative of width and breadth, but viewed it as the first dimension. Depth ‘is the dimension in which things or elements of things envelop each other, whereas breadth and height are the dimensions in which they are
19 ———, Phenomenology of Perception: 306. 20 Steven M. Rosen, ‘How can we Signify Being? Semiotics and Topological Self Signification’, Cosmos and History 10, 2 (2014): 256. 21 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 213–214. 22 Hamrick and Van der Veken, ‘Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought’, 79. 23 Rosen, ‘How can we Signify Being? Semiotics and Topological Self Signification’, 259. Rosen states that the Necker cube is an abstract, objective model of Being, one dimension removed from the two-sided Moebius strip. He suggests that the structure of the Klein bottle, rather than that of the Necker cube, is a more suitable model of Being because it includes a fourth dimension that folds within the subject. ———, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: 187. However, as Sara Shabot Cohen points out, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘wild, non-refined, “vertical” Being’, or flesh, is not equivalent to the smooth homogenous mathematically inscribed space of geometry, but, a confusing, ambiguous, generative, heterogeneous, asymmetric, transformative and plural space, and so more allied to the space of the monstrous grotesque with its confusion of insides and outsides. This leads Cohen to posit that the grotesque figure constitutes a model suited to the postmodern subject, and thus the creation of a philosophy of difference and intersubjectivity that embraces heterogeneity and otherness. Cohen, ‘The Grotesque Body: Fleshing Out the Subject’, 57. See also Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 202–203.
116 juxtaposed’.24 It is a ‘multiplicity of perspective appearances … against the background of the stable thing’25 and is the spatio-temporal dimension of distance that folds (in The Visible and the Invisible) within the chiasm, or flesh.26 Merleau-Ponty explicates this notion with reference to Cézanne’s paintings.27 Cézanne’s description of the feelings he encountered when painting the landscape, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me’ and ‘I am its consciousness’, are interpreted by Merleau-Ponty as a perceptual folding back or reversibility, since the mountain sees itself through Cézanne’s perceptual gazing and this occurs over an interval of time.28 (Figure 11) In this example a series of perceptive reversals generates a temporal ‘thickness’ in which successive acts of perception and expression change both previous and subsequent experiences. It is an act of enfolding that de-centres the subject.29 Cézanne’s ‘ideated sensations’, which are the sensations prior to the bifurcation of sight and touch, recognise that an ‘unconscious element of touch is … concealed within vision’.30
24 ———, Phenomenology of Perception: 308. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 309. 27 ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 166. 28 ———, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, 63. See also Glen Mazis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time’, in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 56. Dastur emphasises that for Merleau-Ponty ‘wild Being’ or ‘the originating’ is not found in a recollection of the past, but in the ecart of the present in which the past exists, or ‘in the ecart that is the space of our whole experience’. Dastur, ‘World, Flesh, Vision’, 31. 29 Mazis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time’, 56. 30 Mark Paterson, Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 99.
117
Figure 11. Paul Cézanne: 'Mont Sainte-Victoire' (1902–1904) Oil on canvas
The experience of depth is revealed in myriad ways as we encounter our world. Glen Mazis refers to an excerpt from the novel Surfacing by Margaret Atwood in which the narrator becomes ‘caught up in the flesh of the world’ while wandering through the Canadian wilderness. Here, the character experiences a ‘heightened sense of being’, reflecting, ‘I am not an animal or a tree, I am the thing in which the trees and animals move and grow, I am a place’.31 Mazis points out that truly heightened, chiasmic experiences, or transformative moments are rare as they tend to be overwhelmed by the ‘signifying power’ of our present, lived sequential time.32
In understanding the depth associated with language, Merleau-Ponty observes, ‘No thing, no side of a thing, shows itself except by actively hiding the others, denouncing them in the act of concealing them’, and adds, ‘To see is a matter of principle to see farther than one sees, to reach a latent existence’.33 Depth is evoked by means of a latent vision in Carlo Scarpa’s design for the entrance gate to the Tolentini building of the Instituto Universitario d’Architettura di Venezia. As a ‘poetic monster’ that unifies the artefact (visible–stone gate) with the real (invisible–cultural
31 Margaret Atwood Surfacing (1972), 213. Cited in Mazis, ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Backward Flow of Time’, 60. 32 Ibid. 33 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 20.
118 context), this grotesque figuration makes visible the invisible structures of perception— such that the ‘invisible is the outline and the depth of the visible’.34
According to Merleau-Ponty, depth or Being ‘is what requires creation from us for us to experience it’.35 He claims that creative problems (he refers specifically to painting) are ‘solved obliquely’, by ‘unhearing historicity, advancing through the labyrinth, by detours, transgression, slow encroachment and sudden drives’.36 The qualities Merleau-Ponty associates with depth and the strategies required for understanding this domain, overlap with the qualities and strategies associated with Serres’ communicative ‘in-between’ space of exchange, of which ‘skin’ is paradigmatic.
Serres
Topology persists in Serres thinking for, according to Steven Connor, it allows the ‘primary operations of touch and moulding’ to merge with analysis.37 However Serres, as Merleau-Ponty, takes topology well beyond the limits of mathematical abstraction. For Serres, topology does not constitute a source for the production of forms, an idea that dramatically finds its way into architectural theory and practice with the publication of Deleuze’s theory of the fold38 but, instead, establishes a form of poetics that relates to complexities of matter, the processes of change, space, and time.39
Serres, in ‘seeking the best model for a theory of knowledge’, declares that the ‘state of things can be construed as a multiplicity of veils, the interlacing of which bodies forth a three- dimensional figure’.40 This approach can clearly be distinguished from that of the positivist, whose search for truth and knowledge is dependent on processes related to ‘anatomisation’, which begins with an unveiling or the rhetorical peeling back of layers of ‘skin’. Serres counters the analytic approach of Cartesian positivism by assembling ideas into an interdisciplinary
34 Ibid., 20–21. See also Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 54–58. 35 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 197. 36 ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 189. 37 Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 106–107. 38 Merleau-Ponty, Serres and Deleuze all connect the concept of the fold with ontological experience. However, it was Deleuze’s Le Pli, which was published just as computer assisted drawing became established in architectural practice, that spawned the literal proliferation of folded built forms during the nineteen nineties. This event is described in more detail in the third part, Prosthesis. 39 Connor notes the connection between Serres’ aims and Gaston Bachelard’s concept of the ‘material imagination’. Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 107. 40 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 81–82.
119 patchwork sourced from myriad genres including myth, narrative, and scientific discourse in order to disclose, rather than argue for, the epistemological primacy of the senses.41 He considers this mode of disclosure consistent with the operation of Plato’s original topological space, chora,42 which, as both matrix and ‘mother’, exists prior to, yet is the environ that facilitates the bifurcation of the Same and Other.43 According to Plato, the Same and Other are subsequently united by the Demiurge through the figure of the chi—or chiasmus.44 Chi represents the cracks, ruptures, intersections, and crossroads that exist between spaces. For Serres, mythical narratives travel along ordered paths only to loop back and intersect previous crossings, and thus create a ‘spatial complex’ or form of discourse that is chimerical. Serres considers Hermes,45 the god of communication who weaves paths and spaces, the mythical manifestation of chi.46 Mythical journeys such as those of Ulysses and Oedipus emulate the thinker’s journey; this does not conform to an overall plan and is not sequential but, instead, proceeds from one connection to the next.47
41 Serres’ pages are filled with rich descriptions of feeling, sensing, understanding, engaging and living, all of which are situated in the expansive, mundane material ground of existence. Margaret Sankey and Peter Cowley, ‘Sense and Sensibility: Translating the Bodily Experience’, in The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2008), vii–viii. 42 The implications of the concept of chora for architecture lie with its originary role in conceiving spatiality. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Woman, Chora, Dwelling’, in Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction, ed. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden (London: Routledge, 2000), 210. Pérez-Gómez emphasises that Plato’s chora, as a third realm that mediates between the determinate ideal realm of Being (associated with geometric space) and the natural realm of becoming (associated with the natural place of human bodies or topos), is necessary for the creation of language and culture. He states that chora is ‘the space of human communication that is inherently bounded and ambiguous’ without which ‘we cannot account for reality’. He adds that, as with dreams, chora can only be grasped indirectly ‘through spurious reasoning’ and with great difficulty. Since chora is the reality or ‘space of human creation and participation’ that occurs at the intersection or chiasmus of Being and becoming, it ‘enables the creation of human artefacts through techne and is also disclosed by them’. Further, Pérez-Gómez notes: ‘The self-consciousness that we associate with the birth of philosophy, science and architectural theory is inconceivable without the awareness of a distance between the mind and world that is revealed through desire’. Pérez-Gómez links the space of chora with the space of Eros Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 45–47. Chora is also described in the section ‘Subversion of the natural order’. The relation between chora and the first architecture is recounted in the section ‘Eros’. 43 Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 47–48. 44 For Serres, this ‘figure is formed by the inclination of the ecliptic on the equator; the world is a chimera’, and so ‘the space of the world requires artful connection’. Ibid., 48. Andrew Gibson, noting that Serres’ chi is denoted with the Greek figure � ‘in which the intersecting lines are neither straight nor equivalent to one another’, emphasises that � does not signal equilibrium or a meeting point, for one line is ‘errant’ or, as Serres describes it, ‘wandering’. Instead, Gibson claims the figure represents ‘the event of connection’. Andrew Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 88. 45 Gibson points out that Serres does not associate the god Hermes with the practice of hermeneutics, which seeks to arrive at a determination, but, rather, interprets the figure in a more classical sense. Traditionally the statue of Hermes as god of communication, transport, commerce and sailors was placed at a crossroad. In this position it constituted a point or node of transmission and so performed a function not unlike that of the philosopher. ———, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 86–87. 46 The chimerical (chi) space that Serres describes is also the space of Hermes. Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 48–49. 47 Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell, ‘Introduction: Journal a Plusieurs Voies’, in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari and David F. Bell (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), x–xi.
120 In The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies Serres identifies ‘skin’ as the paradigmatic exemplar of transitional chi space. Connor believes this work marks a turning point in Serres philosophical development which ‘folds itself back into [the] fabric’ of all previous works.48 Serres rejects the prevailing metaphor of the skin as surface, membrane, or interface: he considers such notions an abstraction. For him, skin, as kneaded dough, folds and enfolds: it both yields and resists and thus achieves depth and thickness.49 The skin is the site where the senses meet but it is also where the world and body meet: ‘The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge … in it the world and body intersect and caress each other’.50
Speculating on the location of the soul, Serres declares that it is to be found within the contingencies of the body as it extends into its milieu; it is in the moments when self touches the self, or when the ‘skin tissue folds in on itself’.51 For Serres, as for Merleau-Ponty, reciprocal touching, or to touch while being touched, is never symmetrical. At each ‘contingence’ the ‘soul or consciousness gathers disproportionately on one side of the exchange’; so, for example, when an individual cuts their fingernails, consciousness concentrates in the cutting hand.52 Serres asserts that we, and our worlds, are sensible because of this asymmetry for, since a central axis does not exist, orientations become irreducible and original. This inescapable split condition with
48 Steven Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, in Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 154. 49 While modern skin is conceived as a single surface, ancient Greek and Roman skins were understood to have thickness. These ‘thick skins’ were multi-layered; they included interior skins such as membranes wrapped around bodily organs. Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 60–61. Connor points out that the topological skin, which ‘holds the dream of the kneaded body’, is an analogue sourced from Bachelard who associates the working of dough with an ‘ideal primary paste’, that is, ‘the perfect synthesis of stiffness and softness’. In the action of folding ‘the dough of history’ temporal points that are spread out along the surface become either dispersed or drawn into proximal relation. This way of looking at history, as a dynamic and unfolding form, is the opposite of analysis—of cutting and separating. Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 109–111. 50 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 80. 51 Serres writes: ‘I touch my lips, with my middle finger. Consciousness resides in this contact. I begin to examine it. It is often hidden in a fold of tissue, lip against lip, tongue against palate, teeth touching teeth, closed eyelids, contracted sphincters, a hand clenched into a fist, fingers pressed against each other, the back of one thigh crossed over the front of the other, or one foot resting on the other. I wager that the small, monstrous, homunculus, each pair of which is proportional to the magnitude of the sensations it feels, increases in size and swells at these automorphic points, when the skin tissue folds in on itself. Skin on skin becomes conscious, as does skin on mucus membrane and mucus membrane on itself. Without this folding, without the contact of the self on itself, there would truly be no internal sense, no body properly speaking, coenesthesia even less so, no real image of the body; we would live without consciousness; slippery smooth and on the point of fading away. … Consciousness belongs to those singular moments when the body it tangential to itself’. Ibid., 22. 52 ———, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 44.
121 which each individual meets their world is not a dualism but, rather, a relation that is in a constant state of flux and exchange.53
Serres, as Merleau-Ponty, does not valorise a single space but believes bodies are situated in multiple, varied, and an ever increasing number of spaces, whose intersections, junctions, and overlappings are continually being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.54 With a focus on the spaces between, or interconnections rather than circumscribed forms, understanding is achieved through heuristic involvement.55 While each culture forms its own distinct appearance, through a unique blend of plural spaces they are all connected by similar modes, which include interweaving, bridging, tying, and linking. Individuals that refuse to ‘pass … through the crossroads of multiple connections’, or remain within a single space, become maladjusted, socially maligned, and ill.56 And so, Serres claims it is essential to journey between spatial ‘varieties completely enclosed upon themselves’, a movement that can only be achieved with the ‘category of between’—or topology—‘the sister science of ars combinatoria of monstrous mixtures’.57 Hermes is Serres’ motif for communicating between different spaces, systems of knowledge, and time that has been ‘folded and crumpled’.58
According to Serres, we have lost sight of the connections between different forms of knowledge and their associated spaces. Local knowledge cannot be understood by means of a global homogeneous structure. True knowledge is plural and materially grounded in its cultural milieu.59 The metaphor of intersection, or crossroads is a deliberate attempt by Serres to resist the vertical dimension of positivist critique and its implicit hierarchies. Crossroads denote a horizontal structure with each intersection pointing to another relation. This produces an accretive maze of linkages, or a structure that is metaphorically associated with the labyrinth.60 Andrew Gibson notes that, while horizontal structures that reduce existence to a single plane might be construed as monistic, the same criticism cannot be leveled at Serres; for him each intersection can be
53 Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, 155. 54 Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 87–88. 55 Ibid., 87. 56 Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 44–45. 57 Ibid., 45, 46. 58 Kevin Clayton, ‘Time Folded and Crumpled: Time, History, Self-Organization and the Methodology of Michel Serres’, in Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London: Continuum, 2012), 41. See also Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 60. 59 Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 88. 60 Ibid., 94–95.
122 folded, overlapped, knotted, and layered to form multiplied entanglements which, although thickened vertically, resist reduction to an overall hierarchical ordering.61
A hierarchical concept of ordering implies that a body of knowledge can ideally be known, that it can be complete or whole. Serres points out that such ordering is accompanied by the misguided view that knowledge leads to clarity and illumination.62 However, the notion (or metaphor) of the crossroads recognises that new connections and thickenings are continuously being made and unmade, and that the opacity and confusion associated with non-knowledge is an ever-present shadow that accompanies knowledge formation.63 Unstable and uncertain, the crossroad can fold into skin or form any other type of intermediary.
So, while discourse underpinned by metric theories mistakenly harnesses methods that seek the quickest and most direct route to arrive at experience and understanding, Serres recommends that human journeys and experiences be topologically extended or ‘optimised’. He advocates taking circuitous routes in order to ‘maximise feedback’, to allow for shifts in the body’s viewpoint or orientation, and thus create opportunities to vary and test concepts. This is best achieved with maze-like structures which reflect on and fold back over themselves.64
Serres idea of enhancing, sustaining or prolonging perceptual experiences by means of multiple perspectives is allied to the concept of ‘slow encroachment’ that is associated with Merleau- Ponty’s depth.65 These ideas find expression in Carlo Scarpa’s design for the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Venice. In this work Scarpa overlays a pre-existing ground floor plan, which remains as a trace, with a new map—a way-finding palimpsest. (Figure 12) Scarpa’s re-tracing, which also re-writes the way water enters the ground floor during flooding, was designed to sustain and deepen the visitor’s kinesthetic experience as architectural elements are encountered and negotiated in new ways. (Figure 13) Perceptual prolongation is also
61 ‘Monism’ is problematic because it re-asserts a position of domination—that of monism. Ibid., 95. 62 This idea stems from the conceptualisation of the body as an a-priori structure, a notion discussed in more detail in the section ‘masterful touch’. 63 Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 95. 64 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 143. See also Pérez-Gómez who writes that the form of the labyrinth, which combines the path of Hermes and the space of Hestia, ‘became a privileged symbol of cities (and architecture in general) in the Western tradition’. And further, that this is ‘the same combination [that] is implicit in the chora or dance platform’ i.e. implied in the circular space between the amphitheater and stage that was occupied by the orchestra in ancient Greek theatre. According to Pérez-Gómez, the labyrinth, with its single point of entry and single centre, is a condensed symbol of human life; it signifies the presence of order in disorder. The association between the labyrinth and the notion of architectural order persists throughout the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque. Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 49. 65 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 189. See also ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 216.
123 realised with Scarpa’s restoration of Castelvecchio in Verona. Here, material changes that directly reference the body, such as those that occur at the height of the shoulder, are situated in liminal spaces including doorways where the body is made proximate, forcing a metonymic re- framing through the momentary confusion of bodily insides and outsides. Glossing Frascari, Scott Drake notes that, while Scarpa’s metonymic shifting of the body (or bodily parts) into architecture differs from the figural metonymy of classical anthropomorphism, in both instances human experience is translated into the built form via productive means that harness the double reference of rhetoric and materiality—a manifestation that merges visual and tactile thinking.66
Figure 12. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) The original floor plan (left) was subject to periodic uncontrolled inundation of water. Scarpa's 're-mapping' (right) also re-writes the way in which water enters the ground floor during flooding.
66 Drake, ‘A Well-Composed Body: Architecture and Anthropomorphism’, 184. The difference between Scarpa’s use of metonymy and the form of metonymy harnessed in classical architecture is discussed in more detail in the section ‘Third Space’. See also Frascari, ‘The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa’, 123.
124
Figure 13. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) New steps from northern canal portals (top left) Raised porch linking the northeast room and entry foyer (top right) New entrance bridge through northern façade window (bottom left) Original staircase partially encased in new stone (bottom right)
Castelvecchio’s most dramatic prolongation emerges with Scarpa’s articulation of the vertical space that serves as a link between the original castle structure and a subsequent extension built during the Napoleonic occupation. Within this inter-connective, dehiscent (chi) space the direct route is shunned in favour of an unfolding that takes place around the statue of Cangrande I. The circulation path guides the participant on a journey that is built around the sculpture. Subject and object are made both distant and proximate through an unfolding sequence of multiplied viewpoints during a slow encroachment in which the subject dwells in the space. (Figure 14)
125
Figure 14. Carlo Scarpa: Castelvecchio (1956–1964) 'Cangrande' viewed from below and above
Connor writes that Serres’ ultimate objective was to create a ‘one-to-one map of the world, reproducing all its fractal singularity, that would be its skin’.67 Within the Western tradition, skin and its correlate touch have become divided along gendered lines—a separation first fixed in partite worldviews. During the early modern period, which sets the scene for present day concept formation, closed, unified skins and masterful touch were aligned with a ‘masculine’ ordered world, while grotesque, porous, expressive skins bound with Eros and touch were ascribed to a disordered ‘feminine’ world.
67 Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, 157.
126 Monstrous skins
Although monsters were regarded as portents, and thus imbued with divine significance during classical antiquity, they came to be seen as natural wonders and/or sources of pleasure and delight during the course of the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century, as science assumed dominance over rhetoric and the arts, monsters had transformed into objects of enquiry, most notably in the fields of physiology and comparative anatomy, and began to lose their magical associations. These historical shifts in the perception of, and emotional response to monsters were not discrete or tidy transitions, as perceptions and attitudes overlapped and combined throughout the early modern period.1
At the time of the ancient Greek poets2 monsters were regarded as wondrous and/or terrifying omens, portents of an impending or future event that may have been either positive or negative. Their presence required interpretation and/or dissemination.3 It was reasoned that, since monsters occurred outside common everyday experience, they must derive from another world—the world of gods—so that they were considered an expression of divine will.4 Regardless of whether an omen foretold of a fortunate or calamitous event, monsters were suffused with supernatural
1 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 175–176. Charles Wolfe notes the complex and ambiguous relation humans have with monsters. He emphasises that despite medicalisation of the early modern monster it continued to ‘show’ the true order of Nature by means of its hidden structural differences and exceptions. Wolfe draws on the writing of Francis Bacon to lend support for his view; in particular, the following excerpt: ‘Errors of nature … correct the erroneous impressions suggested to the understanding by ordinary phenomena, and reveal common forms … For he that knows the ways of nature will more easily observe her deviations; and on the other hand, he that knows her deviations will more accurately describe her ways’. This excerpt was first published in 1620, in Novum Organum, II, § 29. Cited in Charles T. Wolfe, ‘The Materialist Denial of Monsters’, in Monsters and Philosophy, ed. Charles T. Wolfe (London: King’s College Publications, 2005), 190–191. 2 The ancient poets referred to here are Homer and Hesiod, who were active around 750–650 BCE 3 Peter von Möllendorff, ‘Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium’, in Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity, ed. Thorsten Fögen and Mireille Lee (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2009), 94–95. 4 Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 2.
127 meaning and consequently granted extraordinary status.5 However, it was the capacity of monsters to direct humans toward a future threat or event, and thereby potentially disrupt an established world order, that eventually led to them being considered unnatural and deformed.6
The ‘original’ monstrous figures recounted in a parable in Plato’s Symposium,7 figures from which all humans emerge, as classical monsters more broadly signify on multiple levels. Centrally located within the Symposium is a speech conducted by the comic poet Aristophanes in which he recounts how humans develop from an original race of double-bodied creatures composed of a round torso, single head (with two faces looking in opposite directions), four arms, four legs, and two sets of sexual organs.8 These original humans moved about with a rotating cartwheel motion and were enormously strong. It was their strength that fed the conceit that they could conquer Mount Olympus. As punishment for their hubris Zeus cleaved these creatures in half turning only their faces so that they could ‘forever see what they had lost’.9 However, the creatures immediately engaged in a prolonged embrace with their separated halves, brought on by intense despair and longing, and so began to waste away. In a gesture of pity, Zeus rearranged the creatures’ genitalia so that they could at least temporarily assuage their yearning through sexual fulfillment. Yet, this act would always remain a proxy for the complete, eternal fulfillment that had existed when double-bodied humans interpenetrated each other as one.10 According to Jonathan Sawday, this ‘divine anatomical separation’, or dissection of the original humans into two fragments represents the ‘founding moment of all difference, the creation of the attraction of both opposite and similarities’.11
Similarity and difference
Aristophanes’ story upends the established world order. Peter von Möllendorff notes that the present human form, which we perceive as normal, even perfect or ideal, is depicted in this story as deficient. Conversely, the original humans, whom we would ordinarily consider monstrous,
5 Ibid., 2–3. 6 von Möllendorff, ‘Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium’, 95. 7 Plato, Symposium, ed. Erich Segal, trans. Seth Benardete, The Dialogues of Plato (New York: Random House, 1986), 250–253. 8 Ibid., 251. See also von Möllendorff, ‘Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium’, 87, 98. 9 ———, ‘Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium’, 88. 10 Plato, Symposium: 252. 11 Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 184.
128 represent the perfect and established order.12 Further, a temporal dislocation emerges as the past ideal state of human existence becomes the ideal future state.13 Only a divine act of grace from the gods could return humans to their former state of monstrous ‘perfection’, their original state of wholeness.14
In this parable humans are reduced to tokens, or ‘symbols’ that retain association with their lost halves. For the ancient Greeks, a symbolon was a metonymic token of remembrance. It was initially understood as an object broken in two by a host who would proffer one part to a guest whilst retaining the other in a gesture of unity.15 Should the guest or any of their descendants return to the host’s household many years later, the two parts of the object would be joined and made whole in an ‘act of recognition’.16 Hans-Georg Gadamer points out that the symbol permits recognition by indirect means and, in this sense, operates in the same way as classical allegory.17 Both indirect formulations (the symbol and allegory) can be discerned when reading the parable as an allegorical expression of the philosopher seeking the token of true knowledge and thus access to the divine world of Ideas to achieve completion, albeit with cautionary consideration for the danger of hubris. For Gadamer, this erotically charged and ‘profound image for elective affinity and the marriage of minds’ can be extended to the experience of ‘the beautiful in art’, in which ‘the whole and holy order of things’ is revealed.18 For, just as the token allowed the host to recognise the guest by secondary means, the symbol indirectly accounts for the recognition associated with meaningful experience mediated through art (and architecture).19 Here, understanding emerges through the ‘intricate interplay’ between revealing and concealing that refuses recovery of full meaning.20 Because completion is denied, idealism is avoided.21 Symbolic structures that lie beyond the intentions of the artist creator, do not point to meaning
12 von Möllendorff, ‘Man as Monster: Eros and Hubris in Plato’s Symposium’, 96. 13 Ibid., 99. 14 Ibid., 96. 15 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays, ed. Robert Bernasconi, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge Universtity Press, 1986), 31. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 32. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 47. 20 Gadamer points out that Martin Heidegger first describes the notion of philosophical insight gleaned by means of a revealing and concealing which allows ‘us to perceive the ontological plenitude or the truth that addresses us in art’. For further detail see ibid., 33–34. 21 Ibid., 34.
129 but, as with Serres’ veils, ‘allows meaning to present itself’, so that individuals are able to move ‘beyond [themselves] by penetrating deeper into the work’.22
Subversion of the natural order
Classical monsters challenged the concept of unity that underpinned metaphysical philosophy and classical aesthetics. The monstrous and grotesque resulted when the perceived natural order and its associated established hierarchies became compromised either through excess, incompletion, malformation, hybridisation, and excessive growth.23 Mark Dorrian submits that these classes have their origins in Platonic and Aristotelian concepts of world order and biological generation, and can all be reduced to the deformation categories of ‘disproportion’ or ‘combination’.24
In Plato’s Timaeus two orders of reality are distinguished: the ever changing, natural, corporeal world that humans experience and understand through the senses (world of becoming) that is an imperfect copy of; the entirely separate transcendent, incorporeal, perfect, and eternal world of constant, universal Forms apprehended through the intellect (world of Being).25 The Demiurge brings primeval cosmic chaos to order and unity (and thus closer to perfection) mnemonically through geometry—by means of the proportional arrangement and relationship of elemental geometric forms.26 As a microcosmic version of the greater macrocosmos, the unified human body is similarly composed of a closed system of proportional geometrical relationships. The classical aesthetic canon based on this worldview—from which Vitruvius derived his ideal human proportions—conformed to the laws of an ‘anthropomorphic decorum’ such that all parts must exist in proper relationship with the unified whole.27 Within this schema, disproportion and combination are problematic, for these orders do not allow the body to relate to the one.28
The concept of combinational aberration is introduced in the Timaeus with an account that describes how Ideal ‘Forms’ (analogous father) are copied into matter within the intermediary,
22 Ibid., 34, 53. 23 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 310. 24 Ibid. 25 Stumpf, Philosophy: History and Problems: 60–62. 26 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 311. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.
130 chora (analogous mother), in order to bring ‘copied forms’ into existence.29 Chora makes no contribution other than to provide the conditions necessary for procreation or production by the ‘father’.30 Thus, chora represents an enigmatic, neutral, invisible, formless structure that brings Form to matter—it makes the intelligible world sensible. Elizabeth Grosz describes chora as ‘a kind of womb of material existence, the nurse of becoming, an incubator to ensure the transmission or rather copying of Forms to produce matter that resembles them’.31 Where chora fails to be completely neutral and contaminates the imprinted copy of the ‘father’, a hybrid is produced.32
Aristotle’s account of biological generation, On the Generation of Animals, also makes reference to the combinational aberration that results from the imperfect copying of the (male) parent. However, he goes further, writing that the bodily appearance of progeny can be considered monstrous whenever they differ from the parent. Monstrosity is, thus, a consequence of dissemblance. This claim is expanded with the assertion that the first departure from generic type in Nature occurs when a female is formed instead of a male.33 Although Aristotle makes the association between females and monsters plain, both of which he considered deviations from the paternal norm, he states that females are a necessary deformity whereas other monstrous beings serve no real purpose. Aristotle subsequently expands his definition of monsters to include not only those that differ from their parents and ancestors, but those that possess an unnatural resemblance to other species.34
Aristotle’s monsters were not linked to physical imperfection but a deficiency in the natural laws whereby the ideal mimetic resemblance between a male parent and his progeny was violated.35 According to Aristotle, monsters formed when sperm brought into contact with the undifferentiated reproductive substance of the female was unable to exert dominance over this substance and so sufficiently shape it. The degree to which male gametes dominated reproductive matter accounted for the variation and extent to which progeny resembled the father—that is, the highest levels of dominance produced the closest resemblance. As the power of sperm
29 The relation between chora and the original architectural space is described in the section ‘Eros’. 30 Grosz, ‘Woman, Chora, Dwelling’, 213. 31 Ibid., 212. 32 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 311. 33 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals: Book IV, trans. Arthur Platt (Adelaide: University of Adelaide, 2007). Book 4.3. 34 Ibid. Book 4.3. 35 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 312.
131 diminished, the resemblances between fathers and offspring were believed to become more distant, extending in the first instance to the grandfather, then to more remote relatives, and finally to the appearance of animals.36 The lowest order hybrid progeny were not humans born with animal body parts but, instead, were humans in which the animal had become manifest. As such, these offspring were considered interspecies mixtures.37
Imagined skins
Profanity always designates a threshold: the one where the simultaneity of what is hidden and what is revealed is in operation.38
Luce Irigaray
Skin … is a materialisation of the immaterial, the making literal or material of the borderline—or the abstract idea of the borderline—between matter and form, res and species, a thing and its figure.39
Steven Connor
The Aristotelian concept of generation, together with the idea that the mother could negatively affect or shape her foetus, combined with an enduring tradition that held the mother’s imagination responsible for producing monstrous offspring.40 Consequently, monstrous births came to be seen as warnings as well as visible ‘demonstrations’ of maternal desire.41 These ideas found their way into a variety of Renaissance texts including literary works and philosophical and medical treatises.42
Marie Huet suggests that the idea that the maternal imagination could shape progeny through mimetic action derived from desire (or terror) created a complex relationship between procreation
36 Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals: Book IV. Book 4.3. 37 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 312. 38 Luce Irigaray, An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 188. 39 Connor, The Book of Skin: 113. 40 While the idea that the imagination of the mother could affect the formation of her offspring has its roots in antiquity, it was a notion that continued to hold sway up until the nineteenth century. According to Dorrian, the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles of Sicily (490 BC–440 BC) was the first to document this idea. Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 312. Empedocles believed the mother’s imagination was wholly responsible for the dissemblance between parents and offspring. Moreover, because monstrous offspring bore a resemblance to objects or images disassociated from the processes of physical re- creation, such as those derived from fantastic dreams, they were considered a product of art as opposed to Nature. Marie-Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 5–7. 41 ———, Monstrous Imagination: 6. 42 Ibid., 9.
132 and art, for these women essentially took over the role of ‘sculptor artist’. They fashioned monsters through the perversion of ‘Nature imitating Art’, rather than ‘Art imitating Nature’.43 Monstrous progeny not only transgressed the established hierarchy in which the legitimate father should be imitated, but inverted the hierarchy that males and females ought to properly adopt in the process of reproduction. In the act of creation the mother’s imagination exhibited plastic qualities since she shaped the external form and appearance of her progeny.44 However, the female imagination was only considered capable of sensible production, not intelligible production. Her imagination was devoid of intention and telos: all she could do was create a resemblance.45 Huet contends that the mother’s monstrous imitation did not deserve the same scorn that Plato leveled at painters and artists who created works that were at once beautiful and untrue. She faithfully imitated the distortion already imposed on reality by the artwork, and so, exposed its lack of faithfulness to the real.46 The monster that had been modelled on an imitated image did not conceal its origins but rather revealed the ‘source of its deformity’.47
Resemblance was an important factor in generation theories because it offered a natural (albeit tenuous) connection between fathers and their offspring, while at the same time underscoring that paternity could never be certain. Monstrous progeny served as a public reminder of the threat to paternal certainty: resemblance presided over a superficial order while simultaneously masking a primordial disorder. And so, Huet adduces, ‘what resemblance conceals, the monster unmasks’.48 Through imitation early modern monsters made invisible things visible.
Monsters conserved form while at the same time transgressing and eroding it, because an aberration can only be understood to be such if the original form remains recognisable in the transgressed figure. Accordingly, monstrous figures retained a complex matrix of significations that prevented them from descending into the ‘unitary condition of formlessness’.49 The complex nature of the relationship between resemblance (mimesis) and dissemblance evoked by the monstrous trope is highlighted in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.50 Frankenstein’s monstrous
43 Ibid., 7–8. 44 Ibid., 24. 45 ———, ‘Monstrous Imagination: Progeny as Art in French Classicism’, Critical Inquiry 17, 4 (1991): 26–27. 46 ———, Monstrous Imagination: 25. 47 Ibid., 26. 48 Ibid., 34. 49 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 314. 50 Mary Shelley’s novel was originally entitled Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, and first published 1818.
133 creation is not defined by the extent to which he deviates from the ideal human figure, but rather by the extent to which he resembles humans. This is confirmed when the monster says to Frankenstein, ‘God, in pity, made man beautiful and alluring, after his own image; but my form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid even from the very resemblance’.51 Arne Melberg properly notes that ‘mimesis is never a homogeneous term’, that as it moves ‘towards similarity it is always open to its opposite’, to difference, as well as distance and absence.52
While there was widespread acceptance of the power of the maternal imagination during the Renaissance, it was understood to be only one of many factors that might contribute to monstrous births. As new theories of generation emerged they drew upon and combined a variety of models, although many continued to show evidence of the anxiety and fear that a patriarchal society held for the power women exacted over the process of reproduction.53
Generation theories were, notably, also interpreted through the atomist philosophies of Epicurus and Lucretius54 who posited a perceptual model whereby membranes shed by objects rippled through the atmosphere until physically encountered by means of the senses.55 These flying ‘membranes’ (simulacra or pneuma) retained and conveyed a sense of the object’s bodily form; visual understanding was produced through merging the ‘seer’ with the ‘seen’.56 With the continuous shedding of ‘membranes’ the material limit of the pre-modern skin envelope was extended, and the space between bodies becomes a medium that connects all bodies, both animate and inanimate. Lucretius writes:
51 Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (Harmondsworth, 1972), 19. Cited in Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 314. 52 Arne Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3. 53 Monstrous births continued to be attributed to the mother’s excess and perversion including: sex with the Devil; sex during menstruation; inter-racial mixing; the mixing of sperm; and, the consumption of forbidden food. Rosemary Betterton, ‘Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 21, 1 (2006): 82–83. 54 During the Renaissance, Claude Quillet published an influential poem that opposed Aristotle’s theory of generation and, instead, embraced Epicurean philosophy. Translated as ‘The Way to Beget Comely Offspring’ (1655), Quillet’s poem combines myth, folklore and science in order to formulate a poetic instruction for midwives managing conception, pregnancy and infant care. Connor notes the great care Quillet takes to explain the physical process involved in transferring ‘the damaging impression’ of the ‘the object of the mother’s fear or desire to the skin of her child’. For Quillet, sight and touch are made proximate by means of ‘subtle skins’ that are the ‘objects of sight … scoured … from the surface of visible objects’. Connor, The Book of Skin: 108– 109. 55 Connor notes that materialist theories of atomic discharge describe the way in which atoms bind laterally in order to form plates or ‘skins’. Ibid., 110. 56 Ibid., 115, 113. Merleau-Ponty describes the merging of the ‘seer with the seen’ as the chiastic reciprocal condition whereby we no longer know ‘which sees’ and ‘which is seen’. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 139, 245.
134 To primal elements, I now begin To teach you about images, so-called, A subject of most relevant importance. These images are like a skin, or film, Peeled from the body’s surface, and they fly This way and that across the air …
… these images of things, These airy semblances, are drawn From surfaces; you might call them film, or bark, Something like skin, that keeps the look, the shape Of what it held before its wandering.57
It is the fragile Lucretian membranous ‘simulacra’ that Serres harnesses in his philosophy of the senses when suggesting that the impressionist canvases of Pierre Bonnard operate as a ‘simultaneous simulacrum’ or a merging between the skin of the painter and the ‘fine envelope of things’.58 (Figure 15)
Figure 15. Pierre Bonnard: 'Nude in the Bath' (1925) Oil on canvas
57 Lucretius Carus, Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The 'De Rerum Natura' of Titus Lucretius, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 120. 58 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 38.
135 Significantly, Lucretian ‘membranes’ did not stop moving once they arrived at bodily surfaces; they continued to penetrate throughout bodily depths.59 And so, these membranes were able to imprint a monstrous image upon the receptive skin of an unborn child while the mother herself remained resistant enough to avoid any change.60 Thus, pre-modern female skins held the capacity to screen and protect, but were also open to contamination and corruption.61 Yet, the porosity that made females vulnerable (or transmissive) to simulacral impressions was the same physical process that allowed individuals to acquire knowledge and learning. In other words, both ideas and impressions could be transferred back and forth across pre-modern skin membranes.62 Since the transformative power of the maternal imagination relied on the connection and interaction between the mind (imagination) and body (skin), the maternal skin came to be read not so much as a receptacle as an interface: ‘Her skin [was] a meeting place for the different possibilities or natures of the skin’.63 According to Connor, this skin was no mere passive and expressive surface, but an ‘actively unfolding and self-forming organism’.64
The corruption associated with porosity and the imagination was emphasised with monstrous categories, such as the abject crones of the Middle Ages with their uncontrolled, leaking bodies, and the dynamic, expressive, porous skins of Bakhtin’s Renaissance grotesques.65 While females
59 Lucretius writes: ‘[Simulacra] move Sometimes most easily through other things’. Carus, Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The 'De Rerum Natura' of Titus Lucretius: 123. 60 Connor likens these mothers’ skins to glass, since this membrane was both ‘tough’ and ‘transparent’. The softer more impressionable character of women translated into a belief that women were better able to read the surface of things but, less able to penetrate and perceive deeper truths. Connor, The Book of Skin: 112, 115. 61 Consequently, the pregnant female required regulation. She was obliged to remain disciplined and controlled in order to protect her foetus. Betterton, ‘Promising Monsters: Pregnant Bodies, Artistic Subjectivity, and Maternal Imagination’, 83. Braidotti writes: ‘By the end of the eighteenth century, the mother’s body seems to be in a position structurally analogous to the classical monster: it is caught in a deep contradiction that splits it within itself. The female, pregnant body is posited both as a protective filter and as a conductor or highly sensitive conveyer of impressions, shocks and emotions … There is an insidious assimilation of the pregnant woman to an unstable, potentially sick subject, vulnerable to uncontrollable emotions’. Rosi Braidotti, ‘Signs of Wonder and Traces of Doubt: On Teratology and Embodied Difference’, in Between Monsters, Goddesses and Cyborgs: Feminist Confrontations with Science, Medicine and Cyberspace, ed. Nina Lykke and Rosi Braidotti (London: Zed Press, 1996), 149. 62 There were a number of tensions surrounding the notion of bodily porosity (in addition to that of the mother) for, as Shirilan points out, ‘The very mechanics that make a body capable of learning wonderfully make him [or her also] capable of learning wrongly’. Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 67–68, 80. 63 Connor, The Book of Skin: 117. 64 Ibid., 118. 65 Miller writes with reference to the pseudo-Ovidian text De vetula that, during the late Middle-Ages female bodies were not only seen to transgress the boundaries of the proper human form, but also made monstrous through the reproductive cycle itself: they transformed ‘from something stable and attractive (i.e. the virgin body) into something loose and leaky (i.e. the multiparous body) before the final dissolution into old age and eventual decay’. There is early evidence to support this idea. Pliny had written in Historia naturalis that ‘nothing could be … more remarkable/monstrous than the monthly flux of women’. Miller, Medieval Monstrosity and the Female Body: 3–4. Menstrual seepage was not only an involuntary phenomenon (signifying a lack of control) and violation of the bodily boundary; it was also considered toxic and intrusive; it had the power to ‘seep from the eyes of menopausal women’ and harm babies. Consequently the process of generation in all humans (both normative and aberrant) involved formation from ‘abject superfluities’, and following this, gestation in ‘contaminated receptacles’ (the female human
136 and monsters both highlighted the unstable and dynamic character of the skin membrane, Sarah Miller contends that female monstrosity was not merely an exemplar of the monstrous corpus, but was actually its primary manifestation, for it is the body ‘from which all bodies—monstrous or not—emerge’.66
body). Ibid., 4. The ‘ill-formed matter’ of the female body was both the source of bodies considered monstrous, and those that were not. Since the female body is the body from which all bodies emerge; it was considered a ‘text of flesh’ in which one could read signs pertaining to the origins of life and ultimately, decay and death. According to Miller, it was the troubling of fundamental categories such as ‘desire and disgust, life and death, self and other’ combined with the essential, inescapable requirement for women, that accounted for the complex affective response toward their bodies during this time. Ibid., 7, 136. 66 Ibid., 138.
137 Ornamental skins
The fragment, and by association monstrous assemblage, were subjected to renewed attention during the Renaissance. This interest emerged from a desire to reassemble the remains of a lost past and piece together a whole and complete understanding of antiquity.1 Although some assemblages directly referenced their ancient origins, for the most part, the architect struggled with the infinite combinations that the ruins made possible.2 The ability to process ancient fragments within an unrelated context predicated the need for new theoretical paradigms, and the demand held for all disciplines including architecture.3
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola4 recounts in Regola delli Cinque Ordini d’Architettura (1562) a process for selecting and combining (mescolanza or heterogeneous mixing) ancient exemplars and fragments which he used to piece together a novel Composite order. In sum, he outlines an eclectic stratagem for reclaiming antiquity.5 Vignola resisted analogy with the myth of Zeuxis believing there was a fundamental difference between the process of assemblage related to art and the process of assemblage required for architecture. While the artist pursued an ideal form dictated by a higher order, the architect was forced to make a subjective selection from diverse fragments that could be combined to produce a limitless array of forms.6
1 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 21. 2 Ibid., 21–22. 3 Ibid., 21. 4 Vignola, as with a number of his contemporaries, came to architecture through painting. Apart from a dedication and brief introduction, his treatise consists entirely of images with integrated explanations. It was the most heavily referenced architectural treatise up until the nineteenth century. Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: from Vitruvius to the Present, trans. Ronald Taylor, Elsie Callander, and Antony Wood (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 80. 5 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 29. 6 Describing the process by which he designs the orders Vignola writes: ‘I have made this selection not like Zeuxis of the Crotonian maidens, but according to my own judgment, from all the orders, deriving them simply from those of the ancients all together’. In Trattati, Pietro Cataneo and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola, ed. E Bassi and M. W. Casotti (Milan: II Polifilo, 1985), 516. Cited in ibid.
139 Recounted in several classical and antique texts, the story of Zeuxis is also found at the beginning of Cicero’s second book of rhetoric, De invention. Its inclusion is important to Cicero as he harnesses the story’s combinatory method as a stratagem for structuring his account on rhetoric.7 The story unfolds with the citizens of Croton engaging the great artist Zeuxis to produce a painting befitting the Temple of Juno. Zeuxis submits that Helen of Troy would be a subject worthy of veneration, and therefore painting. Since Croton was renowned for its beautiful women, he determined that Helen should be modelled on the most beautiful Crotonian of all. However, Zeuxis was unable to discern all aspects of beauty in any single individual. His solution was to choose a number of women and select from each their most admirable feature: these he then ‘assembled’ and imitated to generate an image of the divine Helen.8
Should pre-modern combinations derived from Nature be positioned along a continuum, the grotesque heterogeneous mixture of parts arranged in an implausible whole (described by Horace), would lie at one end, while the ideal body assemblage (depicted in the story of Zeuxis) would lie at the other.9 The grotesque mixture only ‘succeeded’ when its heterogeneous parts remained coherent. The Zeuxis assemblage succeeded (for the most part) because its parts were of the same kind; they imitated their original purpose or function in the reconstituted whole, for example, a leg ‘part’ still represented a leg. However, the distinction between mixtures (heterogeneous) and assemblages (of the same type) slips and slides.10 As Leonard Barkan notes, a hint of the heterogeneous is revealed in Cicero’s Zeuxis story when Zeuxis is offered male models (on the grounds of modesty) as a simulacrum to develop his image of Helen.11 The act of such combinatory activity evokes monstrous connotations, not only in relation to the issue of seamless mixing, but also because the selected parts no longer reference their origins. Instead, they defer to a new whole.12
The Zeuxis story focused on the act of artistic production, a process that could readily have been extended to architecture. However, as Vignola attests, the analogy was problematic as Renaissance architects were dealing with the practice of mescolare, or the piecing together of
7 Leonard Barkan, ‘The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric, and History’, in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 100. 8 Ibid., 100–101. 9 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 25. 10 Ibid., 25–26. 11 Barkan, ‘The Heritage of Zeuxis: Painting, Rhetoric, and History’, 101. 12 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 25.
140 heterogeneous fragments of antiquity, rather than piecing fragments of the same ‘species’.13 Variants on the Zeuxis myth in classical literature included the stories of the bee and the silkworm; narrations that made reference to originality and imitation in artistic production as they recounted the transformation of one type of matter (pollen/saliva) into an altogether different type of matter (honey/silk). The creative act in both instances sublimates imitation to the higher order of invention.14 In combination, the three stories highlight the tension between the dialectic of imitation and invention that had become a concern for all acts of architectural appropriation during the Renaissance. In the context of this debate Renaissance architects were also drawn to the writings of Horace.15
Although Horace’s cautions regarding monsters contributed to Vitruvius’ position on ornament, which rejected the impossible mixing of elements that defied tectonic logic and reason, Connelly emphasises that it was not the extreme form of ornament that was at issue with Horace’s grotesque, but the capacity of the grotesque to put two (or more) established boundaries ‘into play, or pull [them] into a liminal space’.16 When this occurred, the distance (difference) between ornament and the object that it embellished was diminished, collapsing accepted orders. The danger associated with monstrous ornament was greatest for those who benefited from the maintenance of such orders.17 However, monstrous mixtures were not the only subversive constructs to exert power over Renaissance architecture; Ovid’s narrative poem Metamorphoses (completed in 7 AD) expands the field.18
Metamorphoses
Metamorphoses, as the name suggests, embraced the concepts of change and transformation, both earthly and divine, as its central themes. The poem represents an ancient cosmological epic that unifies the classical Greek myths as it spans the temporal distance between the origin of the world and the deification of Caesar.19 The narrative explains the universe through the reconciliation of a series of dialectic orders that include heaven and earth, the animate and
13 ———, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 276–277. 14 Ibid., 276. 15 Ars poetica not only highlighted the dangers associated with mixing, but hinted at the strategy’s creative potential. Ibid., 283– 284, 294. 16 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 26. 17 Ibid., 31. 18 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 284–285. 19 Frank Justus Miller, ‘Introduction’, in Metamorphoses (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), ix–x.
141 inanimate, and human and beast. The physical, material body is central to the poem, for it is the locus where the tension between the potential disorder of the physical world and the human desire for order and transcendence is expressed.20 In early antiquity, the tensions created with the uncertainty and instability of bodily matter, studied by materialist philosophers such as Lucretius, together with the ambiguous realities revealed through metamorphoses and ekphrasis,21 were key concerns.22
Although Ovid’s human body is shown to be ‘vulnerable, penetrable, and porous’ as it undergoes a continuous series of transformations, the metamorphic world retains its coherence.23 Barkan suggests that while the magical transformations in the poem are not rational or logical in any scientific sense, they nevertheless relate to a ‘transforming spirit’ that is grounded in the real world.24 Conversely, the poem never depicts a real or mysterious transformation that does not involve magic. According to Barkan, this paradox ‘proves the natural world magical and the magical world natural’.25 He adduces that metamorphosis is the ultimate corporeal metaphor because ‘the business of metamorphosis … is to make flesh of metaphors’.26
The perpetual transformations so central to metamorphic myths operate within a cosmic continuum where ‘no realm of being, visible or invisible, past or present [animate or inanimate, human or bestial] is absolutely discontinuous with any other’.27 Mythic thought embraces an ‘intuitive perception of metaphor’; it seeks to identify an essence that ‘carries across’ the boundaries between disparate objects uniting them with the notion that Being is one.28 Or, as Ricoeur summarises, ‘fiction [myth], by opening us to the unreal, leads us to what is essential in
20 Charles Segal, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the “Metamorphoses”’, Arion, Third Series 5, 3 (1998): 9. 21 ‘Ekphrasis’ is defined in the Oxford Classical Dictionary as ‘an extended and detailed literary description of any object real or imaginary’. ‘The Oxford Classical Dictionary’. edited by Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Heffernan describes ekphrasis as ‘the rhetorical description of a work of art’. James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 191 n.192. 22 Leonard Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 10. 23 Segal points out that while Ovid’s understanding of bodily porosity follows in the tradition of the materialist philosopher Lucretius, Ovid’s fluid transformations rely on metaphors that enhance the anxiety surrounding bodily transformations. Segal, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the “Metamorphoses”’, 10. 24 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 18. 25 Ibid., 19. 26 Ibid., 89, 23. 27 Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature: 51. 28 Ibid., 52.
142 reality’.29 This view stands in clear contradistinction to a scientific approach that reductively classifies objects based on their essential nature, and so produces abstract typologies.30
In myth, metaphoric speech and images are understood literally. Thus, according to Geoffrey Harpham, ‘When Dylan Thomas says that “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/drives my green age”, he is speaking metaphorically from an Aristotelian point of view, yet literally from a mythic one’.31 Harpham claims that the grotesque lies at the margin of both figurative metaphor and literal myth where they neither mix nor unite.32 This liminal zone can be plainly understood when gazing at Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting Wasser (1566). (Figure 16) If the image is examined up close, the viewer perceives a mass of fish; however, by increasing their distance from the image the viewer begins to ‘read’ the portrait of a man. It is in the intermediate zone, where the image is equally split between references to both man and fish, where the frame is inhabited by plural forms that do not conform to established hierarchies that the grotesque comes into play. Moreover, according to Harpham, it is in this liminal zone that the title, Wasser becomes activated to (perhaps) signify, at the level of allegory, the common origin of the simultaneous representations.33
29 Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: 296. 30 Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature: 52. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid., 53. 33 Ibid., 13.
143
Figure 16. Giuseppe Arcimboldo: 'Wasser' (1566) and detail. Oil on lime wood
While modern concepts of logic seek to avoid contradiction through the construction of hierarchies of meaning, the mythical universe embraces contradiction and ambiguity—all is meaningful. In the mythical world, gods and corpses do not exist in a relative relationship, but coexist on an equal footing as ‘palpable and living presences’, their relationship mediated through the poetic narrative.34 Myths do not dissociate the senses but, rather, embrace ‘a logic of the senses’. Sensations, such as those evoked by images of decayed or raw flesh which occur together with images of ripened or young flesh, reveal a unified world that cannot be reduced to the abstract physical properties of isolated materials.35 The mythic embrace of the full, bodily, organic cycle of life is what, according to Harpham, allows it to function alchemically,36 transmuting the stuff of life into an understanding of wholeness. Harpham adduces: ‘It is one of
34 Ibid., 54. 35 Ibid. 36 Jung’s study of alchemy sought to discover the secret of ‘liberating the divine potency from the humblest and grossest of physical substances’. Ibid., 55.
144 the large paradoxes of wholeness that it cannot be imagined or figured except as a violation of natural laws, in monstrous or distorted form’.37
Ovid’s physical universe is a numinous world in which all objects possess a divine essence and therefore poetic meaning, be it a flower or stone. Further, every object has a metaphoric story that is produced when the objective identity of the thing is bound with a set of embodied human values. In the world revealed by Ovid, where the boundaries between humans and non-humans have become disturbingly fluid, reason and order can quickly descend into confusion and chaos. The connection between Ovid’s metamorphic body and the notion of disorder aligns with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, as described in a seminal study Rabelais and His World (published in 1965). In tracing the carnivalesque spirit from antiquity to the high Renaissance, Bakhtin determines that with the carnival there is ‘a temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men and of certain norms and prohibitions of usual life’.38 The carnivalesque works with the material world and especially the body—not the body of the mind, but the body as it is experienced through its functional bodily processes.39
The grotesque body … is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body. Moreover, the body swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world … All [bodily] convexities and orifices have a common characteristic; it lies within them that the confines between bodies and between the body and the world are overcome: there is an interchange and an interorientation. This is why the main events in the life of the grotesque body, the acts of the bodily drama, take place in this sphere. … In all these events the beginning and end of life are closely linked and interwoven.
Thus the artistic logic of the grotesque image ignores the closed, smooth, and impenetrable surface of the body and retains only its excrescences … and orifices, only that which leads beyond the body’s limited space or into the body’s depths. Mountains and abysses, such is the relief of the grotesque body; or speaking in architectural terms, towers, and subterranean passages.40
Bakhtin describes the grotesque body as a transitional figure in a state of permanent metamorphosis; it is a body caught between birth and death, growing and becoming. This body is not separated from the world of objects by a clearly defined ‘skin’ but is, instead, blended with
37 Ibid. 38 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: 15. 39 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 84–85. 40 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World: 317–318.
145 the world. Harpham claims that Bakhtin’s fluid blending ‘signifies transcendent merriment, the pure joy of unimpeded process, the affirmation of a rich, dynamic, sensual, festive, cosmic Oneness’.41
Ovid’s metamorphoses, as with Bakhtin’s carnivalesque, depicts the body through its discrete, exaggerated, and distorted parts and processes, rather than through the body as a whole.42 While there is a similar dynamic operating in both transformations as boundaries are transgressed and natural laws challenged, Charles Segal considers Ovid’s metamorphoses more restrained. He suggests that this restraint was prescribed by ‘epic decorum’, and points out that it is a constraint that is absent in Rabelais’ approach.43
Nonetheless, Ovid’s focus on those transitional moments when stable forms and hierarchies disappear and discord is produced, exposes the symbolic, social, and political systems based on order and coherence that normally remain hidden. The poet harnesses myth and art to convert the ‘underlying qualities of mind, character or emotion’ into physical form, thereby revealing hidden human essences that include needs, longings, passions, and fears.44 While the modern literary form will generally situate the body in an individualised story, Ovid’s metamorphoses act upon the body to reveal its character.45
The first of Ovid’s metamorphoses is of Lycaon who, possessed of wolf like savagery for having offered Jupiter human flesh to eat and refusing to recognise his divinity, is transformed into his essential being—a wolf.
His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains some traces of his former shape. There is the same grey hair, the same fierce face, the same gleaming eyes, the same picture of beastly savagery.46
The narrative operates on two temporal levels: that of history, myth, and ritual, and at the level of resemblance and exemplum which is demonstrated with the physical realisation of character. In
41 Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature: 108. 42 Segal, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the “Metamorphoses”’, 12. 43 Ibid., 33–34. 44 Ibid., 12. 45 Ibid., 14. 46 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2nd ed., 2 vols., vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1921), 19.
146 this transformation, the human changes shape but the character remains continuous, thereby linking old and new forms. The close associations justify the metamorphosis, and subsequently allow the reader to understand the more remote associations that may be logical or extend along a spectrum toward the illogical.47 In another account, the Centaur Ocyrhoe is caught at the very moment she is being transformed into a horse.
I would that I had never known the future. Now my human shape seems to be passing. Now grass pleases me as food; now I am eager to race around the broad pastures. I am turning into a mare, my kindred shape. But why completely? Surely my father is half human’. Even while she spoke, the last part of her complaint became scarce understood and her words were all confused. Soon they seemed neither words nor yet the sound of a horse, but as of one trying to imitate a horse.48
The grotesque is evoked with the interpenetration of beast and human. In her physical form (as Centaur), but also spiritually, Ocyrhoe struggles with human consciousness while her sensate being is, at the same time, transforming into a horse. Her awareness of this moment, of becoming overwhelmed by a desire to eat grass, highlights competing tensions between the primal, bestial form and the rational human form. Barkan observes that the metamorphosis ‘images forth’ the displacement or dissociation of a creature trapped between the ‘hierarchies of creation’.49
Ovid’s first clear articulation of the flexible nature of matter occurs when Man himself is created. The flux of elements and parallels between microcosm and macrocosm are animated by means of the metamorphoses that suffuse this account, which has been generally understood as an interpretation of Platonic cosmology.50 The reader is asked to accept the metaphoric flow between separate categories of existence. Yet, although the narrative describes a form of human evolution that occurs with a series of transformations, it is not so much the end state of the metamorphoses that characterises human identity, as the allusive processes that give definition to the ambivalent transformative moment.
47 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 23. 48 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–VIII, 1: 107. 49 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 24. 50 Ibid., 30.
147 And the stones—who would believe it unless ancient tradition vouched for it?—began at once to lose their hardness and stiffness, to grow soft slowly, and softened to take on form.51
In the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha the stone from which the human is formed is not simply transformed in a single moment by a divine power but, rather, begins with the alteration of a material substance which must firstly become soft and pliable. The description evokes the double reference of malleable clay and pliant human flesh, ‘an image of simultaneous but divisible multiplicity’.52 There is also a suggestion that art may play a role in the formation of the body, for, once the stones had grown and softened,
a certain likeness to the human form … could be seen, still not very clear, but as statues just begun out of marble have, not sharply defined, and very like roughly blocked-out images.53
Notably, the form of metamorphosis enacted by the artist or sculptor as they transfigure bodies into various mediums similarly enhances awareness of our own corporeality. Binding two metamorphic acts in a shimmering double frame, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s (1598–1680) marble sculpture, Apollo and Daphne (1622–1625), transmutes bodies into stone while simultaneously revealing the mythical moment in which Daphne’s body begins to change into bark and leaves.54 (Figure 17)
51 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–VIII, 1: 31. 52 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 32. 53 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–VIII, 1: 31. 54 The work depicts the transformative moment in the myth of the same name when, triggered by the smitten Apollo’s touch, Daphne is changed into a laurel tree. Ibid., 35–43.
148
Figure 17. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: 'Apollo and Daphne' (1622-1625). Life size marble sculpture housed in the Galleria Borghese Rome.
Throughout Ovid’s poem art magically facilitates the fluid transgression of boundaries between the various orders and states of reality, such as the movement from solid to liquid, or animate to inanimate states. Charles Segal compares the material fluidity of Ovid’s metamorphoses with the Baroque sensibility that, for example, makes marble appear as fabric.55 (Figure 18)
Figure 18. Gian Lorenzo Bernini: Fabric detail from 'Ecstasy of Saint Teresa' (1647–1652) and flesh detail from 'The Rape of Proserpina' (1621–1622)
55 Segal, ‘Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the “Metamorphoses”’ 17.
149 Ovid’s account of Pygmalion and Galatea simultaneously addresses the body’s interrelationship with art and Nature, noting that both art and Nature employ the creative process to render form from matter. Pygmalion acquires a pejorative view of natural, fleshed women based on his encounters with ‘immoral’ Propoetides (prostitutes).56 Consequently, he rejects Nature and instead turns to art, carving his ideal woman (Galatea) from ‘snowy ivory’.57 The statue is perfect. It exceeds any beauty found in Nature so that Pygmalion becomes ‘inflamed with love for this semblance of a form’. Moreover, he ‘kisses it and thinks his kisses are returned. He speaks to it, grasps it and seems to feel his fingers sink into the limbs when he touches them’58— an image of material fluidity that that echoes that of flesh wrested from stone in The Rape of Proserpina (1621–1622) by Bernini. (Figure 18)
Miraculously, through Pygmalion’s love and caressing the ivory grows soft, ‘as Hymettian wax grows soft under the sun’, and he exerts the ultimate power over his artwork.59 Pygmalion’s transformation defies the idea of a universal physical truth and instead, implies a changeable truth in which the subject, as with Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm, can affect the object; that is, imagination, artistry, devotion, and love can transform inert substances into flesh and bring an artwork to life.60
Barkan contends that the use of simile in the story of Pygmalion—where the process of ‘breathing’ life into a carved figure is likened to the softening of wax—was used by Ovid to signal a metamorphic transition or proto-metamorphoses.61 According to Marie von Glinski, similes highlight ambiguities, contradictions, complexities, and/or problems associated with metamorphic transformations.62 Although metaphor constitutes the figurative means by which Ovid’s physical metamorphoses are realised, von Glinski believes that, when metaphors represent the sole means for modelling literal transformations, a ‘linear argument’ that focuses on the finality of the transformation can result.63 She considers metaphor a potentially static model that might not fully explore the dynamic tension and ambiguous resolution between the first and final
56 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books IX–XV, trans. Frank Justus Miller, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Heinemann, 1916), 81. 57 Ibid., 83. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 85. Barkan claims that in Ovid’s poem ‘wax stands as an emblem of all matter’ for it remains the same substance despite continuously changing form. Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 77. 60 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 77–78. 61 Barkan describes proto-metamorphoses as rhetorical devices that signal the direction of a transformation. Ibid., 20–21. 62 Marie Louise von Glinski, Simile and Identity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 155. 63 Ibid., 4.
150 state of transformations, such as is made plain during those surreal moments when a human mind is trapped in an animal’s body. The risk posed by a static view of transformations is that they can lead to a simplistic understanding of the body, as mere expression of an inner emotion, and so potentially instantiate a superficial reading. Von Glinski submits that Ovid, with the employ of simile, was able to effectively and irreducibly illuminate the transitional moments between real and transfigured bodies.64
Although the analogies of metaphor and simile both rely on resemblance, the more closed nature of metaphor, which owes no allegiance to the identity that spawned it and thus largely displaces the identity of the original sign,65 can be contrasted with simile where identities are brought together in a relation that retains the expressive character of both terms. Similes, therefore, exhibit a hybrid nature. While metaphor locks the metamorphic transformation into a physical form, the ‘suggestive power of the simile’ means that closure is avoided; this is because simile, although concerned with likeness, also relies on contrast.66 With simile the dynamic tension between similarity and difference acts as a destabilising force, making ‘identification less certain, … more fluid and diffuse’.67 The similes contained in Metamorphoses mediate between two levels of Being while possessing no ontological status of their own. They exist in a continuous state of becoming.68 Von Glinski contends that ‘Ovid’s similes draw attention to themselves; they do not fit into a superstructure of imagery but work against the grain as hermeneutical puzzles that open up new complexities’.69
While Ovid’s transformations involve a transfer of identity, such as from humans to the inhuman or inanimate, it is the simile that emphasises the nature of the processes operating at the ‘ephemeral moment’ that marks the gap between the original and end state of the metamorphosis.70 The simile inserted at this point pauses the reader, at once expanding the
64 Ibid., 11. 65 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 21. 66 von Glinski, Simile and Identity in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: 2, 4. 67 Ibid., 154–155. 68 Ibid., 38. 69 Ibid., 154. 70 This action is evident in the mythical story of Deucalion and Pyrrha. In this narrative the process whereby humans emerge from stones is likened to the way in which form is slowly (and partially) revealed as the artisan carves a human figure from marble. This simile confuses the ‘natural’ mimetic order in which art imitates Nature because the proposition of Nature imitating art (as with the maternal imagination) is evoked. Comparisons of humans with sculpture are found throughout Metamorphoses. Most examples are located just before the climax of a transformation; they commonly signify the freezing of movement, or death. Ibid., 34–35, 37.
151 moment of contemplation; the insertion amplifies the process and draws attention to its instability.71 Similes relate to the physical world because they ‘transmit something immaterial through the mental image of something material’ and so represent a mode of seeing that generates an emotional response.72
The hermeneutic function of simile and its relation to metaphor, so central to Ovid’s mythic poem, finds visual resonance in Arcimboldo’s painted composite heads. Roland Barthes notes the ‘linguistic’, or poetic foundation of these works which depend on the creative combination of signs.73 Analogy, or the comparative simile in which a dish may be likened to a helmet, is transformed into a visual metaphor when the helmet actually is a dish. Yet, Arcimboldo’s visual metaphors do not present ‘one idea under the sign of another’; but, in a visual twist, they retain the sign of both, thus exhibiting the character of simile. The metabola of Arcimboldo’s extreme metaphors are not in a state of Being, but in a state of praxis (of doing); they are transitive. According to Barthes, Arcimboldo does not merely demonstrate a ‘talent for collecting resemblances’, but ‘[undoes] certain familiar objects in order to produce new, strange ones from them … which is the visionary’s work’.74
Unlike the visual arts more generally, which tends to operate on one level of articulation (where meaningful forms are derived from lines and points), Arcimboldo’s images, as linguistic discourse (which operates at the level of both word and sentence), operates on two levels of articulation. Because the objects that make up Arcimboldo’s composite heads still retain their original identity, the viewer’s eye ‘hesitates’ between the total meaning of the image and the separate details.75 The viewer’s comprehension is not realised by seeing both images simultaneously, but through a dynamic merging and separating between the two levels of signification.76 According to Barthes, the structure of an image produced through this visual
71 Ibid., 155. 72 Ibid., 158. 73 Roland Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 131. 74 Ibid., 139. 75 Ibid., 134–135. 76 Rosen, ‘How can we Signify Being? Semiotics and Topological Self Signification’, 259. Barthes expands this idea: ‘Arcimboldo makes painting into a veritable language; he gives it a double articulation. The head of Calvin first decomposes into forms which are already namable objects—in other words; a chicken carcass, a drumstick, a fishtail, scribbled pages: these objects in their turn decompose into forms which in themselves signify nothing: here we return to the double scale of words and sounds Everything functions as if Arcimboldo had upset the pictorial system, abusively doubled it, hypertrophying within it the signifying, analogical possibility, thereby producing a kind of structural monster, source of a subtle (because intellectual) uneasiness that is still more penetrating than if the horror derived from a single exaggeration or a simple mixture of elements: it is
152 double articulation enacts a shift from Newtonian based painting, in which objects are fixed, to an Einsteinium based painting where the position of objects exists relative to the position of the observer: in other words, the observer participates in the status of the work.77
Arcimboldo’s metamorphoses, as Ovid’s, confuse natural orders and transgress boundaries: they are in short, monstrous works of ‘wonder’.78 In these works interspecies mixtures are given to excess; flesh is flayed, swollen, decomposing and putrescent. Arcimboldo’s ‘malaise of substance’ results in a seething ‘disorder’ that ‘evokes an entire larval life, the entanglement of vegetative beings, worms, fetuses, viscera which are at the limits of life, not yet born and yet already putrescible’.79 These metaphoric monsters reveal a dynamic world of Nature that, like myth and the transformations revealed in Ovid’s poem, embodies the full corporeal, organic cycle of life.80 Arcimboldo’s paintings share the message conveyed by Ovid’s poem, that the universe is ‘alive, anthropomorphic, passionate, and grounded in human experience’.81
Although metamorphosis was seen as a metonym for the era from which it emerged (in the post- classical centuries), Barkan submits that during the Renaissance, when the artist was looking to bring ‘the old, the dead, and the frozen to new life, metamorphosis becomes a ruling conceit’.82
The Zeuxis myth might have improved on Nature, but Renaissance architects had come to understand that there was no single ideal form derived from Nature that could serve as a universal referent for all architectural models. The enormous variety and quantity of ruined architectural fragments that the humanists encountered precluded any easy understanding of an original antique organisational logic. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that relatively few intact antique buildings remained to serve as models and further, that few of the remaining structures demonstrated any correspondence with Vitruvian exemplars.83 A new methodology that could
because everything signifies on two levels, that Arcimboldo’s painting functions as a rather alarming denial of pictorial language’. Barthes, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation: 131, 134–135. 77 ———, The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art and Representation: 142. 78 At the time of Arcimboldo the monster was perceived as a wonder or marvel of nature. Arcimboldo’s patrons, the Habsburgs, maintained cabinets of curiosities that exhibited such ‘accidents of nature’. Ibid., 147. 79 Ibid., 146. 80 Arcimboldo’s imaginative art was linked to the attainment of knowledge. For metamorphoses, by subverting accepted orders of classification, offered an experimental means of acquiring knowledge; they embodied the ‘noble function of magic’. Barthes summarises: ‘Arcimboldo proceeds, from game to Grand Rhetoric, from rhetoric to magic, from magic to wisdom’. Ibid., 148. 81 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 89. 82 Ibid., 18, 183. 83 Alina Payne, ‘Ut Poesis Architectura: Tectonics and Poetics in Architectural Criticism c. 1570’, in Antiquity and its Interpreters, ed. Alina Payne, Ann Kuttner, and Rebekah Smick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 145.
153 guide the processes of imitation and invention was required. Horace’s ‘implied human’ monster as well as Ovid’s transforming bodies, offered metaphors sufficiently rich, expressive, and layered to serve as models of imitation and invention84—ideas that coincided in the work of Sebastiano Serlio.
Sebastiano Serlio
Born in Bologna in 1475, Serlio, like several other architects of his era, including Donato Bramante (1444–1514) and Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (otherwise known as Raphael) (1483– 1520), was an established painter before turning to architecture. This foundation in the figural arts was understood to have influenced his unique approach to architectural theory and practice.85
Serlio’s fourth book On the Five Styles of Buildings (1537) was the first major architectural treatise to be composed after Alberti’s De re aedificatoria.86 It was also the first architectural treatise to include woodcut illustrations.87 The publication of Book III, On Antiquities (1540) quickly followed, and then there was an unsystematic publication of both earlier and later volumes.88 Although printed subsequent to Book III and Book IV, Serlio’s Book I On Geometry, and Book II On Perspective are noteworthy, for as Onians points out, if the entire treatise is understood consecutively these volumes signal an intentional beginning that reveals Serlio’s unprecedented approach. The early volumes begin with an outline of the principles of drawing and perspective rather than the more traditional description of architectural elements, techniques, and materials, which makes Serlio the first theorist to employ drawing as the starting point for deriving architecture.89
Payne, as Onians, acknowledges Serlio’s divergence from the treatises of his predecessors. However, she attributes this departure to the accretive nature of the work, as it addresses largely independent architectural issues. These ‘“treatise”-like parts’ combine to generate an open-ended form that could include any number of volumes, and so cannot be considered a complete
84 ———, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 284–285, 294. 85 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 263–264. 86 Cesare Cesariano’s illustrated Italian translation of Vitruvius’ De architectura (1521) was the only major architectural text produced in the intervening period between publication of Alberti’s De re aedificatoria and Serlio’s On the Five Styles of Buildings. 87 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 113. 88 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 263. 89 Ibid., 264.
154 corpus.90 However, Payne observes that the disparate volumes are unified by means of a shared emphasis on ornament, and so contends that Serlio’s treatise moves beyond the orders to become, essentially, a treatise on ornament. In other words, Serlio raises the status of ornament well beyond Alberti’s vision so making it a subject worthy of autonomous discourse.91
The text combines assembled fragments derived from plans, elevations, details, and sections, drawn at varying scales and from different perspectives. These pieces are disconnected from any original context and arranged aesthetically rather than logically.92 Payne suggests that the disproportionate, hybrid architectural illustrations might be construed as dismembered monsters but for the fact that seamless mixing can be discerned in their details. (Figure 19)
Figure 19. Sebastiano Serlio: Book IV ‘On the Five Styles of Buildings’ (1537) Column bases and capitals of the Composite order
90 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 115. 91 Ibid., 115–116. 92 ———, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 22–23.
155 When Serlio subsequently applies this process of assemblage to architecture rather than illustrations, it is the work’s relation to patron and client, as opposed to the seamless mixing of parts, that saves the work from descending into the realm of the monstrous.93
The principal aim of Serlio’s treatise was to ‘reconcile’ the ideas of Vitruvius and the existing antique Roman ruins in order to establish an ornamental vocabulary together with principles for its use. The first books published, Books VI and III, reveal Serlio’s thinking in relation to these aims.94 Yet, the Books exhibit differences in approach as well as differing attitudes toward antiquity and Vitruvian authority.
It is in Book IV that Serlio catalogues the orders; this is the same book in which he re-names Alberti’s ‘Italic’ capital the ‘Composite’. With each successive order (maniera) Serlio cites the Vitruvian ideal and then describes related variations found amongst the antique ruins.95 Serlio completes his discussion of each maniera with a catalogue of inventive forms designed to address contemporaneous concerns. The ultimate objective was that this catalogue be harnessed to the task of inventing new relevant forms.96 Invention emerges as a natural consequence of the processes mescolare, and comporre.97 These methods of mixing translate architecturally into hybrid forms that, again, extend along a continuum with seamless mixtures (comporre) at one end and the monstrous grotesque (mescolare) at the other. It is a range illustrated with a comparison of two of Serlio’s gates, one designed as he gave vent to madness, and the other which was composed as rationality returned.98 (Figure 20)
93 Ibid., 31. 94 ———, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 115. 95 Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, ‘Introduction’, in Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), xxi. 96 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 116, 118. 97 Payne describes mescolare (to mix) as a heterogeneous assemblage category that is linked to Horace’s monstrous hybrid (reflected in Serlio’s composite capitals and bestial gates), and comporre (to compose) as an assemblage category that is linked to the compositions of Zeuxis (as in the combining of parts sourced from the same species). However, there was considerable blurring of these categories as architects, who were faced with creating works from fragments, both mixed and composed at once. ———, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 33. See also ———, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 140. 98 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 31.
156
Figure 20. Sebastiano Serlio: 'Libro Estraordinario' (1551) Portal XX of the first series of thirty bizarre gates and Portal XI of the second series of twenty regular gates
Payne claims that Serlio’s renaming of the Italic capital, which exchanges a geographical/ethnic referent for one that, instead, acknowledges the artistic process of the order’s generation, highlights the importance that mixing held for Serlio.99 The Composite order, produced with the mixing of Corinthian and Ionic elements, each with their own natural, mythical origin story, had no origin story of its own. Instead, the Composite was characterised by open-endedness. Significantly, the fact that this order was a creative product of the architect led to Serlio considering it the ‘most licentious of all building styles’.100
Serlio notes that the ancient Romans created many structural mixtures in which the Composite order could be discerned, although the order was most commonly (and appropriately) displayed on the Triumphal arches built from plundered spoils and ruined fragments.101 By its very nature,
99 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 281. 100 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–V of 'Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva’, 1: 369. [LXIIIIv (186v)] See also Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 32. 101 Serlio classifies the ancient Roman Colosseum as an appropriate mixture: ‘Vitruvius in no place, to my mind, discusses the Composite work—called by some “Latin work”, others call it “Italic”. The ancient Romans made this out of a combination of the
157 the Composite was less constrained by the rules and conventions that applied to pure orders such as the Doric. The Doric was understood as the order of decorum, whereas the Composite was considered the order of license. These precepts offered guidance regarding the degree to which each of the orders could be reinterpreted, and also determined the circumstances in which each could be used.102 While Vitruvian principles underscored by the concept of decor determined how the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders could be architecturally included within a structure, the integration of the Tuscan and Rustic orders was guided by Serlio’s own interpretation of their formal character. These approaches, when combined with the permissible invention of the Composite, allowed architects to select the orders that most closely revealed the character and status of their patrons.103
Serlio’s Book IV opens with an account of how the ‘ancients dedicated buildings to the gods, matching them to their natures’. He suggests that an architectural commission for a strong or great man (but also those that were short of stature or medium sized) ought to be constructed from the Doric order that draws its robust character from gods such as Jupiter, Mars and Hercules.104 Using the same approach, Serlio offers analogies for the remaining orders, which he links to body types as well as actions and occupations. In harnessing imitatio in this way, Serlio connects form with content to meet the requirements of decorum. While such a concept might have been problematic were it limited to the canonic orders with their origin stories and strict association with distinct bodily forms, this issue was avoided with the unprecedented anthropomorphism of the Composite order. This concept of license allowed Serlio to generate and access an expansive architectural vocabulary,105 and so, built forms become a ‘permanent commentary on (and hence, a signified of) [their] origins and functions’.106 Serlio’s architectural assemblage, where the part stands as an expression of the entire order, was premised on the
Ionic and the Corinthian—perhaps because they were unable to outdo the creations for the Greeks, the inventors of the Doric in imitation of a man, the Ionic whose exemplar was a matron, and the Corinthian taking its form from a maiden—putting the Ionic volute with its ovolo onto the Corinthian capital, and they used it more for triumphal arches than any other thing. And they were absolutely right to do this, because since they had triumphed over all those countries from which these works originated, they were quite at liberty as their masters to combine them, as they did on that great building, the Colosseum’. Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–V of 'Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva’, 1: 364. [LXIv (183r)] 102 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 275. 103 Ibid. 104 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–V of 'Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva’, 1: 254. [IIIr (126r)] 105 Serlio uses words such as soft, hard, solid, simple, plain, smooth, sweet, softly textured, weak, slender, delicate, mannered, confused and disordered to describe ornamental details. Since these terms and expressions were typically associated with literature and rhetoric, their adoption by Serlio provided architecture with another means of connecting with a broader discourse. Payne, ‘Ut Poesis Architectura: Tectonics and Poetics in Architectural Criticism c. 1570’, 150. 106 Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance: 107.
158 concept of architectural metonymy. It is, as Hersey emphasises, only within this tropological frame that the narrative holds true.107
In Book III, which focuses on chronicling antique exempla, Serlio appears to have a change of heart. While license had positive connotations in Book IV (in the context of producing modern forms that were expressive of their patron), the term is used pejoratively in Book III (in the context of ancient forms). Although Serlio looked to Vitruvius as the highest authority, he did not believe that ancient fragments could be appropriated uncritically. It is in this context that Serlio makes the distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ examples of architecture.108 He adduces that the ancient Romans would naturally have borrowed architectural forms from the ancient Greeks and, since some of these appropriated forms could be considered licentious, not all antique forms were suited to faithful imitation.109 Accordingly, the architect would need to exercise informed judgment in making a selection. On this point Serlio writes:
Perhaps it will seem to those who are completely intoxicated with the antiquities of Rome that I am too audacious in wanting to judge them … it is one thing to imitate the state of ancient things exactly, but to know how to make a choice of the beautiful according to the rules of Vitruvius and reject the ugly and badly conceived is something else. It is certain that the first quality of the architect is that he is not let down by his judgment, as many are.110
Serlio considered Triumphal Roman arches to be almost always licentious for these structures were built from the spolia of other buildings and their façades heavily adorned with collections of assembled trophies and fragments.111 (Figure 21) Another factor that may have contributed to Serlio’s negative view of the Triumphal Arch was Vitruvius’ lack of reference to this architectural form, so that there was no precedence to draw from and no offer of guidance in determining an acceptable form.112
107 Ibid. 108 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 120. 109 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 264–265. 110 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture: Books I–V of 'Tutte l’opere d’architettura et prospetiva’, 1: 196. [CVI (99v)] 111 Serlio cites the Arch of Septimius Severus, erected at the western end of the Forum Romanum (AD 203) as an exemplar of an arch ‘built with the spoils of other buildings’. Ibid., 200–202. [CX (101v), CXII (102v)] Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 265. See also Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 22. 112 ———, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 119– 120.
159
Figure 21. The Arch of Septimius Severus, erected at the western end of the Forum Romanum AD 203, Rome.
Payne submits that the apparent contradiction of Serlio’s approach to license in Books IV and III, where one book appears to sanction license and even consider it critical for program success while the other associates it with licentiousness, simply reflects the broader sixteenth century dilemma surrounding appropriation.113 The fact that book IV was published before Book III, she claims is indicative of the centrality of the appropriation debate at the time.114 However, Payne posits that, rather than shifting from one approach to the other, Serlio may have been advocating for both. Nevertheless, these two approaches exist together in an uneasy relationship.115 In combination, they define a perilous edge where good license is extended to its limit and, if exceeded, falls to bad license and so failed architecture. It is this navigable edge that constitutes the dynamic locus that characterises Serlio’s licentious domestic gates.116
Serlio’s Libro estraordinario di Sebastiano Serlio bolognese: nel quale si dimostrano trenta porte di opera rustica, mista con diuersi ordini, & uenti di opera dilicata di diuerse specie: con
113 Ibid., 120–121. 114 Ibid., 115–116. 115 Ibid., 120–121. 116 Ibid., 121.
160 la scrittura dauanti, che narra il tutto was published in 1551.117 In this volume the license granted to the Composite column was extended to the design process and architectural forms.118 Interestingly, Libro estraordinario takes the motif of the triumphal arch Serlio so disparaged in Book III, and applies it to the domestic gate which, by association, becomes licentious.119 Moreover, the license referred to in this volume (as in Book IV) is not only permitted, it is actively embraced.120
Libro estraordinario was composed in Fontainebleau, a relatively wild environment which Serlio claims influenced both his state of mind and the character of the book.121 He responds expressively rather than rationally to his surrounds and designs a total of fifty gates. The first series of thirty ‘rustic’ gates was conceived during a self-proclaimed bout of ‘architectural frenzy’,122 after which he designed a further twenty this time more delicate gates that Onians suggests might have signaled a return to sanity.123 In Serlio’s introduction to the first series of works he writes, ‘Now that I have given vent to bold inventiveness [bizzaria] in the mixed and licentious things, it is correct that I should discuss at a certain length things which follow the
117 This was the last book to be published in Serlio’s lifetime; a book not yet conceived when he planned his original treatise. Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 263. Although Libro estraordinario was printed in 1551 during a stay of residence in Lyons, it was composed in Fontainebleau. Serlio moved from Italy to France (Fontainebleau) in 1541 at the age of 65. Having struggled financially for much of his career, the move was prompted by a lucrative appointment as Royal Architect to François I. While Serlio’s arrival in Fontainebleau marked the beginning of a period in which he would design many of his built works, success was short-lived. While François I was supportive of Renaissance humanism, and so the work of Serlio, he was succeeded by Henri II in 1547 who, as a French nationalist, replaced Serlio with a French architect in 1548. Serlio’s finances subsequently took a turn for the worse, a change in fortune that prompted the move to Lyons some time between 1549 and 1550 under the patronage of the Archbishop, Ippolito d’Este. Interestingly, Libro estraordinario is dedicated to Henri II rather than François I which, Rosenfeld believes may indicate that Serlio continued to receive some form of stipend from Henri II despite the loss of status. Sebastiano Serlio and Myrna N. Rosenfeld, Serlio On Domestic Architecture (Mineola, N.Y: Dover Publications, 1996), 23. 118 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 280. 119 Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 121. 120 The stratagem pertaining to license in Book IV and it interpretation in Libro estraordinario owes a debt to Alberti and the inventive rhetorical strategies outlined in Della Pittura (1435)—which drew influence from much earlier ancient Roman rhetorical treatises, most particularly Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria. Martin Kemp, ‘Introduction’, in On Painting: Leon Battista Alberti (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 19. Serlio’s inventive strategy would, in turn, influence his contemporary Giorgio Vasari. Evidence of this can be found in Vasari’s account of painting and sculpture that is recorded in the introduction to Lives (first published in 1550). For more detail see Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 306. 121 In his dedication to King Henri Serlio writes: ‘finding myself continually in this solitude of Fontainebleau, where there are more beasts than there are men … the desire came into my mind to form in visible design several gateways in the Rustic style … I advanced so far as to make a total of thirty. Nor was this sufficient—sensing as I did that my mind abounded in new fantasies … I decided to make twenty of more delicate workmanship’. Sebastiano Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture trans. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, 2 vols., vol. 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 460. 122 Ibid. 123 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 280.
161 rules [regolari]’.124 It would seem that by including both approaches in the portal designs he considered both of value.125
Serlio’s rustic portals uncomfortably combine the classical orders with heavily rusticated elements. In these works there is no seamless mixing of species. Smooth and rough elements are alternated repeatedly, creating a staccato effect. This strategy is clearly visible in rustic Portal XXVIII where a pure Doric order signifying the ultimate in decorum has been violently sliced using strips of rustic banding.126 Serlio illustrates this portal and outlines a subversive rationale for his approach:
If it were not for the bold inventiveness [bizzaria] of some men, the modesty of others would not be recognised … But because there always were, are today, and (it is my belief) always will be, boldly inventive men who seek for the unusual, I wished to break and damage the beautiful form of this Doric Gateway.127
In Rustic Portal XXIX, designed as an entry gate for the park of a Renaissance Lord’s villa, Serlio goes further. (Figure 22) The gate combines Doric columns with Corinthian capitals in a fragmented assemblage. The contrast between refined and rough-hewn elements is heavily emphasised by accentuating the rustication to the point that it appears ‘bestial’. The bestial blocks convey the impression of a ruin, of wounding and decay,128 an effect that is enhanced with the profane proliferation of weeds that sprout from the stones and their joints.129
124 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture 2: 493, 595 n.101. The term ‘bizarre’, borrowed from French, is believed to derive from the Italian term bizzarro (adjective), meaning odd, freakish, queer, unique or whimsical. The nouns bizzarria (singular) and bizzarrie (plural) accordingly translate as oddness, peculiarity, whimsy or inventiveness, capriciousness, quirkiness or uniqueness. John Purves, ‘A Dictionary of Modern Italian: Italian-English & English-Italian’, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 54. And so, the bizarre works composed by Serlio in response to his wild environ might also be considered partly a response to the bizzarrie of his patron King. 125 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 280. 126 Ibid., 280–281. 127 Serlio, Sebastiano Serlio on Architecture 2: 490. [XXVIII (16v)] 128 The relationship between the ruin, as a naturally occurring section, and the architectural ‘wound’ is explored in the subsequent sections, ‘Disfigured knowledge’, and, ‘The skins of Giovanni Battista Piranesi’. 129 Payne, ‘Creativity and Bricolage in Architectural Literature of the Renaissance’, 32.
162
Figure 22. Sebastiano Serlio: 'Libro Estraordinario' (1551) Rustic Portal XXIX
Much like the mythical universe, ordered hierarchies are suspended and oppositions exist alongside one another in an equal relationship.130 A bestial, raw, decomposed, eroded, and sensate world combines with a refined, decorous, and intelligible world, to form a unified vision.
Hersey writes that the rustic elements that are ‘extruded through the more civilised ones into a genetic mosaic’, reveal a personality that is at once ‘feminine and gross, bestial and refined’.131 Through an assemblage strategy that allowed for variations in texture and the interpenetration of different orders and profiles Serlio was able to extend the expressive power of the orders and reveal with the ornamental ‘skin’ the personality, if not the soul, of the client.132
130 Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 280. 131 Hersey, Pythagorean Palaces: Magic and Architecture in the Italian Renaissance: 109. 132 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 279.
163 Payne writes that, although Serlio might not have used the term mostro,133 monsters were invariably contrived as a result of his emphasis on mescolanza and its basis in mixing species.134 However, while Serlio’s licentious, bestial assemblages teeter on the edge of monstrosity, they avoid descent into the abyss because they retain a level of coherence that is contingent on the mimetic continuity expressed in relation to their patron—their resemblance to their ‘father’.135 This idea had its foundation in an anthropomorphic analogy recorded by Antonio di Pietro Averlino, also known as Filarete (circa 1400–circa 1469) who not only described buildings as organisms that live and die, but conceived of architectural works as the progeny of an architect ‘mother’ and client ‘father’.136 In Rustic Portal XXIX, this paternal resemblance acquires dark psychological undertones. For, according to Payne, this bestial assemblage can be read as a physical manifestation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the soul (essential nature) and character of an individual is revealed in the metamorphosed form.137 The connection with Ovid’s poem can be expanded: if the rusticated elements of the portal are obscured, the architecture that is revealed is correct and undistorted. Each layer therefore retains its discreet form and separate identity—the two species do not blend.138 In other words, the assemblage is composed of two superimposed ornamental layers that, like an Ovidian metamorphosis (or more specifically the figure ground ambivalence of simile) and the double articulation of Arcimboldo’s grotesque portraits, oscillates from one level of articulation to the other in a prolonged moment that reveals an anthropomorphic universe grounded in the real.
133 Mostro (the Italian word for monster) derives, through an archaic form monstro, from the Latin monstrum. Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. 134 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 288. 135 Ibid. 136 Antonio di Pietro Averlino (also known as Filarete) writes: ‘As [it is] with man himself, so [it is] with the building. First it is conceived, using a simile such as you can understand, and then it is born. The mother delivers her child at the term of nine months or sometimes seven; by care and in good order she makes him grow … The building is conceived in this manner … he who wishes to build needs an architect. He conceives it with him and then the architect carries it. When the architect has given birth, he becomes the mother of the building. Before the architect gives birth, he should dream about his conception, think about it, and turn it over in his mind in many ways for seven to nine months, just as a woman carries her child in her body for seven to nine months. He should also make various drawings of this conception that he has made with the patron, according to his own desires … When this birth is accomplished, that is when he has made, in wood, a small relief design of its final form, measured and proportioned to the finished building, then he shows it to the father’. Filarete, Treatise on Architecture: Being the Treatise by Antonio di Pietro Averlino known as Filarete, trans. John Spencer, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 15– 16. [Book II, 7v ii.] 137 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 288. 138 Onians speculates that just as nobles (at the time of Serlio) wore masks at social gatherings in order to indulge themselves under cover of anonymity, Serlio might have used the ‘cloak of rustication to give himself a greater creative freedom, knowing that he [could] remove it at will if anyone should charge that such coarse and irregular features expressed his real self’. Onians, Bearers of Meaning: The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: 281–282.
164 Sympathetic touch
The expressive skin-like qualities of Serlio’s ornamental façades were conceptually allied to materialist139 notions of perception founded on the idea of a sympathetic cosmos in which all bodies were connected through the animated medium of simulacral pneuma.140
Early modern bodies were able to communicate by means of the imagination, but they could also communicate sympathetically across distances, as was illustrated with a ‘contagious’ yawn or blush. According to Stephanie Shirilan, the early modern body was ‘so porous and subordinate to the forces of sympathy and imagination as to be nearly erased by them’.141 This imaginative and sympathetic order relied on the same ‘animate, materialist cosmology’ with its porous skin surface as sympathetic medicine and its homeo and allopathic treatments.142 And so, during the early modern period a rational, scientific worldview was overlaid with a metaphysical worldview. Variously these paradigms coexisted, intertwined, merged, and overshadowed one another. While the scientific worldview would come to dominate by the end of this period, the metaphysical worldview continued to exert influence. Consequently, early modern bodies, as ancient and medieval bodies, were understood to extend beyond the skin boundary; they emitted and exchanged vapours, urine, faeces, sperm, blood, spit, and various other secretions.143 As a result, any single body could not be viewed as entirely discrete from another. The fragile skin surface did not demarcate body from world but, rather, continued to express an interior state by means of signs that revealed the ‘complexion of the soul’.144 This view of the body surface as a place of exchange, ‘permeability and mysterious metamorphoses’, saw the skin retain its value as a therapeutic organ, and the site of ‘conduction’ well into the nineteenth century.145
139 Rosen asserts that, with regard to the senses, ancient Greek philosophers split broadly into two groups: ‘the empiricists, materialists and scientists, for whom touch predominates; and the “metaphysicians” … for whom sight is of primary importance’. Stanley Rosen, The Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry: Studies in Ancient Thought (New York: Routledge, 1988), 120. 140 Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 67. 141 Ibid., 69. 142 Ibid., 67. 143 Connor speculates that the anxiety surrounding the regulation of bodily porosity, which increased during this period, may have occurred in response to the prevalence of plague and syphilis. Unsurprisingly, these fears manifest in a resistance to bathing, a social practice that thereby serves as a barometer that gauges the level of societal anxiety related to bodily porosity. Connor, The Book of Skin: 22. 144 Ibid., 26. 145 Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World: 39–40. Elkins points out that psychoanalytic theories continue to rely upon the ‘tradition of the porous skin’ although their focus is limited to bodily orifices, and so they do not reflect the ‘sheer complexity’ of the actual body. For Elkins, the Enlightenment fascination with the skin, instead persists in the more contemporary domains of medical illustration and the visual arts which seek to capture the ‘specifics of membranes’. He considers
165 However, humoral theory and its associated physiology, including porosity, would eventually be dismissed as unscientific and replaced with a narrower, mechanical understanding of the skin membrane. This, in turn, would contribute to an emerging view of skin as an abstract and isolated body part understood in terms of separation and difference.146 It was this reduced notion of the skin membrane that nourished the shift from an epistemology that read the body through all the senses to one that increasingly valorised sight.147
these images ‘the most promising and challenging formal and metaphorical source for visualisations of the body’. Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 41–42. 146 Connor, The Book of Skin: 26. 147 Elizabeth Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses”’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 2.
166 Tactile Vision
Although ocular centrism maintained primacy during the early modern period, as it had throughout the preceding ages, the cultural significance of touch nevertheless endured. For touch, unlike the distancing nature of sight (hearing and smell), was inescapably rooted in the corporeal, living, dying body to which all humans are bound. This confronting fact was painfully ever- present prior to the emergence of modern medicine, a rational, omnipotent and unambiguous discipline, which manifests post Enlightenment. In sum, the early modern period retained an intricate, ambivalent, inter-disciplinary view of the senses that had a profound effect on the way in which bodies were understood to intersect with the world. And, although this complex, sensual understanding of body and world would subsequently disappear, it nevertheless left an enduring trace that would be reinvigorated (in architecture) with the appearance of phenomenology and postmodern philosophy.
As discussed earlier, Western culture’s ‘affinity for the visible’ emerged in ancient Greece where sight was bound with the concept of theoria and the acquisition of knowledge, more particularly philosophical knowledge.1 The Platonist concept of vision,2 which influenced one theory of
1 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993), 24–25. See also Biernoff who writes: ‘most Indo-European terms for mental activity derive from words for vision or the visible’. She adds, ‘aside from securing the primacy of sight in relation to theoretical knowledge the equation of seeing and knowing privileges a mimetic logic. Ideas (from the Greek idein “to see”) are imagined (Latin imaginare “to picture oneself”) as visual representations set before the mind’s eye’. Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 66–67. 2 In the Timaeus, Plato proclaims that the human eye is able to perceive light because it shares qualities with the sun—the source of all light. Plato associates sight with intelligence and the soul, and so, was able to analogously describe the intellect as the ‘eye of the mind’ and elevate its status to the idea of the Good. Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 26. However, Plato’s ocular-centrism was tempered by his understanding that the senses (including vision) could deceive, which is revealed with the parable of the Cave recounted in the Republic. In this account chained prisoners derive a false perception of reality from events depicted as fleeting shadows reflected on the back of the cave wall. In an unfolding visionary sequence that might move the prisoner toward attaining full knowledge, the prisoners can firstly turn to catch sight of the objects casting the shadows and, following this, discern the firelight beyond these objects. Finally, they might glean understanding of the real world and ultimately the sun, thereby marking an ascent into the realm of the intelligible. In Plato’s parable sensual information cannot represent the truth, for this form of understanding is but a shadow of true understanding which can only be
167 optics advanced during the Middle Ages, was based on a belief that the eye both emitted and received light rays (extramission) thereby implicating a communicative relationship and potential intertwining between subject and object.3 Gadamer notes the participatory character of ancient Greek theoria which necessitated ‘being totally involved in and carried away by what one sees’. According to Gadamer, the ‘spectator’ that participates in contemplative theoria is ‘a spectator in the proper sense of the word’ since they engage in a form of communion with the object being 4 viewed. The belief in this concept of optics persisted well into the Middle Ages, in fact up until the theory of extramission was finally superseded.5
The bi-directional, incarnated concept of vision on which extramission was founded, where ‘[s]ight … was at once an extension of the sensitive soul towards an object, and the passage of sensible forms through the eye and into the brain’,6 endowed vision with significant powers.7 During the Middle Ages ‘looking’ could effect an emotional transformation and exact physical changes, a phenomenon illustrated with the belief that monstrous, medieval crones could murder babies with their gaze. The medieval eye, which could pierce objects, ‘was simultaneously receptive, passive, vulnerable to sensations; and active: roaming, grasping’.8 Suzannah Biernoff observes that the ‘corporeal flux of medieval vision’ is a notion that is sympathetic with Merleau- Ponty’s concept of intertwined, perceptually incarnated ‘flesh’.9 This is because the medieval model of vision (despite distancing) instantiates a distance that remains proximal: the subject is not yet disassociated from their environment. Biernoff notes that for the medieval philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon (circa 1214/1220–circa 1292) ‘looking becomes analogous to
arrived at through philosophical reasoning. Blackburn, The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy: 243. Plato’s distrust of sense perception translates into a distrust of the mimetic arts—particularly representational painting. Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 27. 3 The medieval theory of optics relied on the ideas of Plato, but also incorporated aspects of Euclid’s geometry and Galen’s ideas pertaining to the physiology of the eye. ———, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 38. 4 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald Marshall, 2nd ed. (London: Continuum, 2004), 122. 5 Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 31. 6 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 3. 7 The medieval understanding of sight was not a poetics or abstract ‘metaphorics of sight’, but relied on metaphors and allegories to exact real and tangible corporeal effects. Ibid., 4–5. Singer writes, ‘Manipulating their characters’ eyesight by means of irony, metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche, late medieval poets suggest that words can succeed where cutting-edge medical interventions cannot’ adding, ‘Their blind poetic subjects, though (paradoxically) unable to look, nonetheless reinforce the paronomastic interplay of the mire and the miroir: how we look at ourselves is how we heal ourselves’. Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 21. 8 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 3. 9 Ibid., 5.
168 touching’ and further, that ‘we are altered in every act of perception’.10 Bacon’s comments draw comparison with Merleau-Ponty’s position regarding the intimate relation between vision and tactility:
Since the same body sees and touches, visible and tangible belong to the same world. … There is double and crossed situating of the visible in the tangible and of the tangible in the visible; the two maps are complete, and yet they do not merge into one.11
Further, Merleau-Ponty also notes that the encounter between subject and object holds the potential for both to be changed by the experience.12
The medieval conceptualisation of vision was ambivalent because, in response to competing ideals and tensions, it incorporated ‘multiple ways of seeing’ rather than a ‘monolithic regime of vision’.13 Martin Jay suggests that the uneasy balance between sight and the other senses during the Middle Ages stems from its twin origins. While the Middle Ages inherited the idea of hegemonic ocularity (including divine vision) from the Hellenistic tradition, it also inherited the idea of an un-representable God from the Hebraic tradition. Consequently, two forms of vision emerge: one associated with speculation that derives from the ‘eye of the mind’, and the other associated with observation and derived from the experience of sight.14 And so, a revered ‘metaphysics of light’, which found expression in the illumination of gothic churches and texts, existed alongside a more secular concept of vision that recognised the potential for deception, arousal and desire.15 The shifting tension and balance between these two optical traditions accounts for the varied forms of ocular-centrism encountered prior to the Enlightenment.16
During the Middle Ages, the relation between these two forms of vision was navigated by means of analogy. In other words, these modes of seeing were not considered polar opposites but, rather,
10 Ibid., 85. 11 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 134. 12 Ibid., 90. 13 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 12. 14 Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 29. See also Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 11–12. 15 Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 27, 29. 16 Ibid., 29.
169 were overlaid so that not only was vision intimately connected with the other senses, it was also intimately connected with language.17
Medieval ambivalence toward sight and its relation to language is highlighted with Julie Singer’s study of the rhetorical strategies harnessed by late medieval French and Italian poets to restore eyesight, or at least compensate for medical blindness.18 Exchanges between rhetoric and medicine were commonplace during the Middle Ages. Singer suggests this ‘blurring’ came about because ‘medieval medicine [was] a theoretical more than a practical discipline, grounded in an abstract schema of complexions and qualities’: and, alongside this, ‘the late medieval poetic text [was] an increasingly tangible, even corporeal entity’ since poetic forms were arranged according to bodily rhythms and structures.19 Consequently, during this period there was ready acceptance that poetry possessed therapeutic qualities.20
Harnessing the suggestive power of tropes to compensate for vision is illustrative of an expansive concept of optics, a view that stands in stark contrast to the narrower contemporary view. Carolly Erickson, who considers medieval vision an expansionary concept because it extends beyond sense perception toward extra sensory perception, describes medieval perception as ‘flexible’.21
17 For the scholastics these two forms of vision did not constitute an un-navigable duality. The corporeal mode of vision (immanent) and the spiritual mode (transcendent) did not move vertically or ascend from things to the Idea but, were articulated through a series or continuum of perceptual modes which could be navigated via analogy. The medieval schoolmen distinguished between a number of forms of analogy: literal or historical (which remained in the earthly or material realm); allegorical, tropological or moral; and, anagogical. While each form of analogy moves from what is known to what is unknown in order to illuminate something about the unknown, it was the anagogical sense of analogy, which was ‘upward leading’, that moved vision from the visible (immanent) realm to the invisible (transcendent) realm. Biernoff suggests that this form of analogy is ‘not so much a mode of symbolic translation, as a means of transportation’. [Some commentators also attribute this same quality to allegory—see Biernoff for more detail]. One of the most frequently cited examples of anagogical elevation is Abbot Suger’s description of St Denis which, importantly, also highlights the way in which verbal and visual processes are bound. Suger writes: ‘When—out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God—the loveliest of the many-coloured stones has called me away from external cares and worthy medication has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues: then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner’. Suger cited in Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 126. Suger considered the material world a veil that concealed a truth. Through anagogical interpretation he situated the viewer or reader ‘between worldly experience and transcendent mysteries or hidden meanings’. Biernoff notes: ‘The experience created by Suger is one of suspension or syncopation: between heaven and earth, matter and the immaterial’ which leaves the reader dialectically ‘straddling’ the poles of dualism. Biernoff adds, ‘The bodily eye is both the model and the vehicle for the inward and upward looking gaze which will eventually be re-incorporated into the divine Light’. Ibid., 36, 125–128. 18 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry. 19 Ibid., 147. 20 Ibid., 2–3. 21 Erickson elaborates: ‘From our point of view, the visionary is a person who sees what isn’t there; his visions separate him from reality. In the Middle Ages, visions defined reality’. She claims that this ‘puts a basic perceptual barrier between us and the past’ which, although unable to be crossed, must at least be acknowledged in order to ‘come to terms with a quality of awareness’ that
170 Singer explores this idea with reference to Guillaume de Machaut’s ‘lyric prosthetic’, as described in Livre du Voir Dit (1362–1365), a poetic healing device that replaces a missing eye with a round lyric structure (the rondeau) in a metonymic act of substitution.22 (Figure 23) Singer contends that, since rhetorical metonymy and medical prostheses23 both turn on the same operation of substitution, it would have been understood and accepted that a poetic form could be substituted for an organic structure.24 Singer’s account emphasises the medieval trans- disciplinary view of optics, which does not place the medical condition of blindness in the context of homogeneous discourse but, rather, in a context that is heterogeneous and connected.
Figure 23. The 'musical calligram' seen here is a visual representation of the round lyric form (or rondeau). This illustration appears in the 'Compas' of Baude Cordier (circa 1400)
has long since been discredited. Carolly Erickson, The Medieval Vision: Essays in History and Perception (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 30, 106. 22 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 147–148. 23 Singer asserts that, although medical prostheses are not formally described until Paré’s publication of Des monstres et des prodiges (1573), there is evidence that these devices were in production well before then. Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 148–149. 24 Notably, Singer observes that both prosthesis and poesis derive from the same logic i.e. that of supplement, where poetic language compensates for the gap between a word and its meaning. Ibid., 21, 168.
171 The medieval concept of vision, which fluidly mediates the relation between object and subject, can be clearly distinguished from the Renaissance concept of vision that emerges with the ‘epochal achievement’ of perspective.25 While Biernoff suggests that postmodernism shares a concern for the ‘underside of ocular centrism’ with the Middle Ages,26 this ‘underside’ continued to percolate throughout the early-modern period, where it also merged with notions of tactility.
Plural touch
During the early modern period, touch was heavily implicated in generating meaning in representational systems that extended to the domains of art, architecture, philosophy, religion, medicine and rhetoric.27 Tactility operates within the domain of the proximate, unlike sight, hearing and smell, which extend the fleshy body beyond its skin surface to far greater distances. Unlike the other senses, touch is not discretely located within its own sense organ but diffused throughout the body, an elusive, ‘ubiquitous’ sense that is both ‘nowhere and everywhere’.28 Moreover, because touch is encountered at levels deeper than the skin, it was deemed to be a ‘property of the flesh itself’.29 Although Aristotle claimed to privilege sight, he nevertheless recognised and emphasised the importance of tactility: of all the senses it was common to all organisms, and necessary for the acquisition of sensual knowledge.30 Touch was not only seen as the appetitive sense that sustained life (for beasts and humans alike), but the sense in which humans excelled; it was the sense that made humans human.31 Echoing this sentiment, Pliny the Elder wrote in Naturalis Historia (77–79 AD) that, while animals such as the eagle, vulture, and mole excelled in the senses of sight, smell, and hearing respectively, humans excelled in touch.32
Although there was a revival of Platonism during the Renaissance, and also revival of its inherent anti-tactile stance,33 the humanist enterprise drew sustenance from multiple sources including the
25 Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought: 44. 26 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 2. 27 Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses”’, 3. 28 Ibid., 4–5. 29 Ibid., 5. 30 Steven Connor, ‘Introduction’, in The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies (London: Continuum, 2008), 2. 31 Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses”’, 11. 32 Ibid. 33 Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), who was instrumental in the Renaissance revival of Platonism, acknowledged the Aristotelian requirement for the universal sense of touch in all animals; however, he did not believe that touch could influence the intellect. Ficino states that ‘Nature has placed no sense farther from the intelligence than touch’. For Ficino, the highest powers of knowing were derived from the intellect and reason and the lowest powers of knowing were drawn from taste and touch. He claimed that although ‘contemplative love ascended from sight to mind; voluptuous love descended from sight to touch’. O’Rourke Boyle,
172 ideas of Aristotle and the ‘pro-tactile’ position of Lucretius (and other materialists). Michelangelo’s fresco, the Creation of Adam (1508–1512), which is fused with the building’s structure and so manifestly inscribes the interior space of the Sistine Chapel, illustrates the way in which plural and sensually inconsistent positions were merged at this time. (Figure 24)
Figure 24. Michelangelo: 'Creation of Adam' (circa 1508–1512) Fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel
The image depicts the biblical moment in which Adam becomes ensouled. The transformative instant occurs as God’s outstretched finger almost touches that of Adam, an epic ‘moment when spirit and matter will cojoin’.34 Renaissance representations of the scriptures were influenced by the Platonic idea that human existence could be ‘elevated’ through deification. Michelangelo’s image, which depicts the divine origins of the soul and the manner by which it descends from the heavens to earth, represents the ‘transcendent idealism’ that lay at the heart of the humanist program.35 However, alongside this overarching Platonic vision is a materialist vision that is revealed in the way the life force is transferred from God to corporeal matter.36 Put simply, only a divine cosmic spark could facilitate the transfer of the soul across the gap between divine and corporeal fingertips. The notion of a divine spark was a Stoic notion that stemmed from a belief that the elements emerged from a creative fire, or pneuma, (which is also the Stoic word for
Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin: 4. Aligned with the ideas of Ficino, the Neo- Platonist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) considered hands the instruments of degradation. Ibid., 5. 34 Loren Partridge, Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Rome (1996), 48. Cited in ibid., 1. 35 Ibid., 3. 36 Ibid., 2–3.
173 God).37 Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle emphasises the significance of the notion of tactility embodied in the image:
In art it was Michelangelo who most aroused the human imagination to the sense of touch. ‘Tactile values’ occurred when representation of solid objects communicated to stir the mind to feel, to weigh, to measure them and their potential and to perform the essential function of the human hand: to grasp … The particular instrumentality of the human hand down to its parts of finger, phalanges, and fingernail, is painted in the focal detail of Adam’s sweeping gesture raised to acknowledge and accept the divine command.38
37 The belief that the origin of existence and the elements were produced through the action of creative fire or fiery breath, an ‘amorphous matter’, underscores the significance that creative fire had for the Stoics. Although the Stoics believed this ‘fiery breath … penetrated the cosmos and ensured its cohesion’, Neo-Platonists were not persuaded by this idea. Consequently, O’Rourke Boyle adduces, ‘The creative infusion into Adam of a divine spark cannot climax a Platonist program for the Sistine Chapel ceiling’. Ibid., 5. 38 Ibid., 88–89.
174 Eros
Eroticism is not the excess of pleasure, but the pleasure of excess.1
Bernard Tschumi
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
The rhetorical understanding of ‘touch’ that ‘moved’ an audience ‘to grasp’ and ‘stir the mind to feel’ was central to an unusual (but widely read, at the time of the Renaissance) architectural treatise structured in the form of a didactic narrative, namely the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (first published in1499), which translates as ‘strife of love in a dream’. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an ingegno, an inventive assemblage with a hybrid structure that can be discerned on many levels.
Physically the treatise presents as a ‘textual assemblage’ comprised of images, fragments of text (some in different languages), symbols, hieroglyphs, epigrams, and pictures.2 Even though the narrative takes the form of a love story based on the amorous, unfulfilled pursuit of Polia (which translates as ‘many things’) by Poliphilo (which translates as ‘the lover of many things’), more than half the text and images relate to architecture, which are also assemblages—in keeping with the recuperative spirit of the Renaissance. However, the hybridity of the text goes further, drawing on an encyclopedic range of subjects including classical mythology, the architectural theories of Vitruvius and Alberti, music, geography, geometry, religion, science and art. Within
1 Bernard Tschumi, ‘The Pleasure of Architecture’, in Theorising a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 537. 2 Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 17.
175 the structure of the narrative dream this vast repository of information becomes source material for the imagination.3
The space of dreams
In dreams, all forms of knowledge are encountered and combined in a space that is non- hierarchical. Dream images are transformations where reality is manipulated. In Hypnerotomachia Poliphili architectural elements are reassembled, altered on the basis of scale, or contrived in the form of new analogies.4 New unthinkable, incongruous (poetic) associations are created and lead to new forms of understanding.5 (Figure 25) Frascari believes the dream enacts a ‘monstrous semiosis’.6 He observes that, while dreams are the source of myths, neither are irrational categories. Instead, they are ‘ontic tools for penetrating the rigor of reason enlightening the imaginary aspects of thinking’.7 According to Frascari, the imagery of the dream is congruent with Vico’s poetic ‘imaginative universals’. For dream images, just like Vico’s universals, permit a form of cognition that does not separate instrumental from symbolic representation. This is a union that Frascari considers essential for an architectural theory of images. Dream images ‘not only represent but capture something of, or participate in, the nature of, what is being represented’. Thus, understanding comes from an embodied response (desire), rather than an intellectual or rational response.8
3 Ibid., 46. 4 A prime example of the recombinant strategy applied to architectural forms occurs early in the story when Poliphilo emerges from a labyrinthine forest to chance upon a temple. The temple is a strange agglomeration of architectural parts drawn from diverse sources. A towering obelisk sits atop an immense pyramid shaped roof that shades a portal entrance formed from the monstrous lips of Medusa. The interior consists of an entirely unadorned spherical ‘room’ of impossibly vast proportions. Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, trans. Joscelyn Godwin (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 22–29. Inconsistent architectural elements are combined and merged with Nature and other art forms. For example: a miniature grotto is located in a ceiling; a labyrinth is made up of watery paths; and, fish mosaics that line a pool appear to come alive and move in the sunlight. Lefaivre points out that the buildings described in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili literally transform into the irregular shape of ‘real’, rather than ideal bodies—an architectural idea that had no precedence. Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance: 51–56. 5 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 113. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 ———, ‘Maidens “Theory” and “Practice” at the Side of Lady Architecture’, Assemblage, 7 (1988): 18.
176
Figure 25. Woodcut image from 'Hypnerotomachia Poliphili' (first published in 1499)
The vision of uniting dreams with reality is made manifest in Scarpa’s restoration of Castelvecchio in Verona. According to Frascari, the clearest example of this manifestation is found in the supports for the artworks, which comment on the pieces.9 (Figure 26) In the sculpture gallery, human-scale marble figures which float above dark, reflective, pool-like plinths that, in turn hover above the floor, appear to be engaged in conversation with one another. Scarpa’s figures can move at will: they are caught in a suspended moment in in space and time. Tension is generated through the ‘irrational’ subversion of the laws of physics—this is the space of dreams.
9 ———, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 76.
177
Figure 26. Carlo Scarpa: Castelvecchio sculpture gallery (1956–1964)
Dreams have long held an important place in architectural design. Frascari notes that Scarpa dreamt of building a house with moveable stonewalls prior to realising the concept architecturally.10 Alberti, too, relied on the imaginative power of dreams.
I am accustomed, most of all at night, when the agitation of my soul fills me with cares and I seek relief from these bitter worries and sad thoughts. To investigate and construct in my mind some unheard—of machine for moving and carrying weights to reinforce and construct extremely big and invaluable things. And sometimes it has happened that not only have I grown calm in my restlessness of spirit, but I have thought of things most rare and memorable. Sometimes I have designed and built wonderfully composed buildings in my mind, combining different orders and many columns with diverse capitals and unusual bases, and adding these to cornices and entablatures, conferring upon the whole a harmonious and new grace.11
10 Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 113. 11 Leon Battista Alberti Opere volgari Vol. 2 Book 3, 210. Cited in Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance: 170.
178 The idea of connecting dreams with reality lay at the heart of the Surrealist philosophical and artistic enterprise. Vesely claims this notion, which had its origins in Renaissance hermetic thought and the mythic thought of Romanticism, was not merely emblematic of the Surrealist movement, but founds the ‘subterranean world of the whole of modern culture’.12 The dream, writes Vesely, ‘implies nothing less than total rejection of current logic and culture with all its institutions’ and a ‘total liberation of human desires’.13 Dream images defy logical understanding by drawing together two or more distant realities into ‘lucid and insolent rapport’.14 As Vesely so neatly summarises, ‘the mystery of life’ is concealed within the content of dreams.15 Through dreams, which were considered ‘infinitely poetic’, the Surrealists sought access to epistemological truth. Poetic dream images and rationalist machine age imagery and objects were often combined within their works. By establishing a relationship between poetics and the rational sciences the Surrealists believed meaning could be conferred on the latter by the former.16 The intention was not to substitute one reality for another, but rather achieve an alchemical transformation, a ‘ritual or magic act in which reality is transformed always in its full corporeality’.17 This notion of corporeal entwining and transforming distant realities again converges with the model of semiosis associated with Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ‘flesh’. Merleau-Ponty challenged the idea that dreaming (as a particular condition of the imaginary) is secondary, derivative, or additional to the ‘real’ experience of wakefulness.18 In Phenomenology of Perception he declares: ‘We have no right to level all experiences down to a single world, all modalities of existence down to a single consciousness’.19 He considered all modes of consciousness valid, including dreams, myth and madness; moreover, all were essential in establishing our perceptual orientation within the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, dreaming gives dimension and depth to the experience of consciousness. It situates us closer to the experience of ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being because of its irrational (pre-cognitive) nature.20 In
12 Dalibor Vesely, ‘Surrealism, Myth and Modernity’, Architectural Design 48, 2–3 (1978): 87. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 91. 15 Ibid., 89. 16 Vesely writes that prior to modernism meaningful associations were achieved by means of analogy, a form of relation embodied in the poetic image. Ibid., 91. 17 Ibid., 88. 18 James Morley, ‘The Sleeping Subject: Merleau-Ponty on Dreaming’, Theory and Psychology 9, 1 (1999): 98. 19 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception: 338. 20 Eros is implicated in this exchange, although not in a libidinal, psychological, or physiological sense. Merleau-Ponty describes his notion of flesh in terms akin to the Pre-Socratic concept of ‘element’, in terms of generation and growth: ‘The Flesh is not matter, is not mind, is not substance. To designate it, we should need the old term “element”, in the sense it was used to speak of water, air, earth, and fire … a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being’. ——
179 emphasising the existential insight afforded by dreams Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘During sleep … I hold the world present to me only in order to keep it at a distance’; and, in dreams ‘I revert to the subjective sources of my existence’. He adds that dream images, just as the imagery of poetry and myth, ‘reveal still more effectively that general spatiality within which clear space and observable objects are embedded’.21
During the dream itself, we do not leave the world behind: the dream space is segregated from the space of clear thinking, but it uses all the latter’s articulations; the world obsesses us even during sleep, and it is about the world that we dream.22
The space of dreams is not the space of geometry but an irrational space in which the distance (both physical and temporal) between object and subject contracts: it is a topological space of relation.23 Merleau-Ponty explains that dreams are made known to us through the distance of our waking state, a distance that also protects us from the insanity that would result should the proximity of dreams extend to lived experience.24 For the most part, the unity of wakeful experience is so profound that we have limited access to the dreams that are so closely interwoven with desire and the imaginary.25 In the essay ‘Eye and Mind’ Merleau-Ponty describes the powerful insight that dream images convey when mediated through painting, where the ‘oneiric universe of carnal essences’ that constitutes the painted image ‘gives visible existence to what profane vision believes to be invisible’.26
Moral love
While the syncretic nature of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has been widely acknowledged, despite diverse interpretations,27 it is generally recognised that this work valorises and celebrates the sensual and material aspects of architecture and, in doing so, elevates the status of the experience
—, The Visible and the Invisible: 139. Johnson claims that Merleau-Ponty’s repeated association of ‘flesh’ with terms such as spark, fission, explosion, and dehiscence ‘speaks to us of desire’. Galen A. Johnson, ‘Ontology and Painting: Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 50. In The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty describes ‘flesh’, as ‘a pregnancy of possibilities’, and in the same publication he writes: ‘in the patient and silent labour of desire, begin the paradox of expression’. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 250, 144. In the essay ‘Eye and Mind’, Merleau-Ponty notes that the painter’s vision ‘is a continued birth’. ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 168. 21 ———, Phenomenology of Perception: 331. 22 Ibid., 341. 23 Ibid., 339. 24 Ibid., 341. 25 Hamrick and Van der Veken, ‘Nature and Logos: A Whiteheadian Key to Merleau-Ponty’s Fundamental Thought’, 82. 26 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, 169, 166. Drawing from Merleau-Ponty, Frascari writes: ‘oneiric images show the possibility of a transformation that makes visible the invisible’. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 113.
180 of touch. Within the narrative, the erotics of touch make architectural encounters meaningful, and contribute to knowledge in such a way that it transforms Poliphilo by bringing him closer to the divine.
What distinguishes Hypnerotomachia Poliphili from all prior, and contemporaneous works related to architecture is its narrative rather than instructional form, and the profound and explicit eroticism attributed to the material and space of architecture.28 Liane Lefaivre submits that the eroticism associated with anthropomorphism in classical architecture has tended to be overlooked in favour of a focus on the canons of proportion and geometry. Despite this, she points out that a certain eroticism is revealed in a number of Renaissance treatises including: Filarete’s vision of the architectural project as the child born of the ‘marriage’ between architect and patron; the ‘emphatic virility’ of ‘Leonardo and Cesariano’s Vitruvian figures’; and, the implied virginal ‘tenderness’ associated with the anthropomorphised Corinthian column.29 However, these oblique references overlook the most obvious and celebrated source of Renaissance architectural eroticism, namely that derived from the monstrous metaphor. The erotic charge of ornament underpins the entire premise of assemblage so essential to the Renaissance recuperative enterprise. Ornamental monsters are described variously but almost always in terms that are highly charged, licentious, and bodied.30 Consequently, there would have been no more appropriate way to structure a humanist erotic text, and the architectural works contained within it than by means of the imaginative exuberance expressed through monstrous assemblage and erotic ornament.
Lefaivre at one point suggests that the architectural images contained in this ‘ecstatically erotic’ book express the rhetorical concept of historia that Alberti introduces to painting—a means of conveying both the feelings of the architect and inviting the same feeling of participation from the spectator. However, Lefaivre herself subsequently acknowledges that the ‘nature of the
27 The fact that the subject of erotic touch in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has been interpreted in various ways attests to the intricate, complex and nuanced interrelations achieved with the process of mixing. Highlighting this divergence, Pérez-Gómez claims that the structure of the narrative is based on a Neo-Platonic vision, given it ‘follows the philosophical ascent of the soul, pursuing pictures from the mind’s eye’. Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 39. Whereas Smick believes that the work’s focus is on the importance of the material realm—an idea that runs counter to Neo- Platonism. Harvey, ‘Introduction: The “Sense of All Senses”’, 20. 28 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 39. 29 Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance: 234. 30 Connelly, The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play: 30–31.
181 passion’ contained in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, remains far in excess of Alberti’s rhetorical historia.31 She speculates that, although more dream-like, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili might share an affinity with Lorenzo Valla’s Epicurean manifesto De voluptate, which even went so far as advocating free love.32
Pérez-Gómez points out that the association between Eros and revelatory meaning in art, poetry, human handcrafts (techno-poiesis), and architecture has its beginnings in ancient Greece.33 Eros emerges with Greek tragedy, which originates in ritual.34 It is in the middle space between the actors and audience, in the chora or space of the dance platform, that the dramatic action of Greek theatre takes place.35 Plato’s chora and the dancing platform of ancient Greek theatre share more than a name, since both also constitute the grounds for contemplation, participation, and recognition—for Being and becoming.36 It was the space of chora that facilitated the catharsis of the dramatic plot; in this space there was a revealing of knowledge that reconciled personal
31 Lefaivre also notes that this is a necessary step in the evolution of a ‘romantic sensibility’. Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance: 181. The work’s eroticism has more often been attributed the sensualism associated with Renaissance paganism—most notably Lucretian naturalism. Rebekah Smick, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 206. 32 When Poliphilo was faced with having to choose to travel along one of three paths: vita contemplativa (a life of contemplation); vita activa (an active life involving toil); and, vita voluptuosa (a life of desire), he chose vita voluptuosa. And so, Lefaivre declares, ‘What could be more radically Epicurean than this’. Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re- Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance: 76–77. 33 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘The “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning’, in Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise, ed. Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 93. 34 Pérez-Gómez writes that Greek tragedy and comedy originated in the dithyramb (derived from the word dithyrambos that denoted ‘a leaping’, or an ‘inspired dance’) during a spring ritual dedicated to Dionysus ———, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 36, 48. This is significant, for Pérez-Gómez adds, ‘rituals allowed for recognition of the individual’s place in society’ and their ‘relation to the natural world’, an idea that connected individuals and society up until the end of the eighteenth century. However, post industrialisation, public spaces that serve as sites for ‘significant action’ or ‘spaces of participation’ are replaced with self-conscious spaces designed to support a ‘reduced … network of social relations’. Ibid., 125–126. Hannah Arendt submits that the replacement of the public realm by the social realm, founded on a culture of consumption and self-expression, has ironically resulted in the loss of self. She writes: ‘the presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves’. She adds; ‘The privation of privacy lies in the absence of others; as far as they are concerned, private man does not appear, and therefore it is as though he did not exist. Whatever he does remains without significance and consequence to others, and what matters to him is without interest to other people’. Arendt, The Human Condition: 50, 58. Pérez-Gómez notes the problematic that this represents for the domain of architecture, given the discipline is founded on the notion of participatory action associated with ritual. Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 126. 35 Pérez-Gómez explains that the term chora in Homer’s Iliad, refers to a liminal space, in this case the space situated between a horse and chariot. However, ‘once the Dionysian rituals were transformed into drama, this liminal space became architectural’. In this latter context it is a space that both connects and separates the audience from the dramatic action of the theatre. ———, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 49, 37. 36 In the ancient Greek theatre Being and becoming took shape through mimesis—by means of the elements required for the expression of art, such as rhyme, rhythm and harmony. Analogously, ‘significant architectural space in the western tradition’ relies on the ground constituted by the material building and the space inscribed by means of ‘lighting, the truth unveiled by art, and the gap between word and experience’. Pérez-Gómez contends ‘that the ever-present ‘origin’ of Western architecture is founded on this understanding of architecture as a space for the dance, for the poetic motility that distinguishes human beings from other animals, for the narrative language of ‘choreography’. Ibid., 48–51.
182 destinies with the will of the gods. This concept of theatre would provide an enduring link between the associated architectural form, the cosmos and the acquisition of existential knowledge, and is an idea that finds expression (during the Renaissance) with Giulio Camillo’s memory theatre.37
According to Pérez-Gómez, it was Hesiod’s epic poem Theogonia (seventh century BCE) in which the god Eros came to stand for a ‘lack’, and linked to this ‘a desire for what is missing’, that established that a distance had to be maintained in order for desire to be sustained. In other words, the irreconcilable relation between ‘lack’ and ‘desire’ that is held in permanent tension creates a revelatory ‘middle’ space that possesses thickness and depth.38 For Pérez-Gómez, the alchemical moment (of recognition, truth or understanding), such as when an artwork (or architectural work), ‘appears utterly new yet uncannily familiar’, takes place ‘as and in erotic space’.39 The space of Eros is encountered in the dialogic space of rhetoric, with metaphor, in the surface depth of Cézanne’s paintings,40 in the paradoxical space of Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmus, in the enigmatic space of exemplary architecture and in the space created with textual hermeneutics. All permit self-knowledge and ultimately world knowledge.41
Aristotle draws analogy between Eros and knowing.42 For Aristotle, the desire to ‘reach out’ and know gives humans pleasure; however, the fact that humans always fall short in their understanding is a source of continuous pain.43 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is an allegory. The erotic impulse of desire that drives Poliphilo’s search for love is in fact a search for knowledge. This desire is symbolised with numerous references to Poliphilo’s thirst, which remains unsated.44 Pérez-Gómez claims that the human ‘lack’ that underpins the erotic impulse, ‘our
37 ———, ‘The “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning’, 97. 38 Ibid., 96. 39 Ibid., 93, 96. 40 The surface depth (created through ambiguity and tension), encountered in Cézanne’s works is revealed as he relates the literal space of depicted objects to an independent, tactile painterly surface. It is an approach that leads art historian Richard Schiff to posit that Cézanne does not hold to an orthodox view of tactility (hence the claim that a conventional tactile line cannot truly capture nature). Schiff perceptively discerns a deeper ‘emotional’ form of tactility at work in the surface of Cézanne’s paintings (e.g. one that responds to colour) which is experienced in a piecemeal fashion (or metonymically) rather than by means of an all encompassing formal touch that is only understood when the subject is external to, or standing before a physical object. These ideas are discussed in more detail in the section ‘An entanglement of tropes’. 41 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 116–117. 42 Smick, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, 214–215. 43 Pérez-Gómez, ‘The “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning’, 96. 44 Examples of Poliphilo’s thirst can be found throughout the text. Examples include: ‘I took as my last comfort the damp and dewy leaves that lay beneath the fronded oak, pressed them to my pale, cracked lips, and greedily sucked the moisture from them to cool my parched throat’; Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream: 19. [§ A6] and, ‘I discovered an octagonal building with a rare and marvelous fountain, whose invitation I did not refuse as I slaked the thirst that had remained
183 thirst’, is our existential condition that can only be reconciled within ‘the cultural realm of poiesis and its metaphoric imagination’.45
While Rebekah Smick, as Pérez-Gómez, recognises the Aristotelian roots of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’s sensualism she focuses on its ethical dimension. Smick asserts that Hypnerotomachia Poliphili was principally informed by the philosophical dream vision, in which the pursuit of a woman was, in fact, an allegory for the pursuit of moral perfection, a state that is only attained when the soul is released from the materiality of the body. In Platonic philosophy, moral perfection was achieved prior to death by means of contemplation.46 However, for Aristotle who considered body and soul inextricably linked up until the point of death, it was not possible to acquire divine knowledge during an individual’s lifetime.47 Moreover, Aristotle did not embrace the Platonic idea that thinking was a form of ‘seeing’, or that the senses create a deceptive reality that is but a poor reflection of divine universals. Instead, Aristotle considered the senses a necessary fact of human corporeality. These ideas would subsequently (during the Middle Ages) influence Thomas Aquinas, who came to regard sense perception as fundamental to all human thinking. The senses play a positive role in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili as they lead Poliphilo to Polia or, facilitate the acquisition of knowledge as a path to virtue. In choosing the path of voluptas, or desire, Poliphilo enters a sensual realm that moves him nearest to finding Polia (knowledge). Notably, it is the sense of touch that brings Poliphilo closest to the moments of fulfillment.
For Aristotle, the moral contemplation that brings humans closest to acquiring divine knowledge in this world is attained by means of sensation. Yet, sensations risk being disrupted by the emotional responses with which they are inextricably linked. And so, for Poliphilo, a perfect balance had to be maintained between the emotions of pleasure and pain in order to avoid disruption to sensation, and permit the proper formation of moral thought.48 Although initially Poliphilo struggles to acquire this balance, as his journey progresses he becomes more successful
unsatisfied for so long’. Ibid., 70. [§ D7] Further: ‘I could not say whether the temptation to drink came more from the burning thirst of that whole day and the one before, or from the beauty of the source, whose chill indicated that the stone was lying’. Ibid., 73. [§ E1] 45 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 42. 46 The mystics also believed that an individual could acquire understanding of divine universals. Smick, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, 210. 47 Ibid., 207. 48 Ibid., 212.
184 in managing his emotions.49 For Aristotle, touch played an essential role in the physiology of balancing emotions. He believed it to be the sense that regulated the body’s temperature through pneuma carried in the blood—where heat was considered the source of the body’s power. With the even blending of hot and cold blood in the heart emotions could be controlled and ‘right reason’ formed.50 When Poliphilo touches Polia for the first time and feels ‘grasped between warm snow and solid milk’, he exhibits a balanced response. However, Smick points out that this Aristotelian form of equilibrium takes on a Christian dimension when Poliphilo adds that he felt as if he were ‘touching and holding something beyond the human condition’.51 In other words, it is by means of touch that Poliphilo, not only attains moral knowledge, but goes further to attain access to knowledge of the divine.52
For Aristotle, moral behaviour was not simply a matter of understanding or reasoning, but could guide individuals meaningfully toward the Good through ‘love’. Yet, according to Smick, references contained in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili allude to a Christian concept of ‘God’s love’, and so draw influence from Aquinas. Although God cannot be known before death, Aquinas surmised that because love involves a direct relation with the thing loved, it ‘effects a greater unity than knowledge’.53 It is because love is drawn to the substance of a thing rather than its formal representation that it offers a means of overcoming the ‘divisiveness of our representational mode of cognition’, and brings us closest during our lifetime to knowledge of the divine.54 Since touch is the only instance where a sense organ is granted unmediated apprehension of sense data, it is essential to comprehending ‘God’s goodness’.55
Smick suggests that the anthropomorphism of Renaissance architecture, which created an ornamental, expressive skin, allowed the experience of architecture to be harnessed as an allegorical vehicle suited to conveying knowledge of the divine that was (like touch) also uniquely direct.56 For Poliphilo architecture was not just visually beautiful, but erotically
49 Ibid., 212–213. 50 Ibid., 213–214. 51 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream: 149. [§ I7] See also Smick, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, 214. 52 ———, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, 214. 53 Thomas Aquinas, Summa, IaIIae, 28, 1. Cited in ibid., 216. 54 Ibid., 217–218. 55 Ibid., 218. 56 Smick elaborates: ‘As a tactile art, … an art with a literal skin, architecture allows Poliphilo the possibility of a skin-to-skin knowledge of the pneuma, the life-giving spirit of God that lies within. Buildings are the instruments available in this life, mostly in the form of temples or churches, for human congress with the divine. Moreover, as is evident in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,
185 charged: it invited him to touch and feel.57 The sensual and erotic touch that permeates Hypnerotomachia Poliphili stands in direct contrast to the touch associated with agency and epistemological certainty (represented with the synecdoche of the hand) that emerges with the elevation of the anatomical sciences during the early modern period.
their voluptuous effect on us, the pleasure they give, can literally move us in the direction of repeatedly choosing God’s goodness as long as we exert proper control over our passions’. Ibid., 223. 57 This idea finds support in the direct and erotic encounters Poliphilo has with architecture, such as when he beholds a frieze in which there lies a nymph so breathtakingly lovely he is overcome with the desire to reach out and ‘stroke and tickle’ her feet. Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream: 71–72. [§ D8]
186 Masterful touch
Dissection is … one of the most apt metaphors for the experience of intense, directed, thinking or seeing: the Latin perspicere from which we have the words ‘perspicuous’ and ‘perspective’ means seeing through, as in a fog or penetrating a dark night. Analytic thought often borrows those visual metaphors, but ultimately perspective, piercing, and penetrating may all depend on the fundamental desire (or fear) of seeing through the skin.1
James Elkins
Paradoxically, the flaying of the skin envelope, or opening of the body through dissection, consolidated the ground for humans to be understood as bounded and autonomous. Individualism emerged as a theological view of Nature underpinned by the idea of macrocosmic–microcosmic equivalence was gradually replaced with a secular worldview. Secularisation gathered strength in Europe following the Reformation. It led to the world being understood in terms of singular forms: human beings were displaced from the cosmos, their communities, and ultimately their bodies.2 Once the body was no longer viewed as an analogous microcosm of the greater macrocosm, it became merely a bounded object that was understood primarily in relation to other bodies.3 This eventually produced a condition whereby, according to David Le Breton, humans ‘suddenly discovered themselves encumbered with a body, an ontologically empty form, depreciated and accidental’.4
During the Middle Ages the interior of the body was largely unknown. The strength of microcosmos–macrocosmos association was so powerful that dissections were forbidden; for, to penetrate the body with instruments was considered violation of a ‘divine creation’ and
1 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 127. 2 Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, 53–54. 3 Ibid., 56. 4 Ibid., 54.
187 desecration of the ‘skin and flesh of the world’.5 Further, it was considered necessary for the body to remain intact in order to be resurrected.6 Consequently, in this environ those that defiled bodies were viewed with contempt.7 The earliest official dissections were primarily performed on the corpses of executed criminals,8 a ‘punitive class based’ approach to selecting cadavers that exacerbated tensions associated with the practice of anatomisation.9 Early dissections were dependent upon approval from the clergy; their purpose was to offer instruction for surgeons, doctors, barbers and students. However, by the sixteenth century public dissections had transformed into grand theatrical events that were staged to sate the curiosity of a diverse audience.10 Yet, residual resistance to anatomical dissection persisted throughout the seventeenth century, despite growing acceptance of the practice.11
While the transformation of the metaphysical body into an objective medicalised body was foreshadowed with the publication of the physician Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) in 1543, bodily representations contained within the treatise remained ambiguous.12 Vesalius’ images revealed a conceptualisation of the body that was interpenetrated by two worldviews.
The image on the frontispiece of De humani corporis fabrica depicts Vesalius himself conducting the anatomical dissection of a cadaver, signaling that dissection had moved from a subversive, contemptuous practice to one more socially accepted.13 (Figure 27) Until this time,
5 Ibid., 56. 6 Stephen Pender, ‘“No Monsters at the Resurrection”: Inside Some Conjoined Twins’, in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 152. 7 Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, 55–56. 8 Early dissections were primarily performed on ‘normative’ males as the pursuit of anatomical knowledge initially focused on determining commonalities between bodies—an approach that suggests a reduced reading of human anatomy. This approach was encouraged by the fact that a greater number of male criminal corpses were on offer. Given their socially abject status, these corpses could be readily carved into a collection of abstract parts—an act that further eroded the body as subject. Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone Books, 2006), 14–15. 9 Pender, ‘“No Monsters at the Resurrection”: Inside Some Conjoined Twins’, 152. 10 Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, 60. See also Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection: 13. 11 Pender, ‘“No Monsters at the Resurrection”: Inside Some Conjoined Twins’, 152. 12 Sawday asserts that the mythical Anatomia had twin origins; she was both the personification of justice and wisdom, and the mistress of erotic reduction with the power to divide. He claims that this divided origin accounts for the ambivalent stance toward dissection in early modern culture. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 183–184. 13 Ibid., 65–66.
188 anatomists had performed dissections at arms length,14 at a socially, morally, and physically elevated distance while directing the observers gaze with pointed fingers.15
Figure 27. Andreas Vesalius: Frontispiece from 'De humani corporis fabrica' (1543)
Sawday speculates that the theatre depicted on Vesalius’ frontispiece might have been modelled on Bramante’s Tempietto—the Renaissance structure that most essentially embodies the ideal
14 The process of dissection illustrated in miniatures reveals a distinct hierarchy. Typically, the scholar or magister would read from Galen’s treatise in an elevated position some distance from the cadaver. Of the two assistants (barbers) who handled the corpse, the one who cut the flesh was generally illiterate and the one directed to remove the organs, more educated. It is worth noting that Galen’s ancient anatomical treatise relied on analogies between animal and human anatomy based, for the most part, on the dissection of pigs rather than human cadavers. In fact, there is conjecture as to whether Galen ever participated in the dissection of a fresh human corpse. Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, 61. 15 Benthien, Skin: On the Cultural Border Between Self and the World: 43.
189 proportions of Vitruvian Man.16 The illustrated theatre has been anatomically ‘sectioned’ to reveal a female cadaver surrounded by onlookers, including the ancient authorities Galen and Aristotle.17 Her opened abdominal cavity forms the axial mid-point around which the action of the theatre takes place. Sawday submits that this scene is emblematic of the structural coherence of the universe with the womb-giver of life at its centre: it is ‘a drama of life and death’. In this illustration humans are still positioned at the centre of a metaphysical universe.18 The image draws analogy between the dissection theatre as a locus for revealing knowledge of the body, and the memory theatre as a locus for revealing knowledge of the world.
It was in the wooden amphitheatres constructed specifically for the purpose of public dissections (circa 1540) that Vesalius dramatically confirmed his view on the importance of tactile experience, or more particularly, on the need to combine touch with the benefit of immediate visual experience.19 As Vesalius removed organs from opened corpses, body parts were physically ‘handed’ to members of the audience and passed around. On one such occasion Vesalius purportedly declared, ‘surely, lords … you can learn only little from a mere demonstration, if you yourselves have not handled the objects with your hands’.20 While De humani corporis fabrica was the first account to depict a scholar touching and feeling the interior of a dissected body, others followed. Seventeenth century English physician Helkiah Crooke described the senses as the ‘intelligencers between the body and the soul’.21 For Crooke, tactility mediated between the physical body and immanent soul, between the body’s surface and shadowy depths. He emphasised that without touch physicians ‘must of necessity grope uncertainlie in dark and palpable ignorance’;22 and thus equates the loss of touch with the loss of sight, on which the acquisition of knowledge was deemed most dependent.23 Crooke’s expressive, anatomical, and simultaneously allegorical meditations on this relation are recorded
16 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 69–70. 17 Elizabeth Harvey, ‘Review of “Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection”’, Shakespeare Studies 37 (2009): 272. 18 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 70–71. 19 Paula Findlen, ‘Anatomy Theatres, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections’, in The Cambridge History of Science Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katherine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 276. 20 Andreas Vesalius, a modified translation from Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540 (1959) cited in ibid. 21 Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope’, 82. 22 Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), cited in Bettina Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, in Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, ed. Elizabeth Harvey (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvannia Press, 2003), 112. 23 Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope’, 90.
190 in his treatise Microcosmographica (1615).24 In this volume he describes ‘touch’ as the ‘sense of all senses’ for it is the ‘tactive quality diffused through the whole body both within and without’. However, Crooke added that the tactile quality most ‘exquisitely feele’ was achieved with the hand.25
During the Renaissance and Reformation the significance of the sense of touch began to challenge the singular idea of sight as the ‘contemplative ideal’.26 The tactility of the hand was useful for the practice of anatomical dissection, but it was also noteworthy for the role it performed in the acquisition of knowledge and reason.27 The hand not only executed the will of the rational mind during the act of dissection, but was the means by which understanding could be acquired and disseminated through written discourse. In other words, the hand was the agent for the writing that conveyed symbolic meaning on the body.28 However, according to Merleau- Ponty: ‘to relegate [hands] to the world of objects or of instruments’ is to acquiesce ‘to the bifurcation of subject and object’.29
Bettina Mathes observes that during the seventeenth century touch splits along gendered lines. While tactility and touch were generally considered feminine, the touch that emerges with dissection, the act of touching without being touched due to the distancing between subject and object (such as between a passive corpse and the anatomist’s hand), was considered masculine.30 By plunging ‘his’ hands into the body in an act of penetration, the anatomist not only gleaned knowledge about the interior of the body but, according to Mathes, erotically reinforced his masculinity through a form of ‘phallic touch’.31
The erotic desire that impelled the anatomist toward ‘phallic touch’ shares something of the desire that drove Poliphilo in his pursuit of Polia (knowledge); however, there is an important
24 Ibid., 81. 25 Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, 112–113. 26 O’Rourke Boyle, Senses of Touch: Human Dignity and Deformity from Michelangelo to Calvin: xiii. 27 Galen writes: ‘Man is the only one of all the animals to have been provided with hands, instruments suitable for an intelligent animal; likewise, of animals that go afoot he alone was made biped and erect, for the reason that he had hands’. Galen cited in ibid., 73. Cicero also expounded on the utility and significance of hands: ‘We realise that it was by applying the hand of the artificer to the discoveries of thought and observations of the senses that all our conveniences were attained’ and, ‘by means of our hands we essay to create as it were a second world within the world of nature’. Cicero, De natura deorum (circa 25 BCE) 2.60. Cited in ibid., 49. 28 Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, 113. 29 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 137. 30 Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, 113–114. 31 Ibid., 114.
191 difference. For now there is the promise of mastery and fulfillment. Mathes critically reads Vesalius’ choice of a female cadaver for his frontispiece. For her, the abject (naked and un- named) female body that is subjected to the attention of an entirely male audience evokes notions of violation and subjugation.32 Recalling a documented instance in 1536 when Vesalius had illegally acquired a female corpse, Mathes notes its erotic tone.33
After I had brought the legs and arms home in secret … I allowed myself to be shut out of the city in the evening in order to obtain the thorax which was firmly held by a chain. I was burning with so great a desire … that I was not afraid to snatch in the middle of the night what I so longed for … The next day I transported the bones home piecemeal through another gate of the city … and constructed that skeleton which is preserved at Louvain.34
The account describes an anatomical act of ‘construction’ involving a female cadaver that, in the style of the French anatomical Blason (Blazon), conjugates ‘anatomical investigation and erotic love’.35 Sawday observes that the narration employs the language and structures of ‘courtly love’; it describes the illicit, midnight rendezvous with the object of ‘desire’, ‘so longed for’, replete with the gibbet macabrely standing in for a courtly balcony.36 Mathes emphasises that touch was crucial to this ‘eroticised professional endeavor’ which involved ‘manual possession and dismemberment’ as well as the manual ‘investigation and penetration’ of the corpse in order that the anatomist achieve fulfillment.37
Vesalius’ detailed anatomical drawings disclose the troubled and contradictory attitudes that surround the practice of dissection during the early modern period. Although seeking to scientifically and rationally make the interior of the body visible, Vesalius’ illustrations do not depict cadavers objectively. In Book II, flayed corpses or ‘musclemen’ stand stripped of their skin yet are seemingly alive as they gesture toward the reader in the manner of storia (historia). Foregrounded in Paduan landscapes replete with rolling hills and church steeples, they draw the spectator into a narrative. (Figure 28) Sawday suggests that Vesalius’ strange ‘living anatomy’, in which the cadavers appear to participate in their own reductive dissection, represent a strategy
32 Ibid., 118. See also Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection: 15. 33 Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, 119. 34 Vesalius cited in ibid. Also cited in Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 196. 35 ———, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 196–197. 36 Ibid., 197. 37 Mathes, ‘As long as a Swan’s Neck? The Significance of the “Enlarged” Clitoris for Early Modern Anatomy’, 119.
192 designed to offset the highly charged emotional atmosphere that continued to surround public dissections.38 James Elkins, on the other hand, contends that Vesalius’ illustrations are ‘schematisations’ designed to avoid looking at the disordered, labyrinthine, confusing reality of the body. And thus, an act designed ‘to see’ becomes, instead, a strategy to ‘not see’.39
Figure 28. Andreas Vesalius: An illustration from 'De humani corporis fabrica' (1543)
Vesalius’ illustrated corpses align proportionally with the canon of Polykleitus; they are simulacra, or imitations of classical Greek marble sculptures.40 Elkins claims that, through the recovery of ideal forms, Vesalius is at once refusing the abject body and evoking decorum.41 His bodies are ‘removed from suffering and pain’; they deny the painful ‘fact of death’.42 In other words, Vesalius’ drawings resist the dense, incoherent, fleshy morass that constitutes the grotesque, abject body and its association with ‘continual flux’.43 The flayed body is abstracted
38 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 113. 39 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 128–129, 149. 40 Robert G. Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, ELH 68, 3 (2001): 594–595. 41 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 134. 42 Ibid., 128, 132. 43 Ibid., 276.
193 and turned toward the ‘domains of geometry, architecture or sculpture’ in order to escape the anxiety associated with confronting the excesses of a gory reality.44
Vesalius sequences his textual illustrations in order to re-construct the body. He begins with illustrations of the skeleton, followed by depictions of the musculature and circulatory systems, and finishes with images of the brain.45 Through art he aims to construct a unified whole. Crooke, however, did not consider Vesalius’ approach helpful for the business of practical dissection as this practice required partition prior to any form of reconstruction being possible.46 Crooke makes plain the distinction between practice and theory:
[E]ither it signifieth the action that is done with the hand, or the habit of the minde, that is the most perfect action of the intellect. The first is called practical Anatomy, the latter theoretical [sic] or contemplative, the first is gained by experience, the second by reason and discourse.47
And so, Crooke re-frames the process of anatomisation allegorically; as a journey of self- discovery where spiritual and intellectual transcendence represent the ultimate objective and/or destination.48 Crooke describes the spatial partitioning of the body as he retraces Spenser’s journey of the Knights through the Castle of Alma,49 moving through the stomach (‘Cooke- roomes and sculleries’), encountering the heart (‘Parlor of pleasure’) and reproductive organs (‘geniall bed and the Nursery’) to ultimately arrive at the head (‘presence Chamber, where the Soule maketh her chief abode’).50 As a result, anatomists come to understand the body as a
44 Ibid., 134, 149. 45 Galen laid down the order in which the student should learn about the human body in De anatomiciis administrationibus. The bones were to be examined first, for these provided the underlying structure of the body. This was to be followed with an examination of the muscles, and finally examination of the veins, arteries and nerves. In other words, one moves from the innermost parts of the body towards the exterior. The importance of the skin is not highlighted and the structure is only discussed in relation to techniques best suited for its removal so that the organs that lie beneath might be preserved. Connor notes that Vesalius adopts Galen’s attitude to skin and the technique of working from the inside toward the outside of the anatomised body. Connor, The Book of Skin: 13–14. 46 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 131–132. 47 Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), cited in ibid., 136. 48 Ibid., 166–167. 49 Crooke harnesses Edmund Spenser’s allegory, the Castle of Alma—where the feminine is aligned with the materiality of the body and the skin (temporal and imperfect), and the masculine is aligned with the ‘more enduring’ mathematically proportioned structural elements (immortal and perfect)—to construct his anatomical treatise Microcosmographia (1615). Harvey, as Elkins, suggests that the corporeal violation associated with dissection was moderated through the association with geometry and proportion. Harvey, ‘The Touching Organ: Allegory, Anatomy, and the Renaissance Skin Envelope’, 90–91. 50 ———, ‘Pleasure’s Oblivion: Displacements of Generation in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’, in Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture: Lethe’s Legacies, ed. Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams (London: Routledge, 2004), 55. The journey recalls the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi’s (1548–1616) ‘well arranged buildings’, where kitchens were equated with stomachs, and centrally located halls were equated with venous connecting corridors and the heart. Vincenzo Scamozzi and Koen Ottenheym, Vincenzo Scamozzi Venetian Architect: The Idea of a Universal Architecture: Villas and Country Estates (Amsterdam: Architectura and Natura Press, 2003), 188–189.
194 unified whole as well as a collection of parts.51 Notably, Crooke’s architectural conceit not only provided a model for partitioning the body, but came to be seen as a model that could be applied to the spatial arrangement of any form of discourse.52 Consequently, just as anatomical knowledge relied on the practical division of the body followed by its theoretical reconstruction, discourse more broadly would come to rest on the division of topics—or the reversal of ‘Nature’ by ‘art’.53 Underpinning this anatomical idea and its ‘trans discursive application’ was the notion that the body represented ‘an a priori structure that can make known the self and the world’.54 Since anatomisation allows us to know ourselves and, in the words of Crooke ‘whosoever dooth know himselfe knoweth all things’, the logical extension is that the strategy of anatomisation can be harnessed to the matter of acquiring full knowledge more broadly.55 Consequently, by employing the strategy of the anatomical cut, an idealised corporeal unity that denies the facts of reality (embraced by both Vesalius and Crooke) projects a false image onto discourse more broadly, and with it, the illusion of epistemological mastery.56
Disfigured knowledge
Despite the overlay of classical corporeal unity during the early modern period, the violent, painful facts of death were understood and ever present; they were evinced in the emotionally charged atmosphere that continued to be associated with dissective practice. Sawday asserts that the dark side of dissection ‘runs through all Renaissance anatomisations, dissections, partitions, and divisions’, whether the term was encountered in a medical sense or metaphorically.57 Since this was a period where science was not yet entirely separated from other forms of discourse, the vision of dissection as violent partition was also transferred to other cultural domains. Sawday
51 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 160. 52 According to Sawday, this architectural conceit which is found in both anatomical and theological texts, considered the body a ‘“temple” of the incarnation and God the divine “architect” of that construction’. Ibid., 131–132. 53 Crooke describes this bodied process by means of an allegory that compares it with the construction of a built work: ‘Nature first lineth out the masse of the Seede, the warp of the body, and after that with the worf filleth up the empty distances: first she layeth out the foundations, rayseth the stories, bindeth the joyntes and plastereth the walles, till it come unto a perfect building. Art on the contrary takes it asunder peece and peece, proceeding from that which is more to that which is lesse compounded, till at length it come unto the very ground worke or foundation’. Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), cited in ibid., 131. 54 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 594. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid., 594–595. 57 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 2.
195 points out that, paradoxically, this led to works of great ‘beauty and vitality’, particularly in the fields of lyric poetry, drama, art, and architecture.58
The early modern view of dissection is to be distinguished from the objective, scientific practice of dissection and anatomisation that exists today—a practice that is made affectively neutral through an unambiguous and absolute technological frame.59 Although the technological frame shares a unifying logic with the classical body, it reinforces the illusion of control over an uncertain corporeality by means of its omnipotence.
Medical practice begun with Galen, in which the magister directed and described the anatomical process both verbally and in writing, bound the ‘rhetorical cut’, as an essential supplement (or prosthesis) to the ‘anatomical cut’.60 Robert Williams points out that this association was drawn earlier by Plato. In the Phaedrus Socrates declares that, to avoid ‘dismembered confusion’, discourse should be constructed through ‘the survey of particulars, leading to their comprehension in one idea’; and, that the ‘division into species’ should proceed ‘according to the natural formation, where the joint is, not breaking any part as a bad carver might’. Thus, parts are brought into dialectical relation with the whole through the processes of incorporation and anatomisation: the ‘whole cannot prove itself whole’ without this dialectic relation.61 According to Williams, the operation of the anatomical cut is consistent with synecdochic logic,62 wherein each part participates in a greater totality.63 He summarises:
As the anatomical cut divides textuality, the writer qua anatomist initiates a dialectical movement between knowing the parts and knowing the whole. Synecdochic logic, therefore, holds out the promise of absolute textual mastery, occurring when the dialectic reaches a synthesis: a complete knowledge of parts means a complete knowledge of the whole and vice versa.64
58 Ibid. 59 Le Breton, ‘Dualism and Renaissance Sources for a Modern Representation of the Body’, 67. 60 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 596. 61 Plato, ‘Phaedrus’ in the Dialogues of Plato, 270 b, 264 c, 265 d, e. Cited in ibid. 62 According to Fontanier, synecdoche is based on the relationship in which objects ‘form an ensemble, a physical or metaphysical whole, the existence or idea of one being included in the existence of the other’. Pierre Fontanier, Les Figures du discours (1830), 87. Cited in Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 64. Naturally, the closeness of the associated objects can vary in this relationship. Examples of synecdoche include: ‘relations of part to whole, of material to thing, of species to genus, of abstract to concrete, of species to individual’. Ibid. 63 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 596. 64 Ibid., 596–597.
196 The projection of classical unity onto a cadaver, or any other body of discourse, foreshadows Lacan’s original ‘imaginary act’—the mirror stage.65 Lacan asserts that the ego (or sense of subjective self) is not an a priori condition, but comes into being during the mirror stage of human development. In the original pre-mirror stage an infant’s bodily awareness is achieved purely by means of the senses: it understands itself in a piecemeal or fragmented way. The coming into being of the ‘whole’ subjective self occurs when the infant recognises that its ‘skin is the limit of its spatial location’.66 This is not a space that is delineated by anatomy and, or physiology, but is an imagined space shaped by the infants imago, an externalised reflected image of the self that is reinforced by the way an individual feels themself perceived by others. This forced union of the self as image demands that the subject separate from its original fragmentary experience and deny their sensory origins. In other words, an infant’s self- recognition is realised at the expense of a ‘misrecognition’.67 In order to maintain a coherent bodily schema (or imago), the individual projects ‘unified identities’ onto things. Williams makes the point:
Just as the infant draws the mirror image into an imaginary relation of self and other and thereby makes possible the illusion of self-mastery, the subject (mis)recognises in the object an incorporated counterpart over which it can exercise control and ultimately express self-control. In the same way the anatomist projects onto the anatomised object a corporeal unity, creating the illusory prospect of epistemological mastery.68
Lacan was heavily influenced by Freud who wrote: ‘The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body’.69 The sensations of the skin surface are considered the most elemental, ‘essential and constitutive’ of sensory perceptions. The information processed through the skin is simultaneously internal and external, expressive and receptive, passive and active.70 These ideas are implied in Merleau-Ponty’s account of the ‘double sensation’ that occurs when one hand of the body touches another part of the body and
65 Ibid., 595. Homer suggests that Lacan was influenced by the phenomenology of Sartre in formulating his notion of the mirror phase of development, in particular, Sartre’s claim that the ego was but an external object in the world perceived by the subject. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge 2005), 20. 66 Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 39. 67 Ibid. 68 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 595. 69 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Ego and the Id’ in Standard Edition (1923): Vol. 19, 26. Cited in Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 34. 70 Ibid., 35.
197 the position of subject and object is subsequently reversed.71 According to Lacan, the skin surface where the subject is constituted can be read formally in the twisting Moebius strip—a dynamic interface that is at once both inside and outside.72 The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu takes this abstract concept and makes it explicit with his assertion that the ‘centre’ of the body is situated at the periphery—at the interface between body and world.73 For Anzieu, Freud and Lacan the ego is a dynamic entity that is constantly in the process of being formed and reinforced. The ego draws an intimate space around the skin, which is continuously being redefined, be it emotionally, culturally, geographically or physically.74
Williams notes that Lacan’s concept of misrecognition was anticipated by Vico, as is illustrated with the following quotation from the New Science.
[M]an in his ignorance makes himself the rule of the universe, for … he has made of himself an entire world. So that, as rational metaphysics teaches that man becomes all things by understanding them, this imaginative metaphysics shows that man becomes all things by not understanding them.75
As dissection came to be seen as a metaphor for analytic thought, its dissociative and reconstructive strategies, which include prosection, section, excision, grafting, diaresis, and prosthesis as well as its subordinate practices and associated lexicon, were applied to all manner of bodies, be they artistic, architectural, cultural, political, scientific or literary.76
Although it is commonly held that architects conceived the notion of section from the process of dissection, Paul Emmons observes that architects were already utilising this anatomical technique prior to the publication of Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica.77 The ruin, a naturally occurring section, and the architectural ‘wound’ were early precursors for the more explicit sectional cuts that would subsequently appear in the drawings of Claude Perrault and Sir Christopher Wren
71 Merleau-Ponty points out in The Visible and the Invisible that the sensation of touching and being touched can vacillate at will. In other words, the sensations intertwine. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 264–265. 72 Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 36. 73 Elizabeth Harvey, ‘The Portal of Touch’, The American Historical Review 116, 2 (2011): 389. 74 Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 38. 75 Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 405. 76 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 127. 77 Paul Emmons, ‘A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing’, in Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia and Death, ed. Donald Kunze, David Bertolini, and Simone Brott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 158.
198 during the seventeenth century.78 Just as early knowledge of the interior of the body was largely gleaned from open wounds because of strict sanctions surrounding early dissections, architectural ‘wounds’ were similarly illuminating.79 In an act of double framing, they offered glimpses of the world within or beyond immediate view. These early sectional devices, however, did not directly reference the classical unified body but, rather, the melancholic, suffering body.80
The skins of Giovanni Battista Piranesi
The eighteenth century architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) upheld the melancholic tradition.81 His ruinous, architectural ‘bodies’ were described variously as, temporal, decayed, suffering, disordered and labyrinthine. Piranesi’s ruins, in contradistinction to the modern plan, or clinically cut section, reveal more than just the structure or simple cut away view of an interior. By means of historical traces these ruins allude to ways in which interior spaces were inhabited; they rhetorically ‘speak’ of the building's transformation over time; moreover, they ‘touch’.82
78 Ibid., 157–158. 79 Ibid., 158, 160. 80 This idea allowed Frascari to describe Renaissance architects operating under the ‘light of Saturn’ as given to melancholy—a notion reflected in spatial forms such as, ‘labyrinths, arcades, networks of streets, ruins, fragments—where “chronological movements are analysed in spatial images”’. Within a melancholic ‘topography of memorable spaces: the architect is faithful to the things that become “intelligible universals” which help the imagination’. And so, Frascari, citing Walter Benjamin, considers ruins the tangible equivalent of allegory. When philosophical understanding is drawn from images that ‘not only represent but capture something of, or participate in the nature of, what is being represented’ (as with the hermetic visual tradition), rather than by means of rational categories, the recollective universal is at play. It is by means of the recollective universal that we in our modern age can approach the imaginative universal. Frascari, ‘Maidens “Theory” and “Practice” at the Side of Lady Architecture’, 24, 18. 81 The melancholic tradition emerges during the Renaissance as an imaginative poetics inspired by antique ruins takes hold. Its emergence is not only evinced in the imaginative works contained in Serlio’s Libro estraordinario (1551), but also in Étienne Dupérac’s I vestigi dell'antichità di Roma (1575) which depicts architectural works founded on fragments which continue to reference their original context. Vesely, however, observes that during the eighteenth century the ‘ruin-motif’ is uncoupled from its roots in Christianity and the emblematic tradition and becomes, instead, associated with ‘aesthetic experience’ and the more personal expression of ‘melancholy and contemplation’. Dalibor Vesely, ‘The Nature of the Modern Fragment and the Sense of Wholeness’, in Fragments: Architecture and the Unfinished: Essays presented to Robin Middleton, ed. Barry Bergdoll and Werner Oechslin (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006), 48. According to Robin Middleton, this profound shift is heralded with the work of Julien-David Le Roy. For the images in Le Roy’s Les Ruines des plus beaux momuments de la Gréce (1758) do not express a Greek ideal, but rather, the ‘unravelling’ of that ideal. Middleton points out that Le Roy, ‘Having made his voyage of discovery, having returned with his prize, … rejected from the start any attempt to hold the architecture of ancient Greece up as a model for emulation’. Robin Middleton, ‘Introduction’, in The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2004), 83. It is the melancholic tradition associated with Le Roy’s Ruines that provides Piranesi with a point of departure. 82 Elkins describes the bodily response to a painting that ‘speaks’ (in which the distance between the viewer and the viewed diminishes) as ‘visceral seeing’ or ‘thoughtful embodiedness’. He claims that while a large number of disciplines and theories have focused on this idea, including art, gender studies, parts of psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, visceral seeing goes back to ancient times. Elkins believes that pictured bodies act in two ways: by acting on the spectator’s body and ‘forcing thoughts about sensation, pain, and ultimately death’; and, by acting on the spectators mind by ‘conjuring thoughts of painless projection, transformation, and ultimately metamorphosis’. Paradoxically, he claims that these twin ideas constitute a framework that can bring a ‘provisional order to a literature that grows less manageable with each passing year’. He adds that, the ‘depicted body must be intractable, it must escape all categories, all imposed orders as it is the most unsystematic object we can know and therefore must be included in any ordering schema’. Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: vii–viii, ix–x. Accordingly, since the monster and the prosthesis are figured constructs of the ‘real’ that point to those things that must be
199 Steeped in pathos, the ruins evoke emotions of anguish and pain. In picturing the temporal and fluxing body of the real, Piranesi embraced the dark side of anatomisation.
Presaging Piranesi, although there is no evidence of influence, the English scholar Robert Burton (1577–1640) also harnessed the subject of melancholy and anatomical ‘cutting’, not to project a corporeal order onto knowledge or rhetorically ‘open it up’ and create the illusion of mastery, but to disfigure it. A purported medical treatise, Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (first published in 1621) draws less than a quarter of its source material from medical discourse. Instead, it combines citations from a broad range of disciplines that pertain, in one way or another, to melancholy.83 According to Williams, Burton harnesses the disfiguring strategies associated with ‘cutting’ to his task, rather than constructive strategies associated with the rhetorical tradition of building a unified textual ‘body’.84 Burton’s anatomical cut does not yield a body of knowledge that synthesises its parts by means of subordination to a whole but, instead, produces a relationship of parts that disrupts synecdochic logic. Burton’s aberrant cutting strategies include: the list, which ‘sutures’ parts in a way that denies any hierarchical relation; the overuse of digressions, which irregularly swell the text; and interpositio, (or ‘placing between’), which involves inserting heterogeneous citations into sentences. With interpositio the part is elevated to the status of the whole and the sentence remainders, no longer ‘authoritative’, are reduced to fragments. Digressions and interpositio share their logic with the medical strategies of ‘grafting’ and ‘prosthesis’.85
At the level of the text, the Anatomy is further malformed through a mode of partitioning that binds two incompatible organisational systems. The first two parts are arranged as thesis and antithesis, while a third part disregards the first two parts and begins over with a completely new
questioned, they can be harnessed as tools to explore new ways of working, ways that, in accord with Frascari, permit us to escape the historicist loop, to move beyond the ‘search for intelligible universal [or], rational categorisations that do not help the architectural imagination’. Frascari, ‘Maidens “Theory” and “Practice” at the Side of Lady Architecture’, 18. 83 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 593. 84 In Plato’s Phaedrus Socrates claims that the ‘the procedure of rhetoric is like that of medicine’, and further, ‘every discourse ought to be a living creature, having a body of its own and a head and feet’. In other words, rhetorical discourse should be arranged in a bodily form that contains a beginning, middle and end. Moreover, the arrangement of parts, as with the parts of the body, need to exist in dialectic ‘synthesised’ relation to the ‘whole’ body. Plato cited in ibid., 596. 85 Ibid., 597–599.
200 logic, a logic more akin to the division of species. And so, Williams notes that Burton’s ‘melancholy develops in a mutated and recursive fashion’.86
Disfigurement and malformation are monstrous conditions that do not permit the illusion of self- identification.87 Consequently, Burton’s text does not signify, and the reader becomes disoriented. This experience converges with Lacan’s fragmented ‘monstrous’ originary condition which ‘haunts the individual throughout [their] life’. Williams claims that humans maintain a body gestalt and project an illusionary and symbolic corporeal order to avoid regressive awareness of their underlying monstrosity.88
Piranesi, as Burton, harnesses two conflicting epistemological approaches to the task of constructing his architectural images. The first approach relies on the rational acquisition of knowledge drawn extensively and objectively from the archeological examination and documentation of ancient Roman ruins, while the second approach, which relies on the imagination and embraces the concept of invention and the logic of anatomisation, disfigures the first. While the dissective methods associated with anatomisation in pursuit of epistemological and philosophical truth privileged vision (despite the improved status of masterful touch), the disfigured anatomical strategies of Burton and Piranesi elevate the sensuality associated with tactility and touch.
Piranesi goes beyond the accurate and systematic cataloguing of Roman ruins. His approximately one thousand etchings fall into three main series: Vedute di Roma (Roman Views), Antichità Romane (Roman Antiquities), and the Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons). He produced two series of the Carceri. The first was published in 1750 during an initial visit to Rome while the second series, a reworking of the first with two added images, was published in 1761. Marguerite Yourcenar writes that, while the second series of the Carceri transposes ‘the substance of Rome into the realm of the irrational’,89 without Piranesi’s Antiquities and Views the Carceri would lack authenticity.
86 Ibid., 603–604. 87 Ibid., 594. 88 Williams writes: ‘a monster of knowledge shatters the mirror stage of recognition for the reader who desires to know … By bringing out the monstrous in knowledge, Burton forces the reader into an extra-imaginary condition, not only a reminder of the delusions subjectivity projects onto textuality, but also an indication of the subject’s inescapable powerlessness when exposed to the real—that unknowable dimension to knowledge’. Ibid., 605–606. 89 Marguerite Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 90.
201 Without the Antiquities and Views, the phantasmagorical universe of the Prisons would seem too studied, too factitious; we should not discern in it the authentic material reappearing obsessionally amid his own nightmares. Without the almost demonic boldness of the Prisons, we should hesitate to recognise, in the apparent classicism of the Views and the Antiquities, the deep song of a meditation on the life and death of forms at once visual and metaphysical.90
Barbara Stafford observes that in Antiquities and Views Piranesi wields ‘the etcher’s needle like a scalpel’ applying ‘surgical procedures taken … from medical illustrations, to turn the still-living fabric of architecture inside out’, and thus uncover and retrieve ‘the decaying body of the ancient and modern city’.91 Echoing this claim, Yourcenar, rather poetically, describes Piranesi’s opened ruins as ‘turned inside out by the depredations of time and of man, so that the interior has now become a kind of exterior, everywhere invaded by space like a ship by water’.92 The mutable tension between interior and exterior space recalls the inside–outside continuum associated with Anzieu’s peripheral skins.
The ruin, and its relative the ‘wound’, not only establish a dialogue between surface and depth, but also between near and far, open and closed, old and new, past and present, private and public. Surface ‘wounds’ framed by tattered edges that penetrate decayed masonry skins replicate the lesions encountered in decomposing bodily remains. Some ‘wounded’ architectural surfaces have had their uppermost layer of skin (decorative stone facings) ‘flayed’, to expose the structure beneath.93 These images offer intimate, voyeuristic glimpses steeped in ‘secretive otherness’.94 The veiled nature of ‘wounds’, which only partially reveal, heighten the spectator’s desire to see more, to complete the vision. (Figure 29) Viewer participation is invited through the reconstruction of that which is obscured or missing.95 The ruined castle was a primary symbol for the Surrealists for precisely this reason for, in the act of ‘imaginative integration following disintegration’, it was considered possible to recover the romantic, more primary, elemental emotions of childhood.96
90 Ibid., 96. 91 Barbara M. Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 59. 92 Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays: 97. 93 Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine: 61. 94 Emmons, ‘A Window to the Soul: Depth in Early Modern Section Drawing’, 161. 95 Ibid. 96 Vesely, ‘Surrealism, Myth and Modernity’, 92.
202
Figure 29. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Veduta di Roma (circa 1766)
Stafford suggests that Piranesi, as Vesalius and the anatomists before him, invites viewer participation through ‘pointing fingers’, although Piranesi does so metaphorically, by means of ‘light and shade’ and ‘sharp and faint focus’.97 However, unlike Vesalius, Piranesi’s ruined bodies are not schematic representations; rather, they signal the disordered flesh that would in reality confront the anatomist. Body parts are not easily identified. Just as the anatomist must feel ‘his’ way through the fleshy morass of viscera in order to locate nested and layered particulars, the viewer ‘feels’ (both in a tactile and affective sense) their way through Piranesi’s structures. Partially decomposed architectural fragments must be identified piece by piece in a corporeal act of retrieval.98
The spectator who wanders about the detritus to retrieve parts amongst the ruins, mimics the wanderings of the abject, ‘marginal’ figures that inhabit, and at times dissolve into the cracks, joints, and fissures of Piranesi’s corroded structures. These ‘broken’ humans communicate the dramatic scale of the remains; they have effectively become architectural instruments, or scale
97 Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine: 61. 98 Ibid., 64.
203 rules.99 No longer the measure of all things, or ‘architect’s template’, these humans are inextricably bound to the temporality of nature. Elkins refers to a detail, ‘Rovine delle antiche fortificazioni del monte e della città di Cora’, Antichità di Cora (1764), in which two figures are set against a massive stone wall. As these abject creatures look skyward in a gesture of awe, their bodies become one with the swirling mass of etched marks, their outstretched fingers ‘entangled’ with the stones’ ‘fingerprints’.100 The obsessive, clinical clarity and exacting detail of the etched marks highlights the expressive surface of the remains and fragments. According to Teresa Stoppani, both ruins and ruined figures exist in a state of becoming, so placing emphasis on ‘the properties, potentials and failures’ of matter, and thereby highlighting a materiality (and tectonics) that ‘operates beyond form’.101 Stoppani suggests that Piranesi’s figures ‘represent and are part of an architectural stage … in which organic and inorganic, mineral, vegetal, animal and human fuse in an environment that is not regulated by form but governed by change’.102
Stafford notes the ‘intimate connection’ between the eroded surface ‘tissues’ of Piranesi’s ruins and the process by which acids and the etcher’s needle ‘decompose’ a metal plate in order to produce images.103 Accordingly, the processes of decay and decomposition not only constitute Piranesi’s formal model, but also comprise the technical means by which they are realised.104 The hand that was intimately bound with the making of these images evokes Vico’s verum–factum principle, that is, that the truth is not simply found in the constructed form, but also in the actions that led to its production.
While the ruins depicted in Piranesi’s Views and Antiquities remain incomplete parts, they still are able to evoke the reconstitution of an original whole through a ‘prosthetic’ act of imaginative reconstruction whereby, according to Stafford, the viewer ‘suture[s] the certain to the conjectural’.105 In the case of ruins, because the whole can be reinstated, the part remains formally defined despite Piranesi’s emphasis on materiality and transformation. In this sense, the ruined parts act in the way of Plato’s original human ‘symbolons’—they indirectly allude to what is missing in order to supplement, and complete the body. As tokens of recognition, symbolons
99 Teresa Stoppani, ‘The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis’, Footprint, 5 (2009): 150. 100 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 118–119. 101 Stoppani, ‘The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis’, 148, 152, 157 n.142. 102 Ibid., 150. 103 Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine: 61. 104 Ibid., 58–59. 105 ———, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 32.
204 evoke collective memory and collective participation. Thus, in a double act, Piranesi’s ruins function as ‘mechanisms for remembering as well as for imagining’.106
Yourcenar points out that while Piranesi’s Antiquities embody time, the defining character of the Carceri (Prisons) is space.107 In The Gothic Arch (second state) the classical canons (of proportion, composition, and order) and the rules of classical perspective have been either set aside or distorted in order to create a de-centred, labyrinthine, infinite expanse of arched colonnades, ramps and stairs. The scene is composed from multiple viewpoints. (Figure 30) A layered and multiplied structure suggests a deep and boundless interior that expands beyond the physical limits of the work. It is a space that possesses no beginning and no end. The expressively etched marks that texture the surface, together with the proliferation of draped ropes, convey the impression of a dream, of peering through a series of transparent screens or veils—all heighten the sense of uncertainty.
Figure 30. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carcere XIV 'The Gothic Arch'–second state (printed 1761)
106 Erika Naginski, ‘Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico’, in Architecture Post Mortem: The Diastolic Architecture of Decline, Dystopia and Death, ed. Donald Kunze, David Bertolini, and Simone Brott (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2013), 197. 107 Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays: 112.
205 The Gothic Arch does not project the impression of pre-modern incarceration which was generally associated with entombment and claustrophobia, nor does it depict the cold functionalist prisons of modern times.108 The subliminal anguish of Piranesi’s prisons is more ephemeral, and therefore all the more insistent. It is implied in the alienated, diminutively scaled, anonymous figures that have been reduced to an industrious collective. Yourcenar observes that the ‘true horror’ of the Carceri is not generated by the occasional reference to instruments of torture: but,
… in the indifference of these human ants roaming through enormous spaces … never to communicate amongst themselves or even take note of their respective presences … Sure- footed, at ease in these altitudes of delirium, such gnats do not seem to notice they are buzzing on the brink of the abyss.109
Pallasmaa labels the ‘endlessly crisscrossing’ and ‘impossible’ stairways that characterise Piranesi’s Carceri series ‘vertical labyrinths’. Here there is no possible escape. Prisoners are condemned to endlessly descend and ascend in an effort that generates a feeling of ‘hopelessness and suffocation’.110 Piranesi’s ‘impossible’ stairs share a contradictory logic with M. C Escher’s Belvedere. (Figure 31) In Escher’s image, Cartesian logic or the logic of perspective has been replaced with a ‘logic of becoming that attempts to present the ever changing processes of things’.111 Rosen claims that the ‘dialectical thickness’ evoked by Escher’s image is achieved through the realisation of Martin Heidegger’s ‘true time’ in which past, present, and future ‘offer themselves to one another’.112 In this image we are not merely experiencing the oscillating viewpoints of a Necker cube, but the hinge between them.
108 Ibid., 108–109. 109 Ibid., 117–118. 110 The dark psychological undertones of this motif have been heavily exploited in films, including Sergei Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Stairways of the Mind’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis 9 (2000): 12–13. 111 Rosen claims that this logic equates to the ‘principle of non-contradiction’ described by the philosopher Peter Angeles, which is also one of the ‘basic “laws of thought” in Aristotelian philosophy’. Peter Angeles, Dictionary of Philosophy (1981), 155. Cited in Rosen, Dimensions of Apeiron: A Topological Phenomenology of Space, Time, and Individuation: 176. 112 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1962/1972), cited in ibid.
206
Figure 31. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Carcere VIII 'The Drawbridge'–second state (printed 1761) and M.C. Escher: 'Belvedere' (1958)
Piranesi’s Drawbridge evokes a similar spatial anguish to Escher’s Belvedere, although here there is also psychological anguish. In the Drawbridge, spiral stairs wrap around a foreground bridge, pushing it spatially behind the bridge above, which impossibly originates at a point further behind the first bridge. Space and time, in both images, are neither experienced sequentially nor both at once but, rather, through the fluid ‘mutual permeation of opposites’.113
Yourcenar suggests that the world of Piranesi’s prisons is paradoxically ‘closed over itself’, and yet made ‘mathematically infinite’.114 The Carceri evoke dream structures, incoherent space, the absence of time, a denial of the laws of physics, and disassociation of parts. For Yourcenar, the works represent ‘a dream of stone’.115 The wood and masonry so expressively and carefully
113 Ibid., 179. 114 Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays: 114. 115 Ibid., 110–111.
207 wrought in Piranesi’s Views and Antiquities, have in the Carceri become merely ‘part of the edifice with no relation to the life of things’. Yourcenar notes that ‘natural elements are absent or narrowly subjugated: earth appears nowhere, covered over by tiles or indestructible pavings; air does not circulate … a perfect immobility reigns in these great closed spaces’.116 Yet, while these spaces do indeed resonate with a weighty stillness, they are not entirely unrelated to the life of things.
Pérez-Gómez believes that it was Piranesi’s aim to move beyond illusionistic representation in order ‘to understand the phenomenic essences of stone and wood architecture’.117 He adds that since the dissolution of form results in a space that is no longer understood by a reasoning mind, the viewer becomes immersed in an affective environment. This space is not separate to, but constitutive of, the life of things. Eisenman echoes this view when he writes,
Once the environment becomes affective, inscribed with another logic or an ur-logic, one which is no longer translatable into the vision of the mind, then reason becomes detached from vision … This begins to produce an environment that ‘looks back’—that is, the environment seems to have an order that we can perceive even though it does not seem to mean anything. It does not seek to be understood in the traditional way of architecture yet it possesses some sense of ‘aura’, an ur-logic which is the sense of something outside of our vision. Yet one that is not another subjective expression.118
By creating the appearance of a perspectival vision from multiple vanishing points, forms disintegrate, producing an incoherent and uncertain reality. This denies the viewer who participates in the work any possibility of ever reconnecting fragments into a unified whole. In other words, fulfillment is denied. Yet, while the irrational, oneiric space of Piranesi’s Carceri etchings appears to be the space of madness, there is a sense in which the viewer is able to retain their objective ‘waking’ distance. For, as Pérez-Gómez points out, despite the appeal of the second series to the human imagination, the spatial structures ‘remain impenetrable’, and thus external to the human body.119 And so, proximity and distance are held in tension. The filmmaker
116 Ibid., 111. 117 Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science: 257–258. 118 Eisenman claims, with reference to the Alteka Tower project (unbuilt), that folding can be harnessed as strategy for dislocating vision because it confuses established hierarchies such as insides and outsides, and so, creates an affective space in which the environment might ‘look back’ at the subject. This notion opens up to the possibility of the gaze. Peter Eisenman, ‘Visions’ Unfolding: Architecture in the Age of Electronic Media’, in Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965–1995, ed. Kate Nesbitt (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), 560–561. The relation between Lacan’s gaze and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh is explored in more detail in part three, Prosthesis. 119 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 87–88.
208 Sergei Eisenstein considered the disintegration of form that produces the ambiguous objects of the Carceri the preliminary step in a move toward the modern/postmodern deconstruction of space that truly began with Cézanne.120
While Manfredo Tafuri acknowledges the affective power of Piranesi’s distortions, multiplications and fragmentations, he declares that, ultimately, Piranesi’s Carceri series is ‘nothing more than a [visually communicated] systematic criticism of the concept of place’, for Piranesi had long effected the dislocation of the centre.121 Tafuri believes that the decentered space of the Carceri was a deliberate attempt to draw a parallel with the radical changes that were occurring in Enlightenment society and point to their impact on the human condition.122 He suggests that through manipulation of the ‘sacred’ canons, ‘Piranesi upsets “the things” and “the order” because he cannot attack “the order of things” directly’.123And so, by valorising the imagination in an attempt to counter an Enlightenment fixation on reason, the etchings of the Carceri denote a dystopian rather than utopian vision of modernity.124
According to Tafuri, Piranesi’s Campo Marzio (published after re-working the Carceri series) marks the decisive historical moment when Baroque ‘variety’ yields to the modern fragment, for this work does not recover and re-assemble ancient parts (trophies) into inventive hybrids but, instead, contests and re-interprets the past.125 Fragments, in contrast with parts, do not permit a
120 Eisenstein points out that, while Cézanne’s objects no longer have precise outlines, ‘[a] connection with the object is still perceptible’. However, he notes that in Picasso’s paintings, ‘[t]he object—“the pretext”—has … disappeared’ and been replaced with ‘a world of new spaces, volumes, and their interrelationships’. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Piranesi, or the Fluidity of Forms’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, ed. Manfredo Tafuri (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press 1987), 75–76. 121 Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, trans. Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987), 27. 122 ———, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development, trans. Barbara Luigia La Penta (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 18. Piranesi and Vico shared a rationale for challenging the Hellenocentrism that had come to dominate the Enlightenment. While there is no evidence of any direct link between the two thinkers, there is conjecture that Vico’s ideas may have come to Piranesi’s attention via the Franciscan friar Carlo Lodoli, who had developed an association with Vico and was influenced by his ideas. Naginski, ‘Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico’, 185. Both Vico and Piranesi believed that Roman origins could be traced back to the Egyptians via the Etruscans. This allowed them to place the origins of Roman culture prior to that of the Greeks, and so endowed with greater authority. According to Vico, the Romans retained closer connections to their heroic age than the Greeks, who had moved too quickly from their myths to philosophy and reason (of the Barbarous Age). Consequently, they were unable to fully absorb the mytho–poetic sensibility within their culture and language. Vico, The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Unabridged Translation of the Third Edition (1744) with the addition of ‘Practic of the New Science’: para. 158. Erika Naginski suggests that Vico’s principle of verum–factum was consistent with Piranesi’s obsessive documentation of archaic fragments, their assemblage and structure. For Piranesi believed that these assemblages, factum, offered a means for understanding archaic culture, verum. Naginski, ‘Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico’, 190–191. 123 This approach is akin to the approach adopted by Picasso to create Guernica. Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant- Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s: 62. 124 Naginski, ‘Preliminary Thoughts on Piranesi and Vico’, 186. 125 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development: 14–16.
209 reconstruction of ‘wholeness’. Broken or disfigured beyond recognition, fragments are symbolically, and therefore meaningfully uncoupled from any original context.
Describing Campo Marzio as a ‘colossal piece of bricolage’ in which the ‘irrational and rational are no longer … mutually exclusive’, Tafuri claims that the work epitomises the tension between a ‘demand for order and the will to formlessness’.126 In other words, Campo Marzio embodies the struggle between a monstrous and disordered world and one that is determinedly rational and unified.
Situated within the marshy borderlands of ancient Rome proper, Campo Marzio was an ancient Roman burial site and therefore a place that embodied ‘otherness’.127 Although geographically and culturally appended to Rome, in an act of inversion Piranesi makes Campo Marzio primary and the city of Rome the remainder.128 According to Stan Allen, this inversion is symptomatic of the ‘fiction’ of the image which depicts a horizonless, eighteenth century aerial view of a site where ruins appear as traces or fragments.129 Echoing Burton, Piranesi avoids classifying (visual) knowledge on the basis of any linear or rational organisational logic. Instead, parts are arranged so that their chaotic, and at times overlapping, associations remain discordant, heterogeneous, excessive, and ultimately monstrous. Tafuri refers to the space of Campo Marzio as a ‘triumph of the fragment’, a ‘formless tangle’, an ‘architectural banquet of nausea’, and ‘a semantic void created by an excess of visual noise’.130 (Figure 32)
126 Ibid., 15–16. 127 Stan Allen, ‘Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design’, Assemblage, 10 (1989): 75. 128 Ibid. 129 Ibid. 130 Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s: 35.
210
Figure 32. Giovanni Battista Piranesi: Campo Marzio 'Ichnographia' (1762)
Allen echoes Tafuri when he writes that Piranesi, with ‘morbid precision’, directed architecture’s gaze back to its origins in order to demonstrate that the return to origins was futile.131 According to Allen, Piranesi’s project makes the monstrous constitutive:
A return to origins that calls into question the value of the origin; the idea of a critique from within; the notion of architecture’s rationality being turned against itself, a critique of the instrumentality of classical reason, of geometry, of ‘foundations’; the elevation of
131 Allen, ‘Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design’, 71.
211 the marginal and fragmentary to a constitutive position; the ambiguity of frame and subject, of structure and ornament.132
While Piranesi does indeed appear to invoke monsters with his critique of Campo Marzio, Tafuri notes that the fragments have fallen silent, for the images have become disconnected from their original context and therefore are only rendered meaningful within the new context.133 With the complete dissociation of the sign from the signified, the classical monster ceases to exist. For without reference to—or the resistance of—an original transgressed form they simply dissolve into ‘formlessness’.134
The restorative fragment
Vesely considers the fragment emblematic of the contemporary age. Unlike parts whose meaning or values are derived through dialogue with a transcendent whole, fragments have no intrinsic value, and rely on subjective interpretation to convey meaning.135 Historically, the transition from part to fragment was accompanied by a transition from imaginative imitation to self-expression, a shift signaled in architecture, according to Vesely, with a move from the communicative space of ornament moderated by decorum to the expressive space of the late Baroque rocaille.136 Illustrative of fragments more broadly, the rocaille appears unfinished; it is a structuration that is in a state of becoming, and is representative of a universe that is in a similar state of becoming. At issue for Vesely is that the autonomous, self-organising logic (derived from secularisation and organicism) of rocaille fragments established the basis for a more recent view that systems can be substituted for communicative culture—a view that has resulted in inappropriate attempts to ‘simulate a concrete human situation in the context of virtual space’.137 However, while Vesely recognises the reductive nature of fragments, he also believes that they hold the potential to be constitutive138—a notion that is revealed with the ambiguous space of Piranesi’s etchings, Cubist and Surrealist artworks, other exemplary works of art, literature, music, and architecture.139
132 Ibid., 78. 133 The ambiguous object stripped of context and meaning represents, for Andre Breton, the ‘crisis of the object’. Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 318. 134 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 314. 135 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 324–325. 136 Ibid., 328. 137 Ibid., 330–331. 138 Vesely notes that a fragment ‘can appear as an object, as a structure, or as a complete and coherent system’. And while ‘A building or large development may appear complete, well-integrated, and unified’, it may in reality ‘be only a large fragment,
212 Vesely emphasises that the restorative fragment does not simply find meaning in self-conscious acts and experiences but within a shared, communicative, universal ground that includes all aspects of culture. In this context, expansive meaning is derived hermeneutically—not in a ‘single intuition’ but indirectly—here authentic art and architecture take on a mediating role that poetically reveals something about the world in which they are situated.140 To illustrate his claim, Vesely explains that Cézanne did not treat colour as an isolated fragment, but as an element inseparable from the phenomena with which it was associated, so that the fragment of colour acquires a ‘unity’, an ‘unsurpassable plenitude’ that is representative of the real.141 Cézanne’s understanding of the constitutive or restorative function of colour is grounded in primordial depth—in the space prior to the separation of tactility and vision.142
In the ambiguous artworks of Georges Braque, fragments retain reference to the world from which they were extracted, while also referencing their newly constructed spatial context. However, Braque is clear that, within the new context, it is the relationship between fragments that is most important.
It seems to me just as difficult to paint the spaces ‘between’ as the things themselves. The space ‘between’ seems to me to be as essential an element as what they call the object. The subject matter consists precisely of the relationship between these objects and between the object and the intervening spaces. How can I say what a picture is of when relationships are always things that change? What counts is this transformation.
The object is a dead thing. It only comes alive when it is activated. Find the common ground between things. That is what poetry is, don’t you see?143
The constructed space of Braque’s paintings is, therefore, relational. In these works understanding is not derived by means of geometric, or formal structures but through situation. Meaning is revealed iteratively, with the revelatory dialogue between a shared ground (sameness) and related objects (difference). In this space there can be no closure because, as Vesely correctly unsituated and empty of any particular meaning’. Vesely claims that the ‘memory of the original situation’ can only be restored with ‘poetry, art, or genuine interpretation (hermeneutics)’. Ibid., 322. 139 Ibid., 318. 140 Ibid., 334. 141 Vesely cites Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ in Sense and Non-Sense (1964), 15. Ibid., 336. 142 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, 66. Dillon emphasises that it is not Merleau-Ponty’s intention ‘to conflate vision and touch’. Although united in the body, each of the senses contributes something unique to experience. So while ‘vision and touch “are not superimposable”, … they are reversible: for the most part, I can touch what I see and see what I touch’. Dillon, Merleau- Ponty’s Ontology: 160. 143 Georges Braque quoted in B. Zurcher, Georges Braque, Life and Work, trans. S. Nye (New York: Rizzoli 1988), 154. Cited in: Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 338, 339.
213 observes, ‘the world to which a particular thing belongs is inexhaustible, and it is for this reason that the creation (as well as the reading) of a Cubist painting is always open to further revelations’.144 Vesely surmises that ‘While science has discovered the instrumental, analytical meaning of the fragment, it is to poetry that we have to turn to “discover” its restorative or symbolic meaning’.145
So architectural meaning which was once inscribed through the shared reading of rhetorical ornament can today be realised with poetic reframing. According to Gaston Bachelard, because poetic space is expressive it ‘assumes the values of expansion’. He adds that this space ‘belongs to the phenomenology of those words that begin with “ex”’, noting that poetic spatiality ‘goes from deep intimacy to infinite extent, united in an identical expansion’.146 The expressive and expansive space of poetic language and imagery, which is a thickened space that simultaneously embraces proximity and distance, is also the space inscribed by the rhetorical prosthesis—a link noted by the art theorist Charles Garoian. Garoian recalls the classical Greek etymological origin of the term ‘prosthesis’, as a literary device that both supplements and ex-tends discourse, adding that Bachelard’s ‘ex-pression’ can therefore be understood as ‘a prosthetic extension and expansion of embodied language’.147
In sum, by the end of the early modern period, the prosthetic figure that had become allied with the dissociative and reconstructive processes of anatomisation (underpinned by an idealised corporeal unity) that would eventually ‘dissect’ the world into fragments also, enigmatically, holds the constitutive potential for the fragment’s embodied restoration.
144 Ibid., 339. 145 Ibid., 322. 146 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 201–202. 147 The definition of prosthesis found in Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’, aligns with the rhetorical meaning attributed to ‘prosthesis’ in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique first published in 1553. Charles Garoian, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Resarch and Practice (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013), 124.
214
Prosthesis
Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body.1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Every work of visual art is a representation of the body.
To say this is to say that we see bodies, even where there are none, and that even the creation of a form is to some degree also the creation of a body. And if a splash of paint or a ruled grid can be a picture of the body—or the denial of a body—then there must be a desire at work, perhaps among the most primal desires of all: we prefer to have bodies in front of us, or in our hands, and if we cannot have them, we continue to see them, as after images or ghosts. This is a beautiful and complicated subject, the way our eyes continue to look out at the most diverse kinds of things and bring back echoes of bodies.2
James Elkins
1 Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 162–163. 2 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 1.
215 A plural world: the monster yields to the post-human
Teresa Stoppani describes the new conceptualisation of space that emerges in Piranesi’s etchings as ‘dislocated, cloned, and endlessly mutated’, for the fragments contained in works such as Campo Marzio reside in a ‘fluid matrix’ that supports the continuous re-inscription of relations, and generates a dynamic and evolving surface, or space of becoming.1 According to Stoppani, Piranesi not only challenged the concept of a classically ordered architecture, but anticipated a postmodern reading as he moved beyond formal concerns toward a preoccupation with surface and the forces of movement, change, and materiality.2 She claims that Piranesi’s impossible, complex, and uncertain worlds, which are dissociated from any mode of material production, are not places to be inhabited, but exist ‘for the production or construction of ideas’.3 For Stoppani, Piranesi’s approach and concerns can be read alongside those of Deleuze, whose philosophy of becoming founded on a ‘plane of immanence’ is inscribed through the interpellation of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space.4
Deleuze upends the traditional Western canon that valorises Being over becoming.5 For Deleuze, the only constant that persists and is real is becoming, and further, this Being of becoming is a multiplicity.6 Bearing no relation to the traditional dualism of the Many versus the One which always valorises unity, this concept of multiplicity derives from a conceptualisation of difference
1 Teresa Stoppani, ‘Translucent and Fluid: Piranesi’s Impossible Plan’, in From Models to Drawings: Imagination and Representation in Architecture, ed. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, and Bradley Starkey (London: Routledge, 2007), 99. 2 Stoppani contends that working on paper provided Piranesi with the freedom to move past the language of architecture, to apply ‘the rules of representation to go beyond representation’. Ibid., 101. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 102. 5 According to this tradition: Being is understood as that which is real, endures or is constant such as God or Nature; and, becoming is understood as that which is ephemeral, changing, inconstant and fleeting. Stumpf, Philosophy: History and Problems: 60–62. 6 Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2002), 22.
217 that leads to the idea that the One is always multiple.7 Deleuze’s concept of difference is developed through a critical and radical reformulation of traditional subjectivity, which relies on identity to shape or give form to the subject, and in doing so, establish through negation its oppositional relation to the other. This accepted concept of identity, which has its roots in Platonism, persists despite having undergone a number of transformations.
Deleuze determines that Plato did not develop his dualist philosophy of the transcendent Idea8 and its immanent image in order to oppose the image but, rather, to differentiate or distinguish between the authentic copy and the false copy.9 In the Platonic tradition, existing things (the Many) are formed as matter is shaped through imitation of a true, enduring, transcendent Form (the One). The more closely existents participate in the Forms, the greater the resemblance. Plato defines a three-tier hierarchical structure made up of the Idea, or Form (model), the copy, and the copy of the copy (simulacrum). The model is the superior transcendent, followed by the copy, and lastly the simulacrum, emphasising that the value of an existent is entirely dependent upon the degree to which it resembles the Idea.10 Deleuze notes that there are degrees of degradation involved in any process of ‘elective participation’.11 However, he cautions that an exclusive focus on the notion of the ‘infinitely degraded copy’ risks missing ‘the essential’, which is ‘the difference in nature between simulacrum and copy’.12
For Plato, it was important to repress simulacra in order to ‘[assure] the triumph of the copies’.13 As simulacra were not modelled on the Idea, their resemblance was seen as mere semblance, an inauthentic, contrivance or pretense, a resemblance ‘obtained by ruse or subversion’.14 In other words, with the absence of a foundation any likeness to the Idea was purely external and
7 Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60. 8 Smith defines the Platonic ‘Idea’ as ‘a concept of an object that transcends any possible experience … [for] any time we speak of something “pure” or “absolute” … we are almost certainly outside the realm of possible experience, since experience presents us with impure mixtures and non-absolutes’. Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’, in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universtity Press, 2006), 45. 9 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (London: The Athlone Press, 1990), 253. 10 May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction: 49. 11 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 255. 12 Ibid., 253. 13 Ibid., 257. 14 Ibid., 258.
218 superficial. Consequently, it was only possible to truly differentiate between the simulacrum and the copy on the basis of an internal difference, or ‘constitutive disparity’.15
The simulacrum’s lack of reference to any foundation or external cause constituted a betrayal of the model as there was no longer a stable, transcendent Ideal object common to all existents.16 Further, simulacra had the potential to undermine the privileged relation between the model and the copy, for they could ‘[climb] to the surface … “insinuating themselves” everywhere’.17 Plato described the Sophists as the ‘Being of the simulacrum’, counterfeits of the true philosopher Socrates for, in ‘[laying] claim to anything and everything, there is the great risk that the sophist will scramble the selection and pervert … judgment’.18 Thus, simulacra were most problematic when they presented as an exact semblance of the copy, for this rendered them indiscernible from the model and so able to mask the truth.19
Plato considered the relation between the model and the copy—because the relation was based on identity and a stable referent, or essence of the Ideal—a more moral relation than that of the copy and the simulacrum (structured by means of internal difference).20 Therefore, imitation was only pejorative when associated with the simulacrum. Extending this qualification to art, Plato distinguished between more credible iconic and mimetic images, and the less credible images of subversive simulacra, or phantasms.21 For Deleuze, the problematic of Plato’s simulacrum plays a dual role: it calls into question the entire ontological basis of representation and its moral underpinnings, while paradoxically offering a means for reviving Plato’s project.22
Deleuze sought to overturn Platonism, not by reversing the hierarchy of transcendence and immanence,23 but by making the Idea immanent. Deleuze makes the simulacrum primary in order
15 Ibid., 262. 16 Daniel W. Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, Continental Phiilosphy Review, 38 (2006): 104. 17 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 257. 18 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato, the Greeks’ in Essays Critical and Clinical (1997): 137, cited in Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, 98–99. 19 Smith elaborates: ‘If Plato maligns the simulacrum, it is not because it elevates the false over the true, the evil over the good; more precisely, the simulacrum is “beyond good and evil” because it renders them indiscernible and internalises the differences between them, thereby scrambling the selection and perverting … judgment’. Ibid., 102. See also Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 256. 20 Jon Roffe, ‘Simulacrum’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 253. 21 Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, 104. 22 ———, ‘Deleuze, Kant, and the Theory of Immanent Ideas’, 43–44. 23 Were Deleuze to reverse Platonism on the basis of this dualism he would simply have inverted, and maintained, the dualism he was seeking to counter.
219 to move beyond the limitations of representation.24 In this way, the world becomes composed of simulacra with no privileged point of view and no hierarchy. Deleuze summarises this position with the following declaration.
The primacy of identity, however conceived, defines the world of representation. But modern thought is born of the failure of representation, of the loss of identities, and of the discovery of all the forces that act under the representation of the identical. The modern world is one of simulacra. Man did not survive God, nor did the identity of the subject survive that of substance. All identities are only simulated, produced as an optical ‘effect’ by the more profound game of difference and repetition. We propose to think difference in itself independently of the forms of representation which reduce it to the Same … 25
For Deleuze there is no originary model of essences behind repetitions; instead, ‘the essence’ is repetition itself. Drawing on the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Deleuze writes that there is no ‘truth’ behind the mask of appearances for, ‘Behind the masks … are further masks, and even the most hidden is still a hiding place, and so on to infinity’.26 There is no ground prior to difference; there is no original truth. The simulacrum is ungrounded, and so with every event of difference there is a transformation in which the image/life becomes different. Because each repetition of difference is different, and each instance of Being univocal, each instance possesses the same amount of Being as any other instance.27 Accordingly, only difference returns ‘the formless and the superior form which constitutes the eternal return’.28
While the Platonic copy (or representation) depends on an external reference for its meaning and value, the simulacrum has no such dependency. Freed from the limitations of representation, it is able to do more than simply represent. For Deleuze, the importance of the simulacrum lies in its potential to act as a creative force in establishing new connections, or resonances through the cycle of the eternal return of difference.29 John Rajchman highlights the importance of connections in Deleuze’s philosophy, writing ‘it is an art of multiple things held together by
24 John Marks, ‘Representation’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 229. Deleuze explains: ‘Overturning Platonism … means denying the primacy of original over copy, of model over image [and] glorifying the reign of simulacra and reflections’. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66. 25 ———, Difference and Repetition: xix. 26 Ibid., 106. 27 Claire Colebrook, ‘Nomadism’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 186. 28 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 67. 29 Roffe, ‘Simulacrum’, 254.
220 “disjunctive syntheses”’ that are ‘prior and irreducible to predication or identification’.30 In articulating a theory of connections, Deleuze draws on the image of the dice throw, claiming it is pure chance that optimises diversity through the generation of multiplicities, or more particularly manifolds, that extend to infinity.31
Daniel Smith notes that together with Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal return, Deleuze links repetition to the immanent identity of the cosmos and chaos.32
Simulacra function by themselves, passing and repassing the decentred centres of the eternal return. It is no longer the Platonic project of opposing the cosmos to chaos, as though the Circle were the imprint of a transcendent Idea capable of imposing its likeness upon a rebellious matter. It is indeed the very opposite: the immanent identity of chaos and cosmos, being in the eternal return, a thoroughly tortuous circle.33
The eternal return … is not an external order imposed upon the chaos of the world; on the contrary, the eternal return is the internal identity of the world and of chaos, the Chaosmos.34
There is a convergence between Deleuze’s theory of the simulacrum and the unfortunate mothers whose open, porous bodies were purportedly penetrated by the material flux of images (simulacra) emanating from objects of desire (or terror) only to imprint upon their impressionable neonates (also simulacra).35 Monstrous progeny, in concert with Deleuzian simulacra, also passed ‘under cover of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion “against the father”’. Further, ‘without passing through the Idea’ they also concealed ‘a dissimilarity’, or an ‘internal unbalance’.36 In both instances simulacra constitute both actualising force and its expression. However, Deleuze’s actualising flows are incorporeal and so to be distinguished from the pre- Enlightenment corporeal flow of pneuma.37
30 John Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 4. 31 Gary Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 333. 32 Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, 114. 33 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 128. 34 Ibid., 299. 35 Deleuze points out that ‘A strict complementarity exists between sexual drives and simulacra’. ———, The Logic of Sense: 198. 36 Ibid., 257. 37 See Carus, Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The ‘De Rerum Natura’ of Titus Lucretius: 120. See also The Logic of Sense in which Deleuze writes: ‘[T]he Stoics are the first to reverse Platonism and to bring about a radical inversion. For if bodies with their states, qualities and quantities, assume all the characteristics of substance and cause, conversely, the characteristics of the Idea
221 Deleuze’s monstrous category occupies a middle ground, between identity (as an embodiment of the cosmos) and chaos. In this third space dialectical poles ‘mingle’, thus subverting traditional dualism. The concept of a third space is allied with Merleau-Ponty’s ontological ‘flesh’ and Serres philosophical ‘skin’, and the idea that ‘[b]etween the everything and nothing’ there is a dynamic labyrinth of multiple passages through ‘which new knowledge percolates’.38 For Deleuze, the perversion of the simulacrum, its intrinsic difference, its expression as a dynamic, becoming, immanent, positive, creative flow, moves from a secondary situation to a first order modality, and so becomes paradigmatic. Yet, after the publication of Difference and Repetition (1968) simulacra disappear from Deleuze’s writing. Smith reasons that the concept of the simulacrum only has meaning in relation to Platonism, where things simulate or imitate transcendent Ideas. He suggests that Deleuze only posits the concept in order to overturn Platonism from within, and once this is achieved he moves on. In subsequent works, Deleuze’s ontology and the processes of imitation and simulation yield to the notion of actualisation, and so the simulacrum is more fittingly replaced with the concept of the ‘assemblage’.39
Topological space and time
Deleuze harnesses a variety of terms to describe the ‘in-between’ ontological structure that constitutes the spatium of simulacral becoming, including ‘the virtual continuum’ and ‘plane of immanence’.40 This continuum represents an open system that supports the potential for both making and unmaking connections between heterogeneous ‘singularities’
are relegated to the other side, that is to this impassive extra-Being which is sterile, inefficacious, and on the surface of things: the ideational or the incorporeal can no longer be anything other than an “effect”. The consequences are extremely important. In Plato, an obscure debate was raging in the depth of things … between that which undergoes the action of the Idea and that which eludes this action (copies and simulacra) … It is no longer a question of simulacra, which elude the ground and insinuate themselves everywhere, but rather a question of effects which manifest themselves and act in their place. These are effects in the causal sense, but also sonorous, optical, or linguistic ‘effects’—and even less, or much more since they are no longer corporeal identities, but rather form the entire Idea. What was eluding the Idea climbed up to the surface, that is, the incorporeal limit, and represents now all possible ideality … The most concealed becomes the most manifest’. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 7. 38 Assad notes Michel Serres’ claim, in Le Cinq Sens, that the movement of knowledge resembles ‘a zigzag path of grazing goats’. Maria Assad, ‘Ulyssean Trajectories: A (New) Look at Michel Serres’ Topology of Time’, in Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (New York: Continuum, 2012), 85–86. 39 Smith, ‘The Concept of the Simulacrum: Deleuze and the Overturning of Platonism’, 116. 40 Burchill asserts that although Deleuze uses a variety of terms to refer to the virtual continuum their meaning remains essentially constant. These terms include: ‘intensive spatium’ in Difference and Repetition, ‘ideal or metaphysical surface’ in The Logic of Sense, ‘plane of consistency in A Thousand Plateaus (co-authored with Félix Guattari), and ‘plane of immanence’ in What is Philosophy? (co-authored with Félix Guattari). Louise Burchill, ‘The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium’, Philosophy Today, 51 (2007): 154.
222 (simulacra/assemblages), which continuously form, unform, and reform (fold, unfold, and refold) to create new connective webs.41 It is a structure conceptually allied to Serres’ ‘crossroads’.
Influenced by the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Deleuze envisions the plane of immanence as a cinematic stream of images transmitting movement. This idea allowed him to conceive a world no longer illuminated by human consciousness (or perception) but, instead, a world that is ‘luminous’ from within.42 The continuum is constituted by a virtual consciousness, a form of consciousness that exists prior to and beyond human consciousness.43 This idea challenges the apical status of visual perception, which is founded on its privileged role in the acquisition of knowledge, for now ‘all life perceives’.44 The removal of humans from the summit of an ordered hierarchy and their placement on the same plane as all other existents is an idea that has found appeal with scholars exploring the human/machinic interface.45 However, John Marks emphasises that Deleuze eschews the reductive materialism associated with many of these theories.46
In Plato’s philosophy, a corporeal thing was seen as distinct from the incorporeal causes that gave rise to it, and that would subsequently affect it. While Deleuze recognises that this was the ‘first important duality’, he qualifies this statement with the claim that actual beings do not exist separately from the virtual plane of dynamic becoming.47 For Deleuze, existents emerge during the temporal phase of their duration, this phase being but a brief interval in an eternal process of
41 Deleuze refers to the ‘the plane of immanence’ in What is Philosophy? However, in earlier works he refers to the same ontological structure as the ‘transcendental field of experience’, which he opposes to the ‘transcendent’. Miguel de Beistegui, Immanence: Deleuze and Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 47. In Two Regimes of Madness Deleuze explains his notion of ‘transcendence’: ‘The transcendental field could be defined as a pure plane of immanence because it escapes all transcendence both of the subject and of the object’. Gilles Deleuze cited in ibid., 14. According to Deleuze, ‘Singularities [simulacra] preside over the genesis of individuals and persons; they are distributed in a “potential” which admits neither Self nor I, but which produces them by actualising or realising itself although the figures of this actualisation do not at all resemble the realised potential. Only a theory of singular points is capable of transcending the synthesis of the person and the analysis of the individual as these are (or are made) in consciousness … Only when the world, teaming with anonymous and nomadic, impersonal and pre-individual singularities, opens up, do we tread at last on the field of the transcendental’. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 103. 42 Marks, ‘Representation’, 229. Colebrook surmises that ‘relations for Deleuze are best described as “images”’. Claire Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2006), 5. 43 Peter Canning, ‘The Imagination of Immanence: An Ethics of Cinema’, in The Brain is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 341–342. 44 Marks, ‘Representation’, 229. 45 Deleuze’s concept of the machine is not a physical or processual manifestation, or ‘material prosthesis’ designed to supplement or modify bodies but, instead, the ‘vital principle’ that generates new connections within the plane of immanence. ———, ‘Materialism’, 159. 46 This topic is discussed in more detail in the sections, ‘The Persistence of the Subject’ and ‘Third Space’. 47 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 23.
223 actualisation that both precedes and extends beyond their actualised moment.48 In Deleuze’s ontology the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’ both belong to the domain of the ‘real’. The ‘actual’ are corporeal bodies, mixtures, individuals, and states of affairs, whereas the ‘virtual’ are incorporeal, pre-conceptual, pre-personal singularities (simulacra/assemblages) or ‘events’49 that constitute the plane of immanence.50 While the virtual does not resemble, or cannot be identified with, the actual it can bring about an actualisation.51 Moreover, an actualisation can change dynamically; it can become virtualised, and following this, again become actualised. This movement can be multiplied in all directions within a field, so is an idea inconsistent with a linear concept of time.52 Deleuze harnesses the Stoic conceptualisation of time—made up of Chronos and Aion—to describe the separate temporal orders in which the actual and virtual operate.53
Linear time is quantifiable, infinitely divisible, and extended both into the future and into the past by means of abstract measures such as years, months, weeks, days, minutes and so forth. Further, it moves sequentially from one static point to the next. It is a model of time that privileges the present. Bergson referred to this concept of time as ‘spatialised’ because it operates within a defined metaphoric ‘container’ that remains external to the things that happen within it. While this version of time marks things, time itself is not changed, for time exists before events happen
48 Bela Egyed, ‘Counter-Actualisation and the Method of Intuition’, in Deleuze and Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 81–82. 49 Deleuze relied on the notion of the event developed by the Stoics in order to formulate his own concept. Patton notes that the Stoics distinguished between a corporeal or material realm of bodies and states of affairs, and a non-physical realm of incorporeal entities that included ‘time, place and the sense of, or “what is expressed” in statements (Lekta)’. For the Stoics, the sense of a verbal statement ‘is identical to the event expressed in it’. In other words, there is an intimate relation between events, language and things. Paul Patton, ‘The Event of Colonisation’, in Deleuze and the Contemporary World, ed. Ian Buchanan and Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 110. Deleuze describes events as ‘ideational singularities which communicate in one and the same Event’. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 53. For Deleuze, ‘The event subsists in language, but it happens to things. Things and propositions are less in a situation of radical duality and more on the two sides of a frontier represented by sense. This frontier does not mingle or reunite them (for there is no more monism here than dualism); it is rather something along the line of an articulation of their difference: body/language … On the side of the thing, there are physical qualities and real relations which constitute the state of affairs; there are also ideational logical attributes which indicate incorporeal events. And on the side of the proposition, there are names and adjectives which denote the state of affairs; and also there are verbs which express events or logical attributes. On one hand, there are singular proper names, substantives, and general adjectives, which indicate limits, pauses, rests and presences; on the other, there are verbs carrying off with them becoming and its train of reversible events and infinitely dividing their present into past and future’. Ibid., 24. 50 Constantin Boundas, ‘Virtual/Virtuality’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 300. 51 May likens the ‘virtual’ to encoded genes which enact an ‘actual’ unfolding in the creation of an organism but do not resemble it. Furthermore, the ‘virtual’ persists just as genes remain present in the germ cell whether the unfolding takes place or not. However, this exemplar does not permit a full understanding of the relation between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’, which is not linear but reversible and, moreover, multiplied. May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction: 48–49. 52 Boundas, ‘Virtual/Virtuality’, 300. 53 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 61.
224 and will exist subsequent to them passing. Thus, spatial time is transcendent.54 Bergson considered this form of metric duration an abstraction inconsistent with lived reality.55
The concept of existential time developed initially by Edmond Husserl, and later embraced by others including Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, is not a container external to unfolding life. Instead, lived experience shapes the linear space of time. This occurs because experiences sediment within individuals and orient them in a particular direction.56 The position of an experience in relation to the immediate present is contingent on its intensity for each individual. Consequently, unequal weight is given to instances of time, and both the past and future mingle in the present to influence the direction and movement of duration.57 While Deleuze supports the idea of folded time, existential time is problematic for him because it remains subjectively determined; it is a concept subordinated to human consciousness which he claims privileges unity over multiplicity.58
Deleuze’s concept of duration (space and time) not only eschews linear notions of ‘clock time’, but also subverts a linear concept of human consciousness.59 Again, Deleuze draws influence from Bergson who sees the way individuals experience time as allied with the way in which consciousness flows. According to Bergson, successive distinct images of thought interpenetrate one another in a stream that moves at qualitatively different speeds and intensities, thus creating a heterogeneous form of duration. Cliff Stagnoll claims this form of duration is analogous to the flow of musical notes. A musical note ‘lingers’ despite the next note having been sounded. This overtaking, or permeation, reveals the closeness, or distance, between the notes, which can vary.60 According to Deleuze, the tendency for humans to reduce the dynamism of time and movement to static spatialisations is born of a desire for simplicity since; to reduce complexity is to reduce its disorienting and potentially threatening affects. Spatialising duration renders the illusion of a homogeneous order and control that is achieved through habit and convention.61
54 May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction: 41–42. 55 Cliff Stagoll, ‘Duration’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 82. 56 May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction: 42–43. 57 Ibid., 43. 58 Ibid., 44–45. 59 Stagoll, ‘Duration’, 82. 60 It is not possible to grasp the entire set of notes as one for, as music flows one note is on the verge of ending at the same time as it is being changed by the next note. Ibid., 81. 61 Marks, ‘Representation’, 230.
225 Deleuze, as Bergson, assigns a separate order of space and time to each of the two multiplicities, the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’.62 He posits that the actualisation of events occurs within an irreversible, quantitative, homogenous, discrete model of duration (Chronos), whereas the ‘pure event’ of the virtual continuum occurs within a dynamic, continuous, reversible, heterogeneous, qualitative model of duration (Aion).63 The times of Chronos and Aion occur within two very different types of space. Chronos, situates people and things, and is the time of ‘striated’, or metric space, which is also the space of projective geometry. Aion is the time of the pure event and occurs in non-metric ‘smooth’ space, which is structured topologically and so changes qualitatively as bodies act within it.64 These spaces correspond with two polarities: the present (Being–striated) and the infinite (becoming–smooth), respectively65 —and so is a concept that aligns with Serres’ notions of ‘global’ and ‘local’ space.66 Despite distinctions, smooth and striated space enfold the ‘virtual’ and the ‘actual’, and so are unopposed to one another. Smooth and striated spaces are always found in asymmetrical mixture and in a state of continuous transition from one to the other.
Smooth space
The topological character of smooth space, a spatium that possesses an internal surface coextensive with an external surface, is created with the connections between multiplicities.67 Deleuze derived his theory of connections from the philosopher of mathematics Albert Lautman
62 Deleuze describes this idea in Bergsonism: ‘One [multiplicity] is represented by space … It is a multiplicity of exteriority, of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, of order, of quantitative differentiation, of difference in degree; it is a numerical multiplicity, discontinuous and actual. The other type of multiplicity appears in pure duration: It is an internal multiplicity of succession, of fusion, of organisation, of heterogeneity, of qualitative discrimination, or of difference in kind; it is a virtual and continuous multiplicity that cannot be reduced to numbers’. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 38. 63 Inside Chronos corporeal qualities and bodily actions are expressed in a living or ‘vast present’, that is, ‘an encasement, a coiling up of relative presents’. In Chronos the past and future exist as the difference between two relative presents. Chronos is the time of Being, and thus, ‘the present is everything … for to be present [means] to be and no longer to become’. Aion, on the other hand, is the time of ‘pure events’. It is defined by ‘the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present’. The time of Aion ‘retreats and advances in two directions at once … The agonising aspect of the pure event is that it is always and at the same time something which has happened and something about to happen; never something which is happening’. ———, The Logic of Sense: 161–164. The paradoxical nature of the pure (becoming) event—its simultaneity— occurs because there is no subjective viewpoint, or temporal perspective from which it can be examined. Patton explains this phenomenon with an analogy: At zero degrees Celsius H2O can either freeze into ice or melt into water depending on the temporal direction of it’s becoming. Patton, ‘The Event of Colonisation’, 118. 64 Lars Marcussen, The Architecture of Space–The Space of Architecture (Copenhagen: Danish Architectural Press, 2008), 349. 65 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 263, 541 n.239. 66 Hanjo Berressem, ‘Crystal History: “You Pick Up the Pieces. You Connect the Dots”’, in Time and History in Deleuze and Serres, ed. Bernd Herzogenrath (London: Continuum, 2012), 212–213. 67 Burchill also notes the alignment between: Deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’, Merleau-Ponty’s ‘topological space as the model of being’ and Serres topological ‘field of invariants’. Burchill, ‘The Topology of Deleuze’s Spatium’, 154–155.
226 who demonstrated that Riemann’s ‘manifolds’, or multiplicities could be juxtaposed in an infinite number of ways to form a heterogeneous structure (smooth space).68 The fundamental difference between smooth and striated space is that each is formed from a different type of multiplicity:
We have on numerous occasions encountered all kinds of differences between two types of multiplicities: metric and nonmetric; extensive and qualitative; centered and acentered; arborescent and rhizomatic; numerical and flat; dimensional and directional; of masses and of packs; of magnitude and of distance; of breaks and of frequency; striated and smooth.69
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze (and Guattari) harness a variety of exemplars to highlight the difference between smooth and striated space. Striated space, which is delimited and formal, is likened to woven cloth with finite edges and a regular, homogeneous, horizontal and vertically ordered structure. Smooth space on the other hand, which is irreducibly heterogeneous, is compared with a patchwork quilt that can grow uninhibitedly in any direction.70 For Deleuze (and Guattari) the sea is emblematic of smooth space, and the city with its walls, measures, subdivisions, order, and regulations is emblematic of striated space. While striated space is ‘sedentary’, smooth space is limitless: a space of (ideally) uninterrupted speed, ‘flows of intensity’, ‘wind’, ‘noise’, and ‘sonorous and tactile qualities’.71 Smooth space is the space of affects rather than properties, haptic rather than optic.72 Yet, neither space exists in isolation and so, despite the fact that cities are heavily striated, they continuously undergo processes of de- actualisation and re-actualisation.73
Deleuze submits that humans can only be liberated from the rules, opinions, and clichés that induce stasis, or sediment habitual ways of thinking which hold the dangerous potential to instill
68 Riemannian space is formed in the manner of a patchwork. It made up of local spaces that cannot be abstracted or reduced; it is a multiplicity that is not defined metrically but ‘in terms of the conditions of frequency, or rather accumulation, a set of vicinities’. These ‘patches’ exist in tactile relation with unique ‘rhythmic values’ that undergo continuous variation. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 485. 69 Ibid., 484. 70 Ibid., 475–476. 71 Ibid., 479. 72 Deleuze defines his notion of ‘hapticity’ in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. He writes: ‘we will speak of the haptic whenever there is no longer a strict subordination in either direction … when sight discovers in itself a specific function of touch that is uniquely its own, distinct from its optical function. One might say that painters paint with their eyes, but only insofar as they touch with their eyes’. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum, 2003), 155. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 474, 480–481.
227 dogma, with ‘virtual’ ideas.74 Moreover, this shift that allows that individuals to overcome what is objectionable in the present, can only be effected by means of the arts, philosophy, and science, for these domains are the ones that enact movement from the space of the ‘politician’ to the space of the ‘poet’—a becoming or process of ‘counter-actualisation’ that moves humans from the actual plane to the virtual plane.75 According to Deleuze, the destruction of representation by the poet is a positive, rather than negative act, for it moves a participant beyond representation. By contrast, the politician will deny difference in order to sustain an established representational order and maintain a restricted form of thinking. Poetry and art do not provide a recognisable and intelligible view of reality but, instead, permit a view of possible worlds, of sensible worlds.76
Stoppani highlights the way in which Piranesi’s critique of classical architecture becomes a counter-actualisation and movement toward smooth, topological space. In Campo Marzio Piranesi’s juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements drawn from both the past and present, and combined patchwork style, are removed from any historical context, temporal anchoring or ordering paradigm.77 This produces tension as focus is drawn away from defined objects and directed toward the interstitial spaces and forces that bind new, difficult and complex associations.78 In other words, the focus moves from stasis to voyage; this is not a literal movement, but a virtual movement.79 Stoppani notes that, by introducing smooth space into the striated space of the classical city, Piranesi negates established hierarchies along with any claims of authority and legitimacy. Again, this calls into question the value of the origin, as Stan Allen
74 ———, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 204. 75 In What is Philosophy? Deleuze notes that the artist struggles against clichés and opinion: ‘The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision’. Ibid. See also Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 53. Deleuzian claims such as these have contributed to the impression gleaned by Rosen and Connor that Deleuze has a tendency to valorise smooth space (the space of art) over striated space (the space of opinion and dogma). See also Steven M. Rosen, Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 16. and Connor, The Book of Skin: 66–69. 76 Deleuze explains, ‘In very general terms, we claim that there are two ways to appeal to “necessary destructions”: that of the poet, who speaks in the name of a creative power, capable of overturning all orders and representations in order to affirm Difference in the state of permanent revolution which characterises eternal return; and that of the politician, who is above all concerned to deny that which “differs”, so as to conserve or prolong an established historical order, or to establish a historical order which already calls forth in the world the forms of its representation’. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 53. 77 The etchings of Piranesi’s Carceri series also exhibit the topological qualities of ‘smooth space’. The represented interiors of The Gothic Arch (second series) and The Drawbridge are made up of stratified super structures that defy the logic of Euclidean geometry. Staircases constructed from multiple viewpoints overlap and connect in ways that distort these structures, creating an ambiguous and unlimited space. 78 Stoppani, ‘Translucent and Fluid: Piranesi’s Impossible Plan’, 103. 79 Deleuze and Guattari explain that there are two types of voyaging, one that takes place in smooth space (intensive) and another that takes place in striated space (extensive). However, there are continuous ‘transformations of one within the other, reversals … Voyaging smoothly is a becoming, and a difficult, uncertain becoming at that’. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 482.
228 (echoing Tafuri) underscores, and so amounts to a ‘critique from within’ as the ‘marginal and fragmentary’ is elevated to a ‘constitutive position’.80
Of the arts, all of which have the ability to move individuals beyond chronological time and into the time of Aion—‘for all time’, Deleuze singles out the cinema for particular attention.81 Typically, cinematic movement—the ‘movement image’—is achieved through the reconstitution of a series of equidistant photographic instants carefully combined to create the impression of continuity.82 Together, these images form a normative narrative based in representational, or spatial time that seeks to imitate human perception.83 However, Deleuze observes that the movement-image yields to the time-image during the post-war period in Europe, a shift deemed necessary because the movement-image was grounded in fixed norms and conventions.84 With the new image, time is no longer subordinated to movement but, instead, movement is subordinated to time. As Deleuze describes it, time becomes ‘out of joint’, and ‘a little time in the pure state … rises up to the surface of the screen’.85 Once time is freed from the coordinated order of movement, images transform from cliché into ‘the bizarre and the banal’. As a result, the unified space of classical cinema fractures.86 Images are juxtaposed in such a way that time is no longer linear, but jumps backward and forward, ‘a multiplicity of relations are produced in a multiplicity of times’ undermining any coherent narrative.87 The discontinuity and irrational cuts convert the cinematic field into a field of becoming.
80 Allen, ‘Piranesi’s Campo Marzio: An Experimental Design’, 78. See also Stoppani, ‘Translucent and Fluid: Piranesi’s Impossible Plan’, 104. 81 Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed: 102. 82 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 4–5. 83 Tom Conley, ‘Movement-Image’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 179. 84 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xi. The trail of destruction that occurred in Europe following the Second World War contributed to a movement that rejected the rational arrangement of images or representations which no longer aligned with the fragmented world that people had come to inhabit. Flaxman sumarises, ‘in the aftermath of the Holocaust, which effectively obliterated any attempt to “make sense”, the old-style narrative [seemed] impossible’. Gregory Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, in The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, ed. Gregory Flaxman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 41. 85 Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image: xi. 86 Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, 5. Deleuze asserts that ‘time’ in the new cinema was not shown through the movement of the body (empirically or metaphysically) but through ‘its tirednesses and waitings’. Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image: xi. Gregory Flaxman explains that the ‘indeterminacy’ of these images leads to the discovery of a ‘cinema of inaction … [where] the image does not extend to new spaces but “intends”, involuting into the mind, opening up a whole new sense of mental duration … an involution into psychic states’. Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, 6. 87 Colebrook, Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed: 102.
229 Akin to the Deleuzian time-image, the multiple viewpoints of Piranesi’s Carceri coincide in an uneasy relationship, a space without centre, beginning, or end. This is a ‘rhizomic’ or ‘viral’ space of expansive, or unlimited growth that does not allow for a coherent, teleological reading.88 Without a frame, and with perception uncoupled from any stable centre, space becomes de- subjectified. The spectator is presented with an inhuman view that is simultaneously a view from everywhere, yet a view from nowhere—an empty place. While Pérez-Gómez describes this as a space that is impenetrable to the human body, it is precisely because perceptual movement can find no point of purchase that ‘thoughts’ are free to wander and hallucinate.89 Deleuze writes, that to go ‘beyond perception’ is to reach ‘the genetic element of all possible perception, that is, the point which changes and which makes perception change, the differential of perception itself’.90 To move beyond perception is necessary because,
[W]e do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands.91
Deleuze believes that we habitually perceive in clichés and metaphors.92 To go beyond perception is to go beyond the form of human perception that is founded in the ‘solid state’. With art, architectural experience and cinema it is possible to move perception toward a ‘liquid state’,
88 Stoppani, ‘The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis’, 153. 89 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 88. 90 Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: 83. 91 ———, Cinema 2: The Time-Image: 20. 92 While Deleuze supported the ‘metaphoricity of language’, as his writing style attests, he took issue with metaphors per se, for metaphors, which reference domains external to one another, are transcendent and structured hierarchically (since the manifest term is valorised over the latent term) making them ‘universalising’ or paradigmatic. For a critique of this view, see Wendy Faith, ‘Schematizing the Maternal Body: The Cognitive-Linguistic Challenge to Post-structuralist Valorizations of Metonymy’, Metaphorik.de: in Sprache, Literatur, Medien 6 (2004): 54–55. The representational aspect of metaphor is connected to the idea that metaphors can ‘illuminate’ and thus relate a truth. This was problematic for Deleuze for, in reducing what is unknown to what is known, clichés and sedimented thinking are privileged. Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, 38. Deleuze, instead, favoured a becoming metamorphosis where terms have equal ontological value. Lecercle points out that in Ovid’s Metamorphoses terms ‘no longer represent objects because they are themselves objects (they have material shape, they exert force, they mix with objects)’, moreover, ‘there is no separation through obvious falsity’. In the move from metaphor to metamorphosis the space of transfer shifts from an arrangement that is vertical, ‘paradigmatic’ and ‘geological’, to one that is horizontal, ‘syntagmatic’ and ‘geographical’. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Deleuze and Language (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 58–59, 27. Deleuze’s preference for horizontal tropic transfer is consistent with his broader philosophical approach which rests on the concept of contiguous, planar rhizomic mappings. Consequently, Deleuze aligns with the poststructuralist tendency to valorise ‘contextualising’ metonymy over ‘paradigmatic’ metaphor. Faith however, consistent with comments made earlier in this paper, claims that such an inversion simplistically reinstates the reduced, binary oppositions that the poststructuralist’s purport to critique. She writes: ‘content with either subverting hierarchical oppositions or “collapsing” their boundaries, poststructuralists risk confining the complexity of lived relations, and the imaginative possibilities of those relations for the future, to the austerities of logic’. Faith contends that reduction can only be avoided by taking all tropes together, thereby eliminating binary opposition and opening tropology up to combinational possibilities. Faith, ‘Schematizing the Maternal Body: The Cognitive-Linguistic Challenge to Post-structuralist Valorizations of Metonymy’, 54–55, 75.
230 ‘where the molecular (images) move about and merge into one another’. However, for Deleuze the ultimate objective is to achieve a state of ‘pure perception’ or ‘gaseous perception’, where there is ‘free movement of each molecule’.93 Gaseous perception is the objective vision produced by the non-human eye, that is, the eye that is in things.94
For Deleuze, thinking begins when ‘something in the world forces us to think’.95 It begins, not with recognition, representation or common sense, but with the ‘liberation of thought from those images which imprison it’.96 Flaxman asserts that Deleuze drew from Immanuel Kant the idea that the senses needed to become disordered through confrontation with chaos in order to ‘launch the imagination to its efficacious limits’.97 The realisation of sensation or affect, which lies beyond any subjective emotion, is therefore dependent on an act of violence that breaks up dogmatic images of thought.98 Art that denies the ‘prison’ of representation and referentiality becomes a ‘sign’, or ‘machine’ for the production of sensations or affects, that refers only to itself, and so is autopoetic.99
Piranesi’s Carceri operate in a mode akin to that which Deleuze attributes to poetry and experimental cinema, a mode whereby the senses open to chaos—an idea that Deleuze elaborates in What is Philosophy?
In a violently poetic text, [D.H.] Lawrence describes what produces poetry: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos
93 Deleuze writes: ‘if we start out from a solid state, where molecules are not free to move about (molar or human perception), we move next to a liquid state, where the molecules move about and merge into one another, [where human perception moves beyond its normal limits] but we finally reach a gaseous state, defined by the free movement of each molecule’. Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image: 84. 94 Ibid., 81. 95 ———, Difference and Repetition: 139. 96 Ibid., xvii. 97 Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, 13. 98 Sensations have the power to expose dogmatic structures, allowing individuals to move beyond their habitual ways of thinking, and thus, reveal a ‘“molar” existence as a dimension, formation, or perspective within a “molecular” universe’. Ibid., 14. The artist extracts and creatively reconstructs sensations (the ‘Being of sensation’), which are a compound of percepts and affects, so that the spectator can experience them. Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections: 128. Percepts and affects are not dependent on individual perception or personal feelings, but are sensations that exist beyond subjective experience. They are intensive (virtual) qualities that lie beyond signification or, as O’Sullivan describes it, ‘the molecular beneath or within, the molar’. Because these qualities belong to the realm of the virtual they are immanent to sensation or immanent to the artwork. Simon O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 6, 3 (2001): 130, 127. Deleuze writes: ‘Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them. Affects are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived’. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 164. 99 Flaxman, ‘Introduction’, 13.
231 and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab … Art indeed struggles with chaos, but it does so in order to bring forth a vision that illuminates it for an instant, a Sensation … Art is not chaos but a vision of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, to that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmosis, a composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived.100
Because human beings are, for the most part, caught within the spatio-temporal dimension in which they only perceive what they want to perceive, it is necessary to switch spatio-temporal registers in order to experience the world in new ways and thereby access the realm of affects.101 In other words, the quantitative spatio-temporal mode that accompanies all representation in which ‘I think’ and ‘we judge’ must be shifted with the creative process in order for sensation to be extracted from representation.102 In Deleuze’s time-images and Piranesi’s Carceri the artist, and subsequently the participating subject, are transported from an ‘extensive’, quantitative, optic spatiality that is associated with distance, to an ‘intensive’, proximal, haptic spatiality that is relational and qualitative.103 While the body is situated in ‘extensive’ space, bodies produce ‘intensive’ space. Accordingly, very different kinesthetic and sensual relations are at play, and so it is that the ‘intensive’ space of art can move individuals beyond the formal concerns of the lived body.104 Art sensations permit access to other worlds. And, it is artists who are ‘the inventors and creators of affects’, who ‘not only create them in their work … [but] give them to us and make us become with them’.105 As both artists and spectators access the realm of affects, they move toward the virtual field and so become ‘Bodies without Organs’.106
100 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 203–204. 101 O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, 127. 102 Rajchman, The Deleuze Connections: 130. 103 Ibid., 129–130. 104 Rajchman asserts that ‘“Intensive space” takes us beyond the forms of the “lived body” described by phenomenology’. He claims that ‘Merleau-Ponty needs Cézanne to show “things themselves”, whereas Francis Bacon takes the “logic of sensation” further—no longer to the quasi-spiritual world of “the flesh”, but rather to the violence of “the meat”’. Ibid., 131. 105 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 175. 106 The ‘Body without Organs’ is a term developed by Deleuze and Guattari to describe the body in an idealised state, a body in a state of maximum potential. Andrew Ballantyne, Deleuze and Guattari for Architects (London: Routledge, 2007), 34. ‘Bodies without Organs’, or constituent assemblages, are labelled simulacra in early works and ‘desiring machines’ in later works. The ‘Body without Organs’ is completely open to flows and intensities. It is not structured or limited by identity or concepts. Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 168. Thus, the ‘Body without Organs’ is an intense, virtual field, an original vitality that exists both beyond and within incarnation. Deleuze suggests that the transcendent material object of this vitality would include monstrosity. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 143.
232 Because the artwork summons invisible forces of sensation and makes them visible, humans are able to experience the world differently. In other words humans are freed from the blinkers of subjectivity, an idea eloquently summarised by Simon O’Sullivan:
This is art’s function: to switch our intensive register, to reconnect us with the world. Art opens up to the non-human universe that we are part of … but art also operates as a fissure in representation. And as we, as spectators, as representational creatures, are involved in a dance with art, a dance in which—through careful manoeuvres—the molecular is opened up, the aesthetic is activated, and art does what is its chief modus operandi: it transforms, if only for a moment, our sense of our ‘selves’ and our notion of our world.107
Sensation saturates the paintings of Francis Bacon. However, Deleuze is careful to explain that the violent forces of sensation are not to be found in the superficial, clichéd, ‘violently’ represented figures but, rather, in colour and line. Bacon renders his figures flesh not with form but with colour, with the broken tones and complementaries that rupture and mutilate the body envelope.108 (Figure 33) Thus, Bacon subordinates representation to the secondary qualities that would ordinarily be considered the means by which the ‘primary’ figure is made visible. The idea of awarding that-which-is-secondary primary status is an idea also found in the paintings of Cézanne and Bonnard. All three painters sublimate vision to tactility, and thus subvert vision in the very domain in which it is considered preeminent.109
107 O’Sullivan, ‘The Aesthetics of Affect: Thinking Art Beyond Representation’, 128. 108 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: xiii–xiv. 109 Serres posits this notion in The Five Senses with specific reference to the paintings of Bonnard, although it is suggested here that it is also an idea that can be discerned in the paintings of Cézanne and Bacon. Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 37.
233
Figure 33. Francis Bacon: 'Study for Head of George Dyer' (1967) Oil on canvas
When Bacon paints the invisible forces that ‘shake’ the flesh he is not painting movement but, rather, its effect on the mass of the body; he is expressing the relation of materials and intensive forces rather than form and matter. Deleuze asserts that in Bacon’s work sensation takes on ‘an excessive and spasmodic appearance, exceeding the bounds of organic activity’; its intensity is ‘conveyed in the flesh through the nervous wave or vital emotion’.110 Bacon’s portraits dismantle rather than resemble faces. Harnessing the techniques of ‘rubbing and brushing’, the face is ‘disorganised’ and ‘a head emerge[s] in its place’.111 Thus, humanness is subsumed and an animal spirit emerges. (Figure 34) This is a metamorphosis, or state of transition that recalls the double reference of Arcimboldo’s monstrous portraits, or the moment captured with Ocyrhoe’s human cry as she transforms into a beast.112 Neither Bacon’s, nor Ovid’s metamorphoses are hybrid blendings, but share the ‘common fact’ of ‘man and animal’.113 In both instances a ‘zone of indiscernibility or undecidability’ emerges between oppositional forms, and this manifests in a continuous becoming.
110 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: 45. 111 Ibid., 21. 112 Barkan, The Gods made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism: 32. 113 Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation: 21.
234
Figure 34. Francis Bacon: 'Three Studies of George Dyer' (1966) Oil on canvas
Zones of indiscernibility or undecidability also proliferate in the etchings of Piranesi. Stoppani, in The Vague, the Viral and the Parasitic, describes the way in which Piranesi’s representations dissolve through incompleteness (making interior and exterior spaces coterminous), and further, borderlines are made fuzzy with the overlay of ambivalent etched marks allied to the print surface.114 As with Bacon’s ‘heads’, Piranesi’s ambiguity evokes an in-between state, not blended, nor simultaneous, but evocative of a force that sustains a dynamic state of change. Deleuze makes plain the priority he gives to transformation over form and its reliance on indeterminacy and haptic proximity:
To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule—neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularised out of a population rather than determined in a form.115
Stoppani claims that Piranesi’s focus on forces of change rather than form ‘opens up architecture to a dynamic time’, which constitutes a portal that permits access to the virtual realm of affects.116 And so, architectural space, as art, becomes a ground that mediates between the realms of the virtual and the actual.
114 Stoppani, ‘The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis’. 115 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (London: Verso, 1998), 1. 116 Stoppani, ‘The Vague, the Viral, the Parasitic: Piranesi’s Metropolis’, 152.
235 The ability of art to prise open a ground that permits access to the virtual field of univocal Being resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s pre-conceptual, pre-subjective field of becoming, or depth. Although Deleuze was critical of Merleau-Ponty—and phenomenology in general—Jack Reynolds and Jon Roffe make a convincing claim that these criticisms are overly harsh and that they ignore correspondences between structures key to both ontologies.
Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Serres all posit an ontological ‘in-between’ space in order to counter metaphysical dualism. In each instance this structure is plural, dynamic, and imbued with topological qualities that recognise the importance of the haptic realm and its implications for the experience of space and time. Nevertheless, Reynolds et al. point out that Deleuze and Merleau- Ponty have been relegated to either end of an oppositional paradigm that rests on a bifurcation that positions post-structuralist (epochal successor) philosophies of immanence against phenomenological (epochal predecessor) philosophies of transcendence.117 They submit that the almost exclusive focus on what separates these thinkers, at the expense of any consideration of interrelation, has proven to be problematic. As an alternative, Reynolds et al. suggest that the ideas of Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty might be better served if read as a ‘co-existence of planes’, believing ‘a rapprochement’ can be discerned between these thinkers.118
The architect and theorist Ignasi de Sola-Morales attempts a similar reconciliation (also founded on the basis of recognising common ground) with the ‘unlikely’ pairing of Deleuzian philosophy and phenomenology. According to Ignasi de Sola-Morales, the combining of ‘shared features’ gives rise ‘to a certain pluralism’,
117 Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 228. 118 Ibid., 228–229. Deleuze condemned Merleau-Ponty’s concept of ‘flesh’ for being too closely allied to subjectivity and Christianity, writing that ‘a curious fleshism inspires this final avatar of phenomenology and plunges it into the mystery of the incarnation’. Deleuze then adds, rather disparagingly, that, flesh is ‘both a pious and a sensual notion, a mixture of sensuality and religion … not sensation although it is involved in revealing it’. And further, ‘Flesh is only the thermometer of a becoming’. These criticisms emerge as Deleuze discusses the relation between sensation and the work of art, where he continues to insist that ‘flesh’ is still too tied to the ‘judgment of experience’ and that the ‘flesh of the world and flesh of the body’ can problematically be ‘exchanged as correlates’ since there is an ‘ideal coincidence’. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 178–179. However, Reynolds et al. submit that Deleuze underestimates the strength of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical position. For they maintain that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the chiasm does indeed successfully negate the priority afforded to the transcendental ego cogito and the intentionality given to phenomenology, and explicitly denies the flesh as ‘a fact or sum of facts ‘material’ or ‘spiritual’. They point out that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh’, chiasm and ‘wild being’ play similar roles to Deleuze’s pre-individual singularities and the plane of immanence (which is synonymous with univocal being) because ‘flesh’ is prior to the perceiving subject and therefore uncoupled from the subjective gaze and experience—it is a-subjective. In this sense ‘flesh’ is akin to the Deleuzian concept of the percept. In sum, ‘flesh’ cannot be construed as a mere sign of becoming. Both Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty conceive of a ‘lifeworld’ that exists beyond and prior to the perceiving subject, and both agree that this world is dynamic and processual. Further, for both, the perceiving subject is constructed through the ontological processes of folding and intertwining. Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 239–243.
236 … to the priority of descriptive over normative thought, and to a recognition of the need to make thinking more an original construction rather than a dogmatic repetition. A primarily positivist attitude prevails in both camps—an attentiveness to the formal, eidetic dimension of our understanding—which builds more than one bridge between the poststructuralists’ awareness of flows, energies and displacements and the ontological search for intentionalities—the signification and meaning of consciousness, in short, of knowing.119
Importantly for de Sola-Morales, this philosophical merger permits a repositioning, a resurrection of the human subject which, according to Sarah Whiting, he had considered ‘unjustly slain by … modernist objectivity and postructuralist nihilism’.120
This thesis posits that an alignment of Deleuze, Serres and Merleau-Ponty’s key ontological structures,121 which includes many of the shared features identified by de Sola-Morales, provides a similar basis for drawing on the strengths of each. Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh and embodied subject permits a sustained meditation on the interpellation between subject and object that eschews the conceit of humanism, yet adds to the more strictly immanent concept of the individual described by Deleuze. Conversely, the accounts of Deleuze and Serres are able to supplement an exposition on the nature of topological space and the implications that it holds for making the ‘in-between’ subject–object spatium tangible.
The persistence of the subject
While Reynolds et al. note that Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology avoids the extremes of pure transcendence (and arguably the harshest of Deleuze’s criticisms) since it embraces immanence, there is a sense in which transcendence remains, for Merleau-Ponty does not believe the external world can be ignored.122 Humans are always intertwined with their world, and so there will always be a transcendent material exterior and an immanent, conscious interior which precludes
119 Ignasi de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, ed. Sarah Whiting, trans. Graham Thompson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997), 10. 120 Sarah Whiting, ‘Introduction: Subjectifying the Modern’, in Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture, ed. Sarah Whiting (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), x. 121 The key ontological structures referred to here are those Merleau-Ponty describes in The Visible and the Invisible. 122 Although Reynolds et al. proffer qualified agreement with Deleuze’s assertion that Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is tied to transcendence, they point out that in The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty declares ‘immanence and transcendence [ontologically] indistinguishable’, suggesting that neither modality is given priority. While Reynolds et al. recognise that the issue of transcendence might constitute a significant point of difference between Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty, they argue that the transcendence in Merleau-Ponty’s later work is not to be equated with the strong sense of transcendence implied in Deleuze’s criticism. Nevertheless, although Merleau-Ponty’s later ontology is consistent with a univocal realm, it is not consistent with Deleuze’s brand of univocity of Being. Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 244–245. See also Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 89.
237 complete reduction to pure immanence. Reynolds et al. submit that the reduction of pure immanence is untenable for existential phenomenologists and a primary reason for their criticism of Husserlian phenomenology, which was ‘an immanence so purified of transcendence that the cogito is entirely divorced from world, body, others, history’.123 Nevertheless, Reynolds et al. recognise that during Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic intertwining, the ties that prevent a complete reduction to immanence become loosened sufficiently to allow for things to ‘pass into us as well as we into the things’.124
Gary Gutting believes that poststructural theory has replaced the subject that ‘exercises freedom … for the sake of an objective good’ with the individual who exercises freedom ‘for its own sake’.125 He claims the poststructuralist individual’s ‘good’ consists entirely of exercising unrestricted, ‘free creativity, in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring machines’.126 Expanding on this idea, Bruce McClure adduces that, for Deleuze, ‘Human subjects are merely the eventual sediment of the continual process of desiring–production, they are neither its means nor its ends’.127 Problematically, the post structuralist individual must not be limited, for to do so would be to resist the affirmation of the self as value.128 Gutting observes rather darkly:
[Postructuralists] remain content with a naïve, prereflective commitment to the unquestionable status of a transgression, novelty, plurality and difference as absolute ethical ideals. There is, accordingly, no inclination to ask difficult questions about the roots and limits of human freedom; the consuming task is to expose and overcome all obstacles to its unrestricted expansion.129
Rosen points out that while Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘dynamic account of life processes’ was developed in order to counter ‘the totalising tendencies of classical thought’, their attempt, which might have succeeded at the explicit level, has failed at an implicit level.130 For Rosen claims that whenever Deleuze and Guattari pose a fundamental opposition, such as identity and difference,
123 Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 244, 250 n.218. 124 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 123. See also Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 244. 125 Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: 373. 126 Ibid., 373, 341. Desiring machines (also referred to as assemblages and simulacra) are described in Anti-Oedipus as a multiplicity of connections with endless possibilities that are not limited or regulated by any individual subject. Alison Ross, ‘Psychoanalysis—Family, Freud, and Unconscious’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 220–221. 127 Bruce McClure, ‘Machinic Philosophy’, Theory, Culture & Society 15, 2 (1998): 181. 128 Gutting, French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: 373. 129 Ibid., 389. 130 Rosen, Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld: 13, 16.
238 being and becoming, unity and multiplicity, they always refuse the first term in favour of the second, and so construct a ‘meta-dualism’ that leaves little room for ambiguity.131 Nigel Thrift considers Deleuze’s negation of the subject is ‘a step too far’. He calls for a ‘poetics of mundane space and time that can teach us to ourselves in better ways’, ‘a poetics of dreams and improvisations, of what Vesely (2004) calls “rich articulations” that arise out of a deep respect for situations and which manifests itself in continually attempting to go beyond them’.132 Thrift writes that, whilst the brand of humanism that adopts centre stage is to be avoided, it is important to ‘keep hold of a humanist ledge on the machinic cliff face [to] hold to a sense of personal authorship, … And the reason? Because how things seem is often more important than what they are’.133 He summarises this position with a quote from Daniel Wegner:
The fact is that it seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call this an illusion, it is a mistake to think the illusory is trivial.134
Echoing these concerns, Derek Taylor points out that, while Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both embrace dynamic concepts of divergence (difference versus ecart), Merleau-Ponty’s divergence ‘never loses sight of the fact of our own … involvement in the world’.135 Coming down on the side of Merleau-Ponty, Taylor takes issue with Deleuze’s Being as ‘becoming’ for it produces a purely relational form that is not delimited by space, identity, truth, or the body, and so is positionless.136 While Taylor agrees that the ‘violence’ and desiring production associated with Deleuze’s notion of ‘phantasmic genealogy’ can break down sedimented habits and fixed ways of thinking: he believes that the eternal return of difference, with its over emphasis on the arbitrary sign, has resulted in the loss of situation. Without the ability to adopt any position, including the
131 Ibid., 16. That said, Reynolds et al. point out that, while Deleuze insists that transcendence be avoided, he also recognised the difficulty of remaining exclusively on a plane of ‘genuine immanence’ acknowledging that ultimately transcendence might be inevitable. Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 248. Deleuze and Guattari illustrate this point in What is Philosophy?; they write: ‘because thought cannot stop itself from interpreting immanence as immanent to something, the great Object of contemplation, the Subject of reflection, or the Other subject of communication: then transcendence is inevitably reintroduced. And if this cannot be avoided it is because it seems that each plane of immanence can only claim to be unique, to be the plane, by reconstituting the chaos it had to ward off: the choice is between transcendence and chaos’. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 51. 132 Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), 19. 133 Ibid., 13. 134 Daniel Wegner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002), 341–342. Cited in ibid. 135 Derek Taylor, ‘Phantasmic Genealogy’, in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas Busch and Shaun Gallagher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 157. 136 Ibid., 156–157.
239 ethical position that originally motivated Deleuze’s thinking, Taylor claims Deleuze has effectively undermined his own project.137 Taylor concludes his critique by reiterating Merleau- Ponty’s caution against the ‘tendency to project ourselves outside our own situation … which ultimately empties itself of content’.138
The loss of the subject is similarly problematic for de Sola-Morales, who declares:
There is no longer even a subject to shout and gesticulate. With the disappearance of the gods, of myths, of hopes, and of dreams, architecture has also emptied itself of … subjectivity. Clearly there is no collective voice to take its place. It is still more evident that the sensibility of the best artists captures nothing other than a third person who is neither me nor you nor him nor her.139
Without subjectivity or a collective voice de Sola-Morales declares pragmatically, that meaningful architectural experience is relegated to the minor domain of private experience.
The most sensitive architecture of the present moment is thus no longer the expression of a communal project that transmits the values of rationality, progress, and collective emancipation to the urban landscape, but is instead the modest presence of particular discourses that publicly expose what should only be regarded as private experience. … private experience provides the last resort for establishing a weak but respectable veracity.140
Although Deleuze’s erasure of the subject has been critiqued, his radical assumptions regarding the nature of human subjectivity represents a significant shift in thinking, one that has called into question the relation between human and non-human existents.141
As noted earlier, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the de-centred ‘Body without Organs’ together with the concept of the proliferating rhizome have been analogously linked with the ‘ubiquitous’ global Internet. This has contributed to their theory finding its way into cyberspace, cyber culture theory, and post-human debates—debates that have also been linked to the reduced notion of
137 Ibid., 157. 138 Ibid., 158. 139 de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture: 25. 140 Ibid., 108–109. 141 James Williams claims that when individuals daydream, or are engaged in other activities where thoughts and sensations drift and move fluidly through them, they are closer to Deleuze’s concept of the individual than when they self-consciously think. While it is possible to self-consciously reflect on the daydream, this does not equate to the flow of sensations and ideas that arise during the ‘creative’ experience of this state. It is the separation between the creative expression of ideas and consciousness that led Deleuze to believe that at the creative and fluid level there is no difference between humans and other ‘things’ such as animals, plants or inanimate objects. James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 6.
240 prosthesis.142 Underscoring these debates is a problematic that centres on the tension between the Deleuzian desire for uninterrupted flows and, countering this, the need for acts of resistance.
John Marks claims that it is the material complexity of Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence that is missing in cyber theory; it only imagines ‘a world … in the process of becoming smoother’.143 This same lack of complexity, also produced through an overemphasis on smooth space, characterises the digitised space associated with communication technologies such as the Internet. The utopian promise144 and belief that unrestricted communication leads to greater transparency, protects humans from irrationality and, ultimately, allows humans to ‘transcend the body’, amounts to the same utopian vision as that of cyberspace.145 However, techno-fantasies that imagine liberating the rational mind and doing away with the body simply reinstate a dualist way of thinking.146 Recognising that Deleuze and Guattari do indeed open the fleshy limits of the body, Ella Brians points out that this dissolution does not result in synthesis. For, ‘the organic and the non-organic, the human and the machine, the human and the animal’ cannot blend, not because of dualist opposition, but for the more complex Deleuzian fact that there are too many differences to permit structural union.147 Brians claims that Deleuze’s theory resists the ‘techno-fantasy’ of escaping the body, not by ‘shoring up the fleshy body’ but by insisting on the material realm.148
Marks notes that Deleuze and Guattari’s later works increasingly focus on the idea of resistance, as opposed to uninterrupted flow, as a useful strategy.149 Simon O’Sullivan reinforces this view by emphasising that, while some might be led to believe on a cursory reading of A Thousand
142 John Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics’, in Deleuze and the Contemporary World, ed. Ian. Buchanan and Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 194. 143 Ibid., 194–196. 144 Utopian visions are severed from any form of temporality. They freeze time and leave no place for accidents, surprises, or chance. Becoming is suppressed in order to sustain an ideal illusion of perfection and control; it is a vision of the future that has no future and it is not transformative. Utopian visions represent a rational response to uncertainty; they do not take into account place or human diversity but, instead, project a privileged, singular and universal ideal. Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001), 136–139. According to Ballantyne, human beings simplify things, ‘[we] reduce our pluralities to identities’ or ‘neatly identifiable objects’ in order to deal with the world. Ballantyne, Architecture Theory: A reader in Philosophy and Culture: 235. Grosz believes that it is the task of architecture and philosophy not to be content with utopian ideals, but to endlessly question, for this is the only path to realising a positive, embodied architecture. Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space: 150. 145 Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics’, 202. 146 According to Ella Brians, this is an ideal fantasy that seeks to liberate the rational, pure mind from its corporeal, temporal ‘anchor’. Ella Brians, ‘The Virtual Body and the Strange Persistence of the Flesh’, in Deleuze and the Body, ed. Laura Guillerme and Joe Hughes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 135–136. 147 Ibid., 134–135. 148 Ibid., 136. 149 Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics’, 210.
241 Plateaus that Deleuze is a ‘thinker of flows and intensities’ who seeks escape from the material realm, this is not the case, for his later works increasingly focus on the subject, or on actualisation:
[I]t is never a question of wildly destratifying but of dosages, of finding creative lines of flight that lead somewhere and from which one can ‘return’. Deterritorialisation always ends in a reterritorialisation and in fact needs a territory from which to operate.150
Yet, despite Deleuze (and Guattari’s) insistence on immanent materialism, a tension is introduced with the apparent valorisation of smooth space.151 A tension that Deleuze and Guattari appear to acknowledge as they conclude their chapter on smooth and striated space in A Thousand Plateaus with the assertion that ‘smooth spaces are not in themselves liberatory’, and that we should ‘Never believe that a smooth space will suffice to save us’.152
150 Simon O’Sullivan, ‘Subjectivity and Art’, in The Deleuze Dictionary: Revised Edition, ed. Adrian Parr (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 276. 151 This is revealed in accounts that describe art and poetry as liberatory because they break through sedimented, habitual, or dogmatic ways of thinking, and so permit access to the transformative virtual realm. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition: 53. See also Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?: 204. 152 ———, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 500.
242 Third space
The tendency for post structuralism to speculate on an increasingly fluid and transmissive relation between self and world has led theorists such as Connor to speculate on the dissolving limits, or ‘skinlessness’1 that has occurred with the ‘collapse of the surface’.2
[T]he actual skin that bounds us within our individual selves is dissolved away and replaced by a polymorphous, infinitely mobile and extensible skin of secondary simulations and stimulations, which both makes us more versatile by enlarging our psychic surface area, exposing us to more and different kinds of experience, and also numbs us precisely because of the dazzling overload of sensations which this synthetic pseudo-skin conducts.3
He submits that the ‘sensory euphoria of postmodernity’ has removed the objective and defensive power of sight, adding that without this distance and separation the body is left exposed and in need of defence.4 According to Connor, Deleuze’s account does not recognise that there must be a compromise between the skin envelope and membranes, ‘between the body-without-organs, or the body as infinite surface, and the various imaginary enclosures necessary to health and productivity’.5 At issue, is the way in which humans understand proximity, for if everything is made equally intimate with the self then nothing has the ability to ‘stand clear’.6 And so, Connor
1 In the context of the vanishing skin, Connor claims that acts of violence or assault upon the skin performed with ‘The knife, the needle, the stylus, the pen, the whip, the eye’ enact a binding as they simultaneously mutilate. Connor, The Book of Skin: 69. 2 Deleuze reveals the terror of skinlessness his account of the schizophrenic: ‘The first schizophrenic evidence is that the surface has split open. Things and propositions no longer have any frontier between them, precisely because bodies have no surface. The primary aspect of the schizophrenic body is that it is a sort of body-sieve. Freud emphasised this aptitude of the schizophrenic to grasp the surface and the skin as if they were punctured by an infinite number of little holes. The consequence of this is that the entire body is no longer anything but depth—it carries along and snaps up everything into this gaping depth which represents a fundamental involution. Everything is body and corporeal. Everything is a mixture of bodies, and inside the body, interlocking and penetration’. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense: 86–87. 3 Connor, The Book of Skin: 65. 4 Ibid., 68. 5 Ibid., 69. 6 Ibid., 70.
243 argues, the ‘nausea of edgeless exposure that follows from having broken out of our skin’ must be countered with the resistance of membranes.7
This thesis accepts that within an increasingly smooth and disembodied world there is a balancing need for the material complexity associated with the ‘actual’ body—a need for acts of resistance that are found in certain works of art and architecture, the complex ‘folds’ of the body and in the sedimented subject itself.8 For, as Brians points out, it is only when an understanding of the body is sought in terms of its full material complexity that the ‘flesh shows a strange persistence’.9
Folds
Intertwining (encroachment), depth, and folding are allied ontological formulations pivotal to the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, and Serres, with all three structures drawing influence from the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716). While Deleuze is careful to distinguish his folds from those of Merleau-Ponty, a distinction (again) centred on the issue of intentionality,10 it can be said that there is an inexplicit consensus between the three thinkers regarding the fundamental spatial structure of the world—from which other spatialities derive. Once again, rather than focusing upon the differences between these theorists, there is reward in recognising how their ideas overlap, augment, and fold into one another.
For Deleuze, the world is constituted of folds. The fold is the ‘unit of matter’ or, ‘the smallest element of the labyrinth’. And so, the fold is not a secondary structure produced from an unfolded surface, but a primary structure because there is ‘always a fold within the fold’. Moreover, the ‘unfold is … not the opposite of the fold, but follows one fold until the next’.11 Deleuze thereby adduces that multiplicities, which connect to form rhizomic surfaces, are not only folded structures in and of themselves, but are phenomena that continue to fold and form ever more complex, deeper structures.12 All bodies emerge from the forces of the fold.13 At the
7 Ibid. 8 Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics’, 210–211. 9 Brians, ‘The Virtual Body and the Strange Persistence of the Flesh’, 140. 10 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 110–112. 11 ———, ‘The Fold’, Translated by Jonathan Strauss. Yale French Studies 80 (1991): 231. 12 Deleuze asserts, as Merleau-Ponty, that we have forgotten that depth is the original dimension, not a derivative third dimension. He writes: ‘Depth as the (ultimate and original) heterogeneous dimension is the matrix of all extensity, including its third dimension considered to be homogenous with the other two’. ———, Difference and Repetition: 229.
244 material level of the body, the inside is merely a fold of the outside, but there are many other ‘folded’ modalities, such as time and memory which, when coiled together, form the topological structure of the subjective self.14
In his treatise The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1992) Deleuze describes the decorative façade of the Baroque house, which ‘risks “exploding” the interior’, as his inspiration for thinking about the fold.15 According to Deleuze, the Baroque the ornamental screen, which Payne claims had begun ‘to swell and contract as if it were a muscle’,16 becomes completely severed from the structure’s interior space. Deleuze adds, ‘far from being adapted to the structure the Baroque façade has a tendency to express nothing but itself’.17 While this dissociation signals the problematic highlighted by Vesely,18 it is worth noting that the Baroque façade was not yet entirely emptied of communicative purpose. However, the uncoupling meant that a new form of relating insides to outsides was required.19 Deleuze achieves this by dividing the Baroque house vertically into two levels (storeys), consistent with a world ‘organised according to two vectors: a sinking downward and an upward pull’.20 This conceptualisation was founded on Leibniz’ observation that the heaviest element of a system sinks to the lowest point while the lighter element rises until it finds its equilibrium above. Thus, a weightless, pure interiority becomes associated with the ‘metaphysical’ upper storey ‘concern[ing] the soul’, while the lower storey ‘charged with the façade … which extends by puncturing itself [and] … curves back in accordance with the determinate coils of a heavy matter’ becomes associated with ‘physical’ concerns and the body.21 Yet, this scission ‘does not prevent the two vectors from composing one and the same world, one and the same house’. Instead, Deleuze claims it is the fold that separates the two storeys, as it ‘reverberates on both sides in accordance with [the] different orders’, which
13 According to Deleuze, ‘The multiple is not merely that which has many parts, but that which is folded in many ways. Each level corresponds perfectly to a labyrinth: the labyrinth of the coextensive content of matter and its parts, the labyrinth of liberty in the soul and its predicates’. ———, ‘The Fold’, 228. Additionally, there is a ‘correspondence, even a communication between the two levels, between the two labyrinths, between the coils of matter and the folds in the soul. A fold between the two folds?’ ibid., 229. 14 O’Sullivan, ‘Fold’, 107. 15 Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, 234. 16 Payne makes this observation in relation to the ornamental façades of the Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. Payne, ‘Reclining Bodies: Figural Ornament in Renaissance Architecture’, 113. 17 Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, 234. 18 As noted earlier in this paper, Vesely explains that it is when the communicative space of decorum is replaced by the self- expression of the Rocaille that the idea that systems might be substituted for communicative function emerges. Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 328. 19 Deleuze, ‘The Fold’, 234. 20 The separation of the world into a metaphysical and corporeal realm was consistent with the Platonic tradition. Ibid. 21 Ibid., 234–235.
245 allows the divergent orders to coincide.22 The dynamic of Deleuze’s Baroque building comes from its double-sided relation. The fold that is actualised internally with the intimate folds of space that enclose the soul, and realised externally in the coils realised under the influence of matter both differentiates and self-differentiates.23
The Deleuzian fold is not simply a ‘notion’ but an operative act, and further, a revelatory act.24 However, the operative of the fold is only truly Baroque if it has ‘limitless release’. Thus, Deleuze differentiates between Uccello’s folds, such as those depicted in the fresco Blessed Jacopone da Todi (circa 1435–1440), which are ‘not truly Baroque because they remain caught in geometrical solids’ and so are ‘inflexible structures’, and the folds of El Greco, as revealed in Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (circa 1590–1599), which ‘seem to take leave of their supports’.25 (Figure 35)
22 Ibid., 235. 23 Deleuze writes: ‘When Heidegger refers to the Zwiefalt as the differential of difference … he means above all that the differentiation does not refer to undifferentiated origin, but to a Difference which ceaselessly unfolds and folds back from both sides and which only unfolds one by folding back the other in a coextensivity of the unveiling and veiling of Being, of the presence and withdrawal of the being, The “duplicity” of the fold is necessarily reproduced on both of the sides which it distinguishes and which it sets into a mutual relation by distinguishing them: a scission in which each term sets off the other, a tension in which each fold is extended into the other’. Ibid., 235–236. 24 See Deleuze’s explanation of how this is made plain with the Baroque poem Herodiade by Mallarme. Ibid., 236–237. 25 Deleuze observes that in El Greco’s painting ‘cloth, granite, and cloud … enter into an infinite competition’. Ibid., 241–242.
246
Figure 35. Paolo Uccello: 'Blessed Jacopone da Todi'–fresco (circa 1435–1440) and El Greco: 'Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane'–oil on canvas (circa 1590–1599)
Deleuze’s concept of the fold first came to prominence in architectural practice during the nineteen nineties, shifting focus away from a preoccupation with the fragmented, formal systems associated with Derridean Deconstruction.26 Accordingly, a logic of ‘conflict and contradiction’ was replaced with a logic of fluid connectivity giving rise to ‘intensive’ curvilinear, ‘smooth’ forms.27 Paul Harris describes this shift in approach as one that comes to favour ‘linkage’ over ‘aporia’.28 The ‘discovery’ of the Deleuzian fold by architectural theorists and practitioners coincided with the computer revolution. As these devices became established in architectural practice, they were harnessed as novel conceptual design tools, for they allowed complex geometries to be easily generated and manipulated. As a result, mathematically derived
26 Paul A. Harris, ‘To See with the Mind and Think through the Eye: Deleuze, Folding Architecture, and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers’, in Deleuze and Space, ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 36. 27 Greg Lynn, ‘Architectural Curvilinearity: The Folded, the Pliant and the Supple’, in Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Academy, 2004), 24. 28 Harris, ‘To See with the Mind and Think through the Eye: Deleuze, Folding Architecture, and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers’, 37.
247 topological surfaces and deformations proliferated in architectural designs.29 Early examples include Greg Lynn’s ‘Blob Architecture’ (a term first coined by Lynn in 1995) and Stephen Perella’s ‘Hypersurface Architecture’ (1998).
The initial embrace of the Deleuzian fold tended toward literal interpretation, leading de Sola- Morales, who proclaims a debt to Deleuze’s philosophy, stating, in no uncertain terms, that he wished to distance himself ‘unambiguously from those who in recent years have instrumentalised [Deleuze’s] thought’. For, according to de Sola-Morales, ‘A certain fashion … has seized upon the dazzling images of [Deleuze’s] thought, either as forms to be directly visualised in new architectures or as verbal metaphors with which to beautify a conventional, if not vulgar way of thinking’.30
The fashion for creating ‘smooth [folded] transformations’ was problematic for architectural theorists. As concrete manifestations of a dynamic computer imaging process, these expressive forms remained static representations of the idea of change and dynamism, or derivative instances of becoming. Consequently, the final form was simply a metaphoric reminder, or remainder, a clichéd representation of the more distant process of its generation. Further, as with cyberspace and the space of communication technologies, complex geometrical deformations ‘smoothed’ material complexity and so created disembodied spaces. However, by the mid- nineteen nineties architects such as Peter Eisenman had begun to, instead, harness the Deleuzian fold as a processual device for generating architectural ‘folds’ that did not necessarily relate to the final form.31 Mario Carpo, in Folding in Architecture writes:
Forms do not fold (actually, in all Eisenman’s projects … they fracture and break.), because buildings do not move when built, architectural forms can at best only represent, symbolise or somehow evoke the continuity or change or motion … folding is a process, not a product; it doesn’t necessarily produce visible folds (although it would later on); it is about creating built forms, necessarily motionless, which can nevertheless induce the perception of motion by suggesting the ‘continual variation’ and the ‘perceptual development’ of a ‘form “becoming”’.32
29 Mario Carpo, ‘Ten Years of Folding’, in Folding in Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn (Chichester: Wiley-Academy, 2004), 15. 30 de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture: 9. 31 Most often these processes lead to the break up of perspectival and Cartesian grids. Carpo, ‘Ten Years of Folding’, 15. 32 Ibid.
248 Yet, dualist and clichéd thinking lingers in Carpo’s account. The architectural form remains autonomously generated (derived through its own internal logic). Moreover, the object that induces the ‘perception of motion’ remains an object-positioned-before-subject and so precludes a genuinely enfolded relation.
Eschewing a singular objective viewpoint and formal centrality, de Sola-Morales in developing a rationale in support of ‘weak architecture’, describes the significance of folding the subject and architecture together within the aesthetic experience of the Deleuzian event. De Sola-Morales reiterates Deleuze’s description of the event as a precarious, temporal instance, heavily influenced by chance, which exists momentarily then passes, arising typically in dance, contemporary art, conceptual art installations and music.33 He notes that, for Deleuze, subject and object are not oppositional, but ‘folds of a single reality’, with reality emerging as the time of the subject and that of the object ‘coagulate’ in an event encounter along an infinite continuum, or plane of immanence. The event is not produced through a predictable ‘linear and foreseeable organisation but through folds and fissures … the tremulous fluttering of a brief moment of poetic and creative intensity’.34 For de Sola-Morales, the fundamental nature of the ‘precarious’, accidental, liminal, nonlinear event, is decorative.35 De Sola-Morales rejects the humanist, or Albertian notion of decoration with its roots in decorum, and equally rejects any pejorative notion that might be associated with ‘vulgarity’, ‘triviality’, or the ‘repetition of established stereotypes’.36 Instead, he embraces the term’s more mundane usage, that is, ‘a pulling back to a function that projects beyond the hypothetical ground of things’.37 For de Sola-Morales, decoration must be seen:
in the sense it has in the decoration magazines, in its everyday use, the decorative is the inessential; it is that which presents itself not as substance but as accident: something complementary that will even lend itself, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, to a reading that is not attentive but distracted, and which thus offers itself to us as something that enhances and embellishes reality, making it more tolerable, without presuming to impose itself, to be central, to claim for itself that deference demanded by totality.38
33 de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture: 68. 34 Ibid., 69. 35 Ibid., 70. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 69–70.
249 De Sola-Morales’ peripheral notion of the decorative event aligns with Frascari’s focus on the ‘minor’, secondary, ornamental joint as the site where meaningful (non trivial) architecture is realised.39 Linking these ideas, Jennifer Bloomer asserts that, because architecture inevitably gives material expression to a ‘metaphor of hierarchical and structural thinking (gravity, Cartesian logic)’, ‘an architecture of desire’, or ‘a minor architecture’ is relegated to, or can only subversively ‘operate in the interstices of this architecture’. Such a minor architecture is ‘Not opposed to, not separated from but upon/within/among: barnacles, bastard constructions … tattoos (ornament, embellishment)’.40
In arguing for the excess of ornament, Elizabeth Grosz claims that cultures whose architecture remains an expression of ideal cultural conventions, define themselves in opposition to ‘the remainders they cast out’.41 Consequently, ‘unassimilable residues’, such as ‘the other, the abject, the scapegoat, the marginalised, the destitute, the refugee, the dying’ are not only in ‘excess’ of the norm, or ‘superadded’, but effectively ‘undermine and problematise’.42 To achieve an inclusive ‘monstrous’ architecture, Grosz believes it is necessary to include the idea of a ‘gift’, where an ‘excess’ is ‘given’ in an act of celebration. This act defies normative built forms that are narrowly conceived such as those forms created purely in response to commercial, functional and utilitarian values. However, she cautions that ornamental excess is not to be elevated for its own sake, but should be made equal to the greater sum of cultural parts that comprise an architectural work.43
For De Sola-Morales, a decorative ‘folding back’, ‘constitutes a recognition of the fact that for the work of art—sculptural or architectonic—an acceptance of a certain weakness, and thus of
39 As noted earlier in this dissertation, Frascari observes that the transformations that take place in the joints or spatial boundaries, which are characteristic of the ‘monstrous idea of fragmentary architecture’, were made tangible during the Renaissance with the mixing of spoils. The mixing of spoils involves both an assimilation and transformation (a metamorphosis) of other buildings, thus making them culturally relevant. This mode of architectural production continues to this day, whether trophies are drawn from conceptual, stylistic, or actual fragments. According to Frascari, the free meanings associated with unique signs or trophies are subsequently transformed into stable referents within the built environment, making meanings ‘transmittable and assimilable’. Frascari, Monsters of Architecture: Anthropomorphism in Architectural Theory: 22–23. The monstrous semiosis produces non- trivial architecture because the mixing at the site of the joint produces an enigma, where ‘Enigmas are ways of saying what is necessary to say by combining impossible things’. Frascari elaborates; ‘The enigma is a callida junctura which unifies an overturned perverse signifier, with an improper and obscure significance. This relationship is an inversion of the “normal” process of signification. The outcome is extraordinary, that is, a monster’. ———, ‘The Exhibitions of Monsters and the Monsters of the Exhibitions’, Semiotics 1985 (1985): 680. 40 Jennifer Bloomer, Architecture and the Text: The (S)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 36. 41 Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space: 152. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid., 164–165.
250 relegation to a secondary position, may possibly be the condition of its greatest elegance and, ultimately, its greatest significance and import’.44 Thus, he encourages a ‘tangential and weak’ architecture that once experienced resonates in the same way as profound poetry, or a musical note that lingers once heard.45 In ‘weak’ architecture the subject grasps (thus invoking the notion of intentionality) from the chaotic flux of events to construct a new fold in reality. At that moment, fluidity and chaos are arrested.46 According to de Sola-Morales, the fleeting experience of the event does not imply that architecture must be fleeting or ephemeral. For him, instead, architects need to recognise that the contemporary architectural ‘place’ is to be found at nodal points or crossroads, where through ‘a ritual of and in time’ it is possible to ‘[fix] a point of particular intensity in the universal chaos of our metropolitan civilisation’.47 The intersection of crossroads, of skin, resistance, depth, the event, the elevation of that which is indirect and secondary, and the drawing together of subject and object into the fold of space and time, calls for reconsideration of the ideas of Serres.
An approach
In order to counter the postmodernist conceit that privileges exteriority over an ‘inner life’ and thus the tacit reinstatement of dualism, Galen Johnson asserts that it is necessary to rethink the spatial relation between bodily interiors and exteriors and together with this, reconsider the type of metaphors that are harnessed for its explication.48 In Johnson’s view, metaphors such as ‘the [Deleuzian] fold’, ‘lines of exterior force’ and ‘dice throw’ are not helpful for understanding the nature of interior life, nor do they properly explain the enigmatic zone where interiors and exteriors cross over. Instead, he posits that Merleau-Ponty’s ‘philosophy of the fold’ is a more
44 de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture: 70. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 De Sola-Morales adds: ‘Although the event is always something that takes place in the global disorder devoid of meaning, this happy moment—at times accidental, at times the result of a willing intellect—constitutes an outstanding instant in a constant flux, a harmonious, polyphonic chord in a situation of permanent transition … This event is like an extended chord, like an intensity at an energetic crux of streams of communication, a subjective apprehension offered by the architect in the joy of producing a polyphonic instant in the heart of the metropolis’. Ibid., 102–103. 47 Ibid., 104. 48 Johnson claims it is more accurate to say that our ‘inner and spiritual life is in front of us in the places with which we dwell and the relationships we treasure, or that it is above us in the sky’, than to harness metaphors of containment. Galen A. Johnson, ‘Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations’, in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 25–26, 30.
251 meaningful metaphor from which to begin to understand this relation precisely because it still holds with an ontology from ‘within’.49
For Merleau-Ponty, ‘immanence and transcendence are indistinguishable’, so that neither possesses an ontological value greater than the other.50 Merleau-Ponty’s descriptions of Being as depth, dimensionality, horizon and invisibility all allude to an interior ontology.51 And, while Deleuze considered Merleau-Ponty’s connection with interiority or intentionality a ‘stranglehold’,52 Johnson suggests, rather, that it is this connection that offers a conceptualisation that is sufficiently rich and complex to begin to rethink the nature of the interior–exterior continuum. For Johnson, Merleau-Ponty presents us with ‘the beginnings of a postmodern metaphysics’ in which we do not have to choose between the ‘right and the wrong sides of the world’.53 Merleau-Ponty’s corporeal ‘flesh’ as ‘genesis: emergence, transcendence, coming of itself to itself, coiling up, reversal, doubling back, divergence’ mediates between, and ultimately connects, insides and outsides.54 According to Johnson, the flesh is a ‘polymorphous, porous and promiscuous, interior and exterior, where the life of thought, the heart, dream and memory constantly cross over and unravel in the enigmas of desire, the sublime, forgetting, silence, solitude, suffering, night, death and nothingness’.55 It is this meditative, mediating sense of the flesh, it’s interlacing of insides with outsides that is further explicated with Serres’ philosophical notion of ‘skin’.56
Corporeal ‘skin’, including its internal folds and membranes, constitutes the essential ground for all sensory experience and so, for Serres, represents the paradigmatic spatial metaphor for coming to know the relation between self and world. Serres’ ‘skin’, in which the soul resides, is no mere envelope, interface, or surface membrane but, rather, a milieu, or ‘entire environment’.57
Skin wrinkles, adapts, reigns between organs and contains complex paths that link them; more than just the medium of the sense organs, our skin is a mixture of them, like a
49 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 237. See also Johnson, ‘Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations’, 27–29. 50 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 89. 51 Johnson, ‘Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations’, 29. 52 Deleuze, Foucault: 112. 53 Johnson, ‘Inside and Outside: Ontological Considerations’, 32. 54 Ibid., 30. 55 Ibid., 32. 56 John Wylie observes that while Merleau-Ponty accounts for his concepts of depth, ‘flesh’ and reversibility at an ontological level, the material and epistemological contours of this spatium are ‘barely hinted at’. John Wylie, ‘Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2004): 527. 57 Connor, The Book of Skin: 28.
252 palette. … The organism forms a gigantic knot with as many dimensions as one could wish. It begins, in an embryonic state, with one or more sheets, folded, pleated, rolled, invaginated. Embryology has the appearance of applied topology, looks like an infinitely wrinkled skin.58
Steven Brown contends that, while it may at first appear (in The Five Senses) that Serres proceeds from Merleau-Ponty’s de-centred phenomenology of perception, Serres’ is a more ‘radical’ conceptualisation of the relation between subject and object.59 It is through the surface of the skin, where the body and world touch, that the relation between the inner self and outer self is continuously being re-written.60 Moreover, it is through the skin and touch that human beings become immersed in, and know, their world (as opposed to standing before it). Serres writes:
Knowing things requires one first of all to place oneself between them. Not only in front in order to see them, but in the midst of their mixture, on the paths that unite them. … Touching is situated between, the skin is the place where exchanges are made, the body traces the knotted, bound, folded, complex path, between the things to be known.61
Knowledge, which for the positivist is revealed through unveiling and partitioning is, for Serres, realised through an exploration amongst ‘veils’.62 Serres considers skin equivalent to the medieval unifying sixth sense or common sense: it is the sense of ‘selfhood’.63 All the other senses are derived (indirectly) from skin, and therefore touch. As such, the skin ‘carries the message of Hermes’: it represents the means by which humans communicate with the world.64
Despite his criticism of Merleau-Ponty for valorising language over sensory experience,65 Serres recognises the way in which language is entangled with the senses, and is himself heavily reliant
58 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 79–80. 59 Steven Brown, ‘A Topology of the Sensible: Michel Serres’ “The Five Senses”’, New Formations, 72 (2011): 164. 60 Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, 156. 61 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 80. 62 Ibid., 81–82. 63 Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, 158. 64 Michel Serres Les Cinq Sens (1985) translated by Steven Connor and cited in ibid. In the introduction to Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy Harari and Bell write: ‘Myth … is the first explanatory principle formulated by men. Hermes participates in the first system of knowledge about the world: cosmogony. And he plays a very particular role’. Hermes ‘connects, disconnects, and reconnects the endless variety of spaces he traverses’. Hermes is not only the weaver ‘of the many routes and spaces, but also of myth and science’. Harari and Bell, ‘Introduction: Journal a Plusieurs Voies’, xxxi, xxxiii. And further, ‘Hermes is the divine herald, the messenger of the gods. The traveler’s guide and the leader of souls must know the terrain over which he journeys, the shortcuts, the landmarks, the many paths. He must be able to decode the map, the dangers that topography hides. If he represents ingenuity and ruse, it is because these qualities are necessary in order to carry messages and to conserve them. It is not enough to know how to decode, one must also know how to hide, to disguise the code’. Ibid., xxxiv. 65 In conversation with Bruno Latour in 1995 Serres declares, ‘When I was young I laughed a lot when I read Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. He opens it with these words: “At the outset of the study of perception, we find in language the notion of sensation …” Isn’t this an exemplary introduction? … Lots of phenomenology and no sensation—everything via language’. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: 131–132. Ming-
253 on metaphor and allegory in order to communicate his own ideas. Nowhere is this more evident than in his work: The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies.66
Both Deleuze (explicitly) and Serres (implicitly) reject the linguistic turn in favour of a pragmatics that favours context over semantics. Yet, according to Ming-Qian Ma, their version of pragmatics displaces an analytic paradigm in favour of an approach that, paradoxically, makes language the site of philosophical inquiry and conceptualisation.67 Jean-Jacques Lecercle labels this new version of pragmatics a ‘new poetics’, while acknowledging that it introduces a level of tension in relation to Deleuze’s philosophical position.68 Ma points out that the shift in philosophical style of writing, from one that is literary to one that has a ‘poetic texture’, was an idea anticipated with Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible.69 So, despite censuring Merleau-Ponty for his emphasis on the importance of language in relation to sensual experience, Deleuze and Serres appear to accept Merleau-Ponty’s position that sense comes into being, not through denotative meaning, but obliquely through the lateral relations that are established during metaphoric (or tropic) transfers and exchanges—transferences that are ‘implicated in the occult trading of the metaphor’.70 According to Ma, Deleuze builds on this idea to the extent that metaphor becomes understood in its broadest sense ‘as the very metaphoricity of language itself’.71
Serres considers prosaic language a filter erected between sensing bodies and their surrounds that is designed to prevent subjects from meaningfully intertwining with their worlds. Notwithstanding the way language frustrates worldly engagement, he believes it offers a means
Qian Ma asserts that despite this criticism, Serres ultimately accepts the same relation between language and sense that Merleau- Ponty describes in The Visible and the Invisible. Ming-Qian Ma, ‘Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres’, Analecta Husserliana LXXXIV (2005): 115 n.119. 66 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. 67 Ma, ‘Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres’, 97–98. 68 Lecercle, Deleuze and Language: 199. 69 Ma, ‘Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres’, 98. See also Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible: ‘negation and especially interrogation, which do not express any property intrinsic to the things, can be sustained only by the apparatus of language’. And further, ‘One has to believe then, that there is or could be a language of coincidence, a manner of making the things themselves speak—and this is what [the philosopher] seeks. It would be a language of which he would not be the organiser, words he would not assemble, that would combine through him by virtue of a natural intertwining of their meaning, through the occult trading of the metaphor—where what counts is no longer the manifest meaning of each word and of each image, but the lateral relations, kinships that are implicated in their transfers and their exchanges. It is indeed a language of this sort that Bergson himself required for the philosopher. But we have to recognise the consequence: if language is not necessarily deceptive, truth is not coincidence nor mute’. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 96, 125. 70 Ma, ‘Becoming Phenomenology: Style, Poetic Texture, and the Pragmatic Turn in Gilles Deleuze and Michel Serres’, 101. 71 Ibid., 104.
254 of overcoming this divide and so represents both ‘curse and cure’.72 In explicating his philosophy of ‘skin’, Serres develops a critique of The Lady and the Unicorn, a series of six medieval tapestries that depict the senses in the form of an allegory.73 The tapestries portray each sense organ as an island, with four of the five islands decorated with accoutrements pertaining to their represented sense, such as a mirror for sight and a basket of flowers for smell. However, there are no represented objects for the sense of touch. Since the canvas background ‘skin’ constitutes the common ground that each of the sense organs relies on for expression, Serres adduces that there would be no need for objects to be included on the island of touch, as the island itself, ‘made from puckered skin’, represents both ‘subject and object’.74 In the sixth tapestry language is introduced, with the words ‘to my one desire’ inscribed upon the canopy of a canvas tent that sits atop the final island; this, Serres claims, is a spatial allegory for an internal sixth sense.75 (Figure 36)
Figure 36. 'The Lady and the Unicorn' (circa 1500). Six tapestries depicting each of the senses woven in Flanders from wool and silk. Shown here are 'Touch' and 'To my one desire'
According to Serres, language associated with the intellect overwhelms us to the extent that we are no longer attuned to the voice of the senses.76 However, he suggests that with the irrational
72 Maria Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 73. 73 The tapestries are labelled ‘Touch’, ‘Sound’, ‘Smell’, ‘Sight’, ‘Taste’, and ‘To My One Desire’. 74 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 53. 75 Ibid. 76 Serres believes that when prosaic language arrives it anaesthetises us for, as ‘militant egotists we speak in order to drug ourselves’. Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 57–59.
255 and ‘fabulous’ language of myth, poetry, and fable that ‘refuses language’s drive to total hegemony’ we are able to recover sense experience.77 Maria Assad submits that, with his allegorical description of the senses, Serres was able to move beyond a ‘pure description of the tactile’ and, instead, ‘uncover the pre-phenomenological movement in which object, subject and language meet and blend before they separate into their phenomenologically respective domains’.78 It is by means of the inventive, linguistic form of the fable, which ‘floats and dances’ or, alternatively, by means of a ‘topologically variable language’, that this is achieved.79 According to Assad, with the final island of The Lady and the Unicorn Serres binds the five senses to ‘floating, inventive language’, and with this the understanding that language can play a role in the ‘(re)union of subject and object’.80
The Five Senses, which Assad considers Serres most densely empirical work, is notable for its presentation of philosophical theory by means of a poetic discursive method.81 For Serres, inventive thinking, language, and experimentation reveal the dynamic nature of things and so he harnesses this dynamic language to the task of explicating his philosophy—although this explication is achieved at the price of transparency. Serres declares: ‘Clarity is paid for in narrowness, and lofty views by imprecision. Clarification is paid for with statistics and sterility, invention and speed with confusion and obscurity … analysis leaves fecundity behind’82 And further, ‘The analyst stops, breaks, theorises: the writer [artist and architect] pursues, maintains connections, fabricates’.83
Serres, through harnessing inventive language, and the suitably complex corporeal metaphor of ‘skin’, offers a strategy that can make the space of ‘between’ tangible, bringing it into ‘the material realm where it becomes “pliable, tearable, stretchable … topological”’.84
77 Thomas Kavanagh, ‘Review of 'Les Cinq Sens' by Michel Serres’, MLN 101, 4 (1986): 938–939. 78 Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time: 67. 79 Ibid., 72. It is in the nineteenth century work of Emile Zola—the ‘game of the goose’ is a notable example—that myth (as authentic discourse) is ‘linked to the emergence of topology as a new mathematical science’. Consequently, Serres views ‘Zola’s text as emblematic of the power of literature to bridge the distance between two seemingly divergent discourses: topology and myth’. Harari and Bell, ‘Introduction: Journal a Plusieurs Voies’, xxxiv fn.44. 80 Assad, Reading with Michel Serres: An Encounter with Time: 72,73. 81 Ibid., 73. While much of Serres’ philosophy aligns with the ideas of Deleuze, Clayton notes a significant difference in approach, with Deleuze adopting a more traditionally philosophical method of explication. Clayton, ‘Time Folded and Crumpled: Time, History, Self-Organization and the Methodology of Michel Serres’, 32–33. 82 Michel Serres, The Troubadour of Knowledge, trans. Sheila F. Glaser and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 78. 83 Ibid., 79. 84 Rosen, Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld: 13.
256 Resistance, depth, and journeying
James Elkins, as Serres, conceives of the skin as an environment. He notes that in its normal functioning, skin not only divides insides from outsides, but possesses a deeper dermal structure—an intricate layering of dividing membranes and enclosures.85 By taking the simple view that the skin lies between the inside and outside, its deeper ‘attachment’ within the body is negated. While skin can be relatively easily stripped away from the body, Elkins points out that such a process is never ‘clean’ or ‘discreet’, for flayed skin is ‘contaminated’ with particles of deeper membranes and fragments of underlying organs. In other words, the skin is deeply integrated through a series of layered, invaginated and enfolded membranes that are ‘too various to sustain the inside–outside polarity’; this leads Elkins to declare that he is no longer certain that there is a solid body inside the skin.86 Elkins posits that skin is not a boundary but ‘is the body and we ourselves are skin’.87 This notion is perfectly captured in Ovid’s account of Marsyas who cries out as his skin is being flayed from his body, ‘why do you tear me from myself?’88
Elkins determines that because of the intricate and ambivalent identity we have with our skins, ‘metaphors of containment must fail’, and this includes simplistic conceptualisations and projections such as clothing, or architecture being imagined as a second skins.89 According to Elkins, these accounts are missing the complex and ambiguous relation associated with Merleau- Ponty’s depth and Serrean ‘skins’, which provide the thickness, or dimensionality that allows subjects to explore and come to know their worlds. Within this complex dimensionality, the subject cannot know all views. Clarity and transparency become subordinated to opacity and complication and fulfillment is deferred.
In developing his theoretical schema for picturing bodies, Elkins eschews the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty (he makes no mention of Serres) drawing, instead, on the ideas of the Stoics.
85 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 42–43. 86 Ibid., 42, 43. 87 Ibid., 44. 88 Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–VIII, 1: 315. See also Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 43. Elkins notes that while Ovid’s metamorphoses are ‘unpleasant experiences’, there is an absence of pain. Characters might ‘cry out’ because they are being unjustly punished, but do not appear to experience physical hurt. They are ‘impartial observers of the wonder of the moment. Even the most extreme distortions can be painless if they are metamorphoses. … I think this is an essential fact about the concept of metamorphosis: although it is sensual, it does not present itself as a matter of feeling. … Metamorphosis holds because it exists as an idea: we have the clear notion that bodies can be either broken or merely metemphsychosed, and only one of those possibilities entails pain. In that sense, Metamorphoses is a poem of escapes, of demonstration that transcendence is painless and dazzling’. Ibid., 26. 89 ———, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 43–44.
257 Elkins considers the materialist concept of vision a more appropriate vehicle for understanding bodily ‘parts and particularities’ than Merleau-Ponty’s notion of ‘flesh’ which, he claims, is too closely bound with the ‘identity of a body as a whole’.90 According to Elkins, the Stoic concept of perception, derived from emanating, evanescent ‘membranes’ amounts to a search for bodies that ‘begins from bodies, and not just objects’.91 Elkins explains this idea with reference to the Stoic understanding of clouds which, although considered bodies, lack sufficient ‘firmness and skin’ to be able to shed membranous pneuma. Consequently, Elkins posits that this philosophy ‘pauses over the idea of a body that is weightless’ because bodies can really only be understood in relation to their own unique, material, tangible, ‘specific skin’.92
The Lucretian idea of being able to perceive bodies by means of emanating (unique) bodily skins, according to Elkins, aligns with a primal, subconscious need for human beings to continuously seek out clear and distinct bodies and faces and, where there are none, enact a ‘second seeing’ through the invention of bodily metaphors. However, Elkins cautions that ‘in that second search we tend to be easily satisfied and content with the most obvious choices’ and, although they may be true, if too clearly articulated these metaphors are unsatisfying.93 He submits that Elaine Scarry’s ‘bodily sources of culture’ make reference to such unsatisfying metaphors.94 Scarry, as Elkins, asserts that the human being is a creature that projects its attributes outwards onto both verbal and material artefacts.95 According to Scarry it is by means of bodily projections that humans animate the external world and thereby make it responsive to, rather than immune from, the pain associated with corporeal life.96 Moreover, it is through bodily projection onto verbal and material artifacts that ‘we make ourselves (and the originally interior facts of sentience) available to one another’.97 She suggests that, in the first instance, bodily projections are made ‘compellingly visible’ with commonplace anthropomorphic (prosthetic) analogues such as bandages that mimic the skin and spectacles that mimic the lens of the human eye.98 Yet, Elkins correctly considers such normative examples of metaphor banal, ‘coarse’ and ‘literal’. He believes they represent a ‘continuous and swift’ second seeing that is ‘too well articulated’.
90 Ibid., 2. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 6–7. 94 Ibid., 7. 95 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 281. 96 Ibid., 288–289. 97 Ibid., 22. 98 Ibid., 281–283.
258 Instead, a more profound and satisfying second seeing can be found by taking a circuitous path, a conclusion that yet again emphasises the need for resistance, opacity, and journeying.99 Elkins supports his claim with reference to the paintings of Jackson Pollock whose abstractions are ‘virtually a discourse on the represented body, made all the more insistent by its obliquity’.100 The body is made ‘metaphorically present’ in Pollock’s works by means of gesture, surface ‘skin’, and human scale101—poetic exchanges that recall Scarpa’s uncertain and evocative bodily metonymic transubstantiations.
Pollock’s vital marks are corporeal extensions; their embodied energy is transferred to the viewer by means of a latent empathy. (Figure 37) Here, there is recognition of the shared gesture that produces the life size works that allow for bodily transubstantiation. (Figure 38) Further, unable to be comprehended with a single gaze, Pollock’s works demand piecemeal engagement with their complex, layered, visceral, enigmatic, tactile ‘skin-like’ surfaces. Scarpa harnesses the same metonymic devices to the task of architecture in order to make the monumental built form corporeal. Here too, the body is forced to engage intimately with the space through movement, and so achieve metonymic exchange. In Palazzo Querini Stampalia Scarpa creates inventive paths that demand careful attention for successful (vertical and horizontal) navigation. (Figure 39) By forcing non-habitual kinesthetic movement an intimate space is drawn. In the same intervention Scarpa creates an enigmatic link with the melancholic tradition. He inserts a small crypt-like travertine portal that forces those who pass through to brush their bodies against a shoulder height detail and bring their hands into contact with cool stone—in this compressed space human experience is heightened through skin and touch. (Figure 40)
99 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 7. 100 Ibid., 13. 101 Ibid., 15.
259
Figure 37. Jackson Pollock photographed in 1950 by Hans Namuth
Figure 38. Jackson Pollock: Pollock and 'Mural' (1943) Oil and water-based paint on linen
260
Figure 39. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) Garden path
Figure 40. Carlo Scarpa: Palazzo Querini Stampalia (1961–1963) Travertine door
261 Elkins emphasises that it is important for all discourse to engage in a dialogue with ‘skin’ that is broad, and thus avoid limiting the concept to ‘restrictive metaphoric domain[s]’.102 He suggests that, by taking into account the complexities of ‘connective tissue’ associated with ‘gross anatomy’, it is possible to mount a ‘persistent challenge’ to organic schematisation and abstraction.103
Wrapped with the melancholic tradition and its association with pain, an expanded metaphor of skin invokes the second of Scarry’s three forms of projection. While the simplest anthropomorphic projections reference a ‘concrete’ bodily exterior (the body made up of ‘parts, shapes and mechanisms’), the second order of projections moves inward toward the ‘more elusive’ bodily centre (the body of needs and capacities).104 This form of projection effectively turns the body inside out for, ‘what is originally interior and private’, is via projection made into ‘something exterior and sharable’. Further, in a sympathetic world ‘what is now exterior and shareable’ can be reabsorbed ‘into the intimate recesses of individual consciousness’.105 According to Scarry, the penultimate form of projection (or third order) imbues artefacts with sentience or aliveness.106 Anthony Vidler posits that Scarry’s three-stage model of bodily projection has an architectural equivalent in the epochal movement that results in bodily metaphors becoming increasingly abstract, although he acknowledges that throughout history all three modes have (to varying degrees) occurred together. In broad terms, the first shift occurs as corporeal metaphors yield to psychological metaphors or, as the literal inscription of the unified, metaphysical body yields to the ‘psychology of empathy’—a move heralded with the sublime in architecture. The second shift occurs with the modernist animation of the entire environment (the modern city as bodily organism), a conceptualisation that Vidler contends is an unfortunate abstraction that has persisted through much of the twentieth century.107 He claims that the complete move away from the tactile projection of the corporeal body has resulted in a loss: a loss that postmodernism has sought to redress.108 Drake echoes these sentiments, writing that the modern body has become anaesthetised to sensation, including that of pain, and so the deliberate eschewal of an ‘excess of comfort’ by postmodern architects (such as Bernard Tschumi and Coop
102 Ibid., 46. 103 Ibid., 38. 104 Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World: 284–285. 105 Ibid., 284. 106 Ibid., 284–285. 107 Anthony Vidler, ‘The Building in Pain: The Body and Architecture in Post Modern Culture’, AA Files, 19 (1990): 3–7. 108 Ibid., 7.
262 Himmelblau) represents a criticism of modernism through denial of its utopian ideal.109 Postmodern anthropomorphic projections operate within corporeal as well as psychological registers, although Elkins emphasises the continuing need for these projections to remain meaningfully situated within the complex, ambivalent ground of corporeal flesh. Pointedly, Elkins writes that, while ‘Deleuze’s theories are suggestive’
… as acts of imagination they cannot approach the complexity and metaphorical richness that exist in the body’s actual membranes, or the varieties of pressure and turbulence in Bacon’s paintings. For thinking about the ways that a boundary can divide into two regions, I would rather read Morris’s Human Anatomy than Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus.110
Elkins recognises that it is actual ‘membranes’ that are missing from Deleuze’s account of surface topology.111 This thesis posits that Serres’ multidisciplinary account of the ‘skin’ as milieu allows for a deeper, more materially complex, and more particular reading of the body, one that is emotionally, physically, culturally, and historically, situated within the world. Serres’ approach encompasses, in the words of Bachelard, the ‘perfect synthesis … of yielding and resisting forces’.112
According to Serres, our bodies emerge from the tangled ‘state of things’. And, it is because of our entanglement with our world that we do not find understanding through ‘removing an obstacle, taking away a decoration, drawing aside a blanket under which lies the naked thing’.113 Instead, it is only through our involvement in this mixture, by following the ‘disposition of the veils, zones, neighbouring spaces, the depth of the pile, the talweg of their seams’,114 by straying from the direct path of the rationalist, by following ‘long, winding intricate, brightly coloured path[s]’, that we can ‘map unknown lands’.115 Praising the labyrinthine structure of the ear as a model suited for understanding discourse more broadly, Serres writes that to enter the maze is to
109 Drake, ‘A Well-Composed Body: Architecture and Anthropomorphism’, 178–179. 110 Elkins adds, ‘despite Bacon’s admiration for Deleuze’s book, what happens in any one of Bacon’s bodies is more troubled than a single urge. The bodies are specific about their contents—their mixtures of membranes and cartilage, pieces of bone and newspaper, plastic and muscle—and they are exact about their forces—pushing outward, but also infolding, ripping, scraping, and seething without direction. If Deleuze’s, Lacan’s and Freud’s accounts of the skin fall short when it comes to pictured bodies, then it is on account of the body’s sheer complexity’. Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 39, 41. 111 Connor, The Book of Skin: 69. 112 The claim made by Connor references Gaston Bachelard La terre et les rêveries de la volonté (1948), 78. Ibid., 223. 113 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 82. 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid., 82, 263.
263 maximise feedback and connections, ‘toils and torsions’ through an approach that is ‘aslant, elliptical, episodic’.116
Serres eschews linear and direct thinking, which he claims has been confused with reason. To perceive only with the eye and mind is to refuse reality: it is to see only a homogenous, monotheistic, panoramic space, to efface landscape and render the global and local indistinguishable.117 The discursive space inscribed by circuitous and oblique paths is a corporeal space, the space of fiction, myth, fable, and profound poetry. It is a space that is shared with monstrous ornament but, more contemporaneously, also a space shared with the complex figuration of the prosthetic.
Ornamental Prostheses
Although Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560) introduces the word ‘prosthesis’ into the English language, its appearance in this work structures the problematic that will ultimately limit its effect. Prosthesis [πρόσθεσις] is an ancient Greek word that derives etymologically from prostithenai meaning ‘an addition’ or ‘to add’ (made up from pros ‘towards’ and tithenai ‘to place’).118 Rhetorical prostheses were doubly marginalised. Aligned with the artificial and foreign by virtue of their ‘placement’ as an ‘ornament’ in the margin, rather than the body of the text, prostheses were typologically marginalised119 and, as an addition, or supplementary part attached to a prosaic word body they were also lexically marginalised. Yet, rhetorical prostheses were not
116 Connor, ‘Introduction’, 2–3. This idea is made plain in a conversation between Serres and Bruno Latour in 1995, during which Serres states: ‘Have you noticed the popularity among scientists of the word interface—which supposes that the junction between two sciences or two concepts is perfectly under control, or seamless and poses no problems? On the contrary, I believe that these spaces between are more complicated than one thinks. This is why I have compared them to the Northwest Passage … with shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore, sprinkled with ice, and variable … Once again the path of this passage strangely resembles what I earlier called the fly’s flight pattern. It’s more fractal than truly simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had’. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time: Michel Serres with Bruno Latour: 70. 117 Serres writes: ‘Classical mastery of the world and things selects a single constraint or variable and ignores all others. Sheer force of will steers a straight course, crosses the ocean by means of rhumb lines or the arc of the great circle, and goes through the forest in a straight line—nothing distinguishes the local from the global. The age of the great voyages implies monotheism, the dissolution of the countryside, the drawing of immense maps, stubborn disregard for circumstances, and the supremacy of the will over intelligence. The scholar, sailor, philosopher or traveller gets carried away with linearity and confuses it with reason. Forced simplicity, fine victories; non-linear, unexpected or unrecognisable necessity, with its hundred faces and thousand detours, is forgotten, together with its corresponding intelligence and the antique and polytheistic world’. Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 266–267. 118 The etymology of ‘prosthesis’ is described in the Oxford Dictionary, Retrieved September 27, 2016, from https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/prosthesis. See also Lewis and Short, ‘A Latin Dictionary: Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary’. 119 Wills points out that the typological ‘otherness’ of a ‘minor orthographical variation’ (prosthesis) located in the margins of Wilson’s text will come to signal the integrity of any body being deconstructed and reconstructed. Wills, Prosthesis: 226–227.
264 simply an index of spatial or lexical ‘non-assimilation’ for, at all times, they remained connected to a body.120 In other words, the rhetorical prosthesis is fundamentally an embodied construct, albeit one that is enigmatic. More than mere attachment, these prostheses operate in a transitive mode and so, as Wills describes it, the ‘Prosthesis then becomes a prosthesis’.121
Wilson introduces the rhetorical prosthesis at a time when knowledge structures were being deconstructed and artificially reconstructed.122 Wills observes that the ‘setting forth’ or ‘putting to’ enacted by rhetoric amounts to prosthesis or an attachment because it relies on the ‘supplementary movement towards ornamentation’; it enacts a move from proper language to foreign (artificial) language that is transferred or translated through the sensing body.123 He determines that, in classic rhetoric, all tropes (of which metaphor was paradigmatic) enact the transfer from ‘necessity to superfluity, from want to wit’ and so rely on prosthetic transfer for effect.124
There is of course as much of metaphor as metonymy in prosthesis; in fact a powerful will-to-analogy functions through the narrative mode that attaches a wooden leg to a theoretical discussion. But let us not forget that that metonymy and metaphor, or syntagmatic and paradigmatic rhetorical operations in general, are transferential modulations whose directional opposition is a contrivance—can we say a prosthesis?—a contrivance that utterance in general, to the extent that is poetic in Jakobson’s sense, is bound to call into question.125
With the transfer to otherness enacted through tropes such as metaphor, language becomes threatened, for the excess of metaphor, its contrivance and artifice, had the potential to pervert the
120 Ibid., 222, 226. Regarding the complexity of the bodied prosthetic relation, Wills suggests, ‘there is no simple name for a discourse that articulates with, rather than issuing from, the body … no other conception of it except as a balancing act performed by the body, a shift or transfer between the body and its exteriority’. Ibid., 20. 121 Ibid., 11. 122 According to Wills, the epistemological break with classical models as natural forms of knowledge was followed by a prosthetic reattachment of newly invented, artificially constructed forms of knowledge. Ibid., 219. Prosthesis does not begin with the arrival of the word in the English language but in combination with broader cultural changes, with the rise of Protestantism together with the invention of the printing press. There is a break in the continuity of the papacy as well a break in the continuity of the written word. Discourse was no longer uninterrupted; a fluid model of oral discourse was replaced with a new spatial model that involved the cutting of texts and the contrivance of a new visual form based on an ars artifiicaliter scribendi or ‘an artificial way of writing’ due to the invention, and widespread circulation of the printing press. Ibid., 221–223. 123 Ibid., 228. 124 Ibid. 125 Wills adds to this passage suggesting that prosthesis is ‘the result of … a suspension’, that becomes ‘more like an enfolding through which allegory plays but cannot attribute to itself any privilege’. Ibid., 14. Wills cites the following passage from Jakobson’s Linguistics and Poetics: ‘Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent’. Ibid., 321 n.324.
265 ‘pleasurable into something with the dimensions of the monstrous’. As Wills so descriptively explains, rhetoric ‘clothes language in a more pleasant and even regal attire’, but it also possesses the ability to make language appear as if it were ‘wearing borrowed garb’.126 Ultimately, the idea of prosthesis as the artificial attachment to an original word results in the association being considered an ‘unholy alliance’, a corruption that Wills suggests eroded the discipline’s standing.127
Despite the lives and work of Thomas Wilson (1524–1581), Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Ambrose Paré (1510–1590) coinciding with the re-emergence of the rhetorical prosthesis, the term did not acquire its medical denotation until 1704,128 and after this only for a short time would it signify within these two increasingly disparate domains. With the dissection and marginalisation of rhetoric and the rise to dominance of medical science, the prosthesis, as the monster, would eventually become severed from its rhetorical roots, although the issues of placement and re-placement that were pivotal to the rhetorical prosthesis would continue to trouble the medicalised form.129
While originally a sign of dislocation, addition and non-integration, once medicalised, prostheses also became associated with deficiency and ‘lack’. As medical artefacts designed to augment amputated body parts, prosthetic devices were more than mere supplement, they were also visual reminders of what was missing and so pointed to the void they were designed to fill. Consequently, early prostheses came to signify the oppositional, yet inseparable, operations of
126 Ibid., 228–229. Related to this, the power to pervert was equally attributable to the artificial memory upon which classical rhetoric relied. The construction of artificial memory through the selection and attribution of images involved a process of ‘disjunction and re-placement’. At issue for Wilson was not the fact of the image’s exteriority to natural memory, but that through monstrous inventiveness, idolatrous images might find their way into artificial memory and so corrupt. Wills speculates that this idea might, in part, have influenced the decision by Peter Ramus to separate memory from rhetoric. Ibid., 230–231. Peter Ramus, who published Arguments in Rhetoric Against Quintilian in 1549, assigned style and delivery to rhetoric and invention, arrangement and memory to the separate discourse of dialectic. This had the effect of reducing ornament to its present form—as mere decoration. Ibid., 215. 127 Wills points out that prosthesis and prostitution, which both appear in 1553, are closely related adjectival variants. When they first entered the English language, both terms were considered ‘degenerate’ and ‘illicit couplings’. While the first term ‘names a supplementary relation interior to the body of a word’, the second ‘names a degenerate relation between one integral body and another … a corruption that comes from the outside’. Ibid., 225–232, 247. 128 The medical denotation of ‘prosthesis’ emerges in 1704 where it is described (in English dictionaries) as the ‘replacement of a missing part of the body with an artificial one’. Cited in ibid., 218. 129 Wills writes: ‘[The prosthesis] is inevitably caught in a complex play of displacements; prosthesis being about nothing if not placement, displacement, replacement, standing, dislodging, substituting, setting, amputating, supplementing. It begins in a juncture that is already a displacement from its more obvious focus, with a Virgil and a spasm that are metonymic to a more general written exposition’. Ibid., 248, 249.
266 addition and subtraction, or dismantling and assembling.130 These operations neither complement nor negate one another for there can never be seamless, organic completion or singularity. Instead, the terms exist in a state of continuous contrariety, and so enact an endless re-inscription across the ‘contours of [the body and artefact’s] heterogeneous surfaces’131
Wills highlights the fact that Paré’s Des monstres et des prodiges and Wilson’s Rhetorique were situated within the same ‘prosthetic moment’. In both texts, prosthesis or ‘the attachment they bring to bear, can easily be seen as a lever that threatens to switch us over to the inhuman’.132 For Wills, these prosthetic conceptualisations signal ‘embarkation’ on a ‘journey of no return’ that had began long before with the ‘construction of the artificial within the origin itself’133 —a beginning that turns on Plato’s monstrous simulacrum.
While the medical prosthesis does, indeed, explicate the complex and dynamic ground that relates body and artefact, it represents a problematic. For this prosthesis, which is exclusively defined in terms of its medical denotation, becomes the source from which all subsequent contemporary rhetorical meanings are derived. At issue is that the medicalised prosthesis, as the anatomised body, is framed dialectically. It is a structure that continuously references corporeal unity, whether it does so through pointing at completion (regardless of whether it is seamless or not) or absence, and so metaphors founded on this denotation continue to ascribe to, either directly or indirectly, an idealised order. This thesis contends that it is only through recognising the prosthetic trope’s earlier rhetorical denotation that reduced framings can be eschewed. Notably, this expanded reading of the prosthetic trope holds the potential for eliciting a richer, enigmatic understanding of the dynamic ground where body and world meet.
130 Smith adds, ‘[prosthesis] is always and already a place of dismantling and assembling as well as one of discord and disquiet’ and it is ‘this question of place, or … the uncertainty of placing, that is the logic and vitality of this confluence’. Marquard Smith, ‘The Uncertainty of Placing: Prosthetic Bodies, Sculptural Design, and Unhomely Dwelling in Marc Quinn, James Gillingham, and Sigmund Freud’, New Formations 46 (2002): 89. 131 Smith adduces that ‘what matters is the attention one pays to the points of contact between things, between the human and machinic for example, and how these points of contact indicate, demarcate, and circumvent our sense of the shifting extremities between and within things. This is not then just a matter of things being either in place or out of place. For things do not stay in place, nor do they remain out of place. Rather, they take place. As contested events, things take place, and the uncertainty of their placing is at the heart of their unhomely dwelling’. Ibid., 86, 102. 132 Wills, Prosthesis: 247. 133 Ibid.
267 Prosthetic ornament
Mark Wigley contends that Modern architecture, by its nature, constitutes prosthesis.1
Displaced from artifice into the artificial, architecture became a technological extension of the body that is neither natural nor cultural. Modern architecture is the space of the artificial.2
He suggests that the classical understanding of the body and architecture, in which structure and ornament were seen as body and dress, has been replaced with a new relationship in which the building has become an ornament of the body. Further, such ornament has the power to ‘restructure the body that wears it’, by extending bodily boundaries and altering its limits.3 He submits:
‘prosthesis’ … is always architectural. It is always the supplement of a structure—but one that cannot simply be removed. Grafted on to repair some kind of structural flaw, it is a foreign element that reconstructs that which cannot stand up on its own, at once propping up and extending its host. The prosthesis is always structural, establishing the place it appears to be added to.4
Wigley finds support for his position (again) with the etymology of ‘prosthesis’ and its root word thesis (also tithenai), ‘to place’, from which he draws the expanded inference: ‘“to place”, a “position”, a “proposition”, “laid down”, to be “maintained against attack”, to “make a stand”’.5
1 In support of this position Wigley cites the following quotation by Le Corbusier: ‘We all need means of supplementing our natural capabilities, since nature is indifferent, inhuman (extra-human), and inclement; we are born naked and with insufficient armor. … The barrel of Diogenes, already a notable improvement on our natural protective organs (our skin and scalp), gave us the primordial cell of the house; filing cabinets and copy-letters make good the inadequacies of our memory; wardrobes and sideboards are the containers in which we put away the auxiliary limbs that guarantee us against cold or heat, hunger or thirst. … Our concern is with the mechanical system that surrounds us, which is no more than an extension of our limbs; its elements, in fact, artificial limbs’. Mark Wigley, ‘Prosthetic Theory: The Disciplining of Architecture’, Assemblage, 15 (1991): 6. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 8, 9. 4 Ibid., 9. 5 Ibid.
269 Wigley claims that the root word’s etymological origins presuppose a relationship between prosthesis and the prevailing Western philosophical tradition, which builds an argument upon sound foundational principles. He draws an analogy with the way in which an architect designs an edifice in order to construct a ‘thesis’ that can ‘stand up’ and be defended. Accordingly, he determines that architectural discourse can be figured as prosthesis.
Linking the idea of prosthetic extension with the deficiency associated with medical prostheses, Wigley adduces that the prosthetic rewriting of bodily limits results in a body constituted as artifice.
[A] blurring of identity is produced by all prostheses. They do more than simply extend the body. Rather, they are introduced because the body is in some way ‘deficient’ or ‘defective’, in Freud’s terms, or ‘insufficient’, in Le Corbusier’s terms. In a strange way, the body depends on the foreign elements that transform it. It is reconstituted and propped up on the ‘supporting limbs’ that extend it. Indeed, it becomes a side effect of its extensions. The prosthesis reconstructs the body, transforming its limits, at once extending and convoluting its borders. The body itself becomes artifice.6
Notably, Wigley’s account highlights the difficulty in delineating the physical and psychological boundaries of the body in relation to ‘material and social structures’.7 However, his idea of prosthetic extension as a mode of structural enhancement or prop for the natural body, which ultimately results in the body being construed as artifice, is founded on the notion that the prosthetic body is defective, deficient, flawed, or disabled. Vivian Sobchack, who herself relies on a prosthetic device for mobility, is critical of theorists such as Wigley who harness reduced prosthetic metaphors to speculate on artificial and post-human technical extensions of the body, which, according to Sarah Jain, have become a ‘tempting theoretical gadget[s] with which to examine the porous place of bodies and tools’.8
Sobchack claims that tropes such as Wigley’s, operate by pointing to analogous structural and functional resemblances between ideas, and so transfer prostheses into foreign contexts. At issue is that the foreign context, not the literal context that generates the analogy, is illuminated by the
6 Ibid., 8–9. 7 Sarah S. Jain, ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope’, Science, Technology, & Human Values 24, 1 (1999): 39. 8 Ibid., 49. Garoian cites Jain’s caution against using the prosthetic trope ‘merely to argue in favour, or in opposition to technology when “the wounding ingredients of technological production [those academic, institutional and corporate proselytising offenses to the body committed through schooling, labour and consumption] remain continually under ontological erasure”’. Charles Garoian, ‘Verge of Collapse: The Pros/Thesis of Art Research’, Studies in Art Education 49, 3 (2008): 223.
270 re-figuration. Agency is therefore displaced from the body to the artefact, so that the body becomes simply the background to the reconfigured prosthetic—a notion that has led to fantastic speculations such as those that have the prosthesis controlling the body.9 According to Sobchack, these ‘unfleshed’ metaphors reduce the prosthesis to a generalised concept (based on finding commonalities between things), or an abstraction that would not occur if the artefact were examined within its richer, mundane, material ground.10
‘Unfleshed’ prosthetic metaphors are predicated on an objective view of the body that is realised by purely visual means based in Cartesian optics.11 These metaphors naturalise and therefore privilege the whole and able corporeal body.12 By contrast Sobchack claims, the individual who is missing a body part does not (generally) feel defective or incomplete—consequently, the addition of prostheses does not make them feel ‘whole’. The dualism that founds and is inherent in Wigley’s account is matched with the mind/body dualism exhibited in Freud’s account in which he describes the body as ‘a prosthesis of the mind, the mind of the drives’. While Freud all but erases the body as it metamorphoses into the concept of Man as ‘prosthetic god’, the body is reinstated when he highlights the problematic nature of the body/artefact interface in his final phrase.13
With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning … Man has, as it were, become a prosthetic god. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent: but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.14
Sobchack explains that, for those who subjectively live with prosthetics, the artefact can be phenomenologically, structurally, functionally and aesthetically incorporated into their body to
9 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 23. 10 Sobchack emphasises this point: ‘The scandal of the [prosthetic] metaphor is that it has become a fetishized and “unfleshed- out” catchword that functions vaguely as the ungrounded and “floating signifier” for a broad and variegated critical discourse on techno-culture that includes little of these prosthetic realities. That is, the metaphor (and imagination) is too often less expansive than it is reductive, and its figuration is less complex and dynamic in aspect and function than the object and relations from whence it was—dare I say—amputated’. Ibid., 20–21. 11 Ibid., 22. Cartesian optics is limited to the ‘cone of vision’ that projects from the eye outward to the objects at the limits of the line of sight. While perspective theory, which is based on this structure, is characterised by ‘continuity between the dimensionless point and the extended world’, the ‘cone of vision’ prior to the enlightenment was understood as a discontinuous construct. Kunze points out that the ‘pre-Enlightenment cone of vision … was significant for what happened at its top, a small point of great mystery’. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (emblem tradition) the light that emanated from the apex of the ‘cone of vision’ was associated with the head (organ of the soul), but also the shadow, which was considered a simulacrum of the soul. Donald Kunze, ‘Skiagraphy and the Ipsum of Architecture’, VIA 11(1990): 68–69. 12 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 22. 13 Jain, ‘The Prosthetic Imagination: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope’, 39. 14 Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, cited in ibid., 31.
271 the extent that, for the most part, it becomes transparent or absent. For the subject that relies on a prosthetic device, it only becomes present or opaque when physical or social conditions such as its limitations, discomfort or pain make it felt,15 as Freud, who relied on a prosthetic palate, attests.
Although Wills believes that the (rhetorical) prosthesis enacts a discursive ‘shift off the rails’ rather than a detour, Sobchack, by re-inscribing the prosthesis in relation to the lived body, re- configures ‘the detour’.16 With her personal insights she constructs a complex, at times disjunctive, dialogical, yet ultimately constitutive frame that articulates the complexity of the topological contours that mark the intimate relation between body and artefact.17 Sobchack begins with an embodied premise from which prostheses can be understood and illuminated. For, she argues, it is only from this mundane setting that the idea of the prosthetic ‘opens up [the] imagination, and analysis, to an expanded range of action and descriptions’, or ‘tropological and existential possibilities’.18
Linking body and language, Sobchack posits that the ‘indirect’ theoretical paradigm, ‘tropological phenomenology’, offers a richer and more responsible discursive tool for the scholarly critique of prostheses.19 She cites a passage from Ricoeur’s Rule of Metaphor20 as stimulus for developing her approach, for it places as much emphasis on language, or more particularly rhetorical language, as on lived bodies for expression—reinforcing her belief that all experience is reliant on both bodies and language for expression.
This is because there are both an oppositional tension and a dynamic connection between the prosthetic as a tropological figure and my prosthetic as a material but also a phenomenologically lived artefact—the the and the my here indicating differences both of kind and degree between generalisation and specificity, figure and ground, esthetics and
15 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 22–23. 16 Sobchack herself declares an intention to return the displaced concept of the prosthetic to the body of lived experience through indirect means, ‘by way of what might be called a “tropological phenomenology”’. Ibid., 18. 17 While clearly Sobchack’s situation is unique, her insight permits extrapolation and extension to all subject–object relations. Smith argues that since the post humanist body is already fragmented (as Lacan attests), imperfect, incomplete and undergoing a continuous process of decomposition and reconstruction, the figure of the prosthetic becomes a suitable ‘structuring principle’ for making sense of the ‘intricacies’ of the relation between the parts that make up all bodies. Smith, ‘The Uncertainty of Placing: Prosthetic Bodies, Sculptural Design, and Unhomely Dwelling in Marc Quinn, James Gillingham, and Sigmund Freud’, 85–86. 18 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 28. 19 Ibid., 18–19. 20 Sobchack cites the following excerpt from The Rule of Metaphor, ‘If there is a point in our experience where living expression states living existence, it is where our movement up the entropic slope of language encounters the movement by which we come back this side of the distinctions between actuality, action, production, motion’. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 365.
272 pragmatics, alienation and incorporation, subjectivity and objectivity, and between … ‘a cultural trope and material condition that indelibly affect[s] people’s lives’.21
Jonathan Hale notes that language is one of the earliest means by which we can reach beyond our bodies in order to manipulate elements of our physical and cultural environments. In this way, he claims, language is more than just a means of expression: ‘it reminds us of the embodied origins of technology in the effort to extend our human capacities’.22
Sobchack notes that a subjective consideration of prostheses reveals the possible relational meanings and functions at play. These relationships discursively submit to the various figures that make up the ‘expressive and dynamic ground’ in which prostheses are situated.23 In addition to metaphor, the tropes of metonymy and synecdoche also operate within this field.24 She highlights the conflict between the metonymic discourse of scholars who objectively describe the prosthetic object as a species that is distinct and excluded from the body, and the synecdochic discourse of amputees who describe their prosthetic subjectively and included in the body. That said, not all prostheses are equal, and organic inclusion (and dissociation) is one of degree and particular for each individual.25 Sobchack emphasises that, ‘like the turns and effects of language’, her relation with her prosthesis ‘is not only dynamic and situated but also ambiguous and graded’. The extent to which she lives her prosthetic metaphorically, metonymically, or synecdochically depends on her mood, her relation with others, and her environment.26 It is only
21 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 18. 22 Jonathan Hale speculates that manual tool use in humans may have facilitated the evolution of gestural language, and eventually spoken language. He also suggests that this evolutionary event would have freed the hands for more innovative technical and artistic activities. Jonathan Hale, ‘Architecture, Technology and the Body: From the Prehuman to the Posthuman’, in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE Publications, 2012), 517. Hale cites the following excerpt from Merleau-Ponty’s The Primacy of Perception as support for developing an expansive view of technology: ‘Visible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself. Things are an annex or prolongation of itself; they are incrusted into its flesh, they are part of its full definition; the world is made of the same stuff as the body’. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 162–163. See also Hale, ‘Architecture, Technology and the Body: From the Prehuman to the Posthuman’, 513. 23 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 24. 24 Ricoeur (citing Fontanier) distinguishes between the tropes of metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor, based on the type of relationship from which they emerge, namely correlation or correspondence, connection, and resemblance respectively. While there is symmetry between metonymy and synecdoche because in both cases the related terms or objects are drawn from within a single domain, the objects exist in a relationship of either exclusion (metonymy) or inclusion (synecdoche) which distinguishes between them. Consequently, the objects ‘part’ and ‘whole’ can function synecdochically, where the part is included in the whole, or metonymically, where the part stands for the whole in an act of exclusion. Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language: 64. See also Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, ‘Metaphor, Metonymy and Conceptual Interaction’, Atlantis 19, 1 (1997): 281–282. 25 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 27. 26 Ibid.
273 when the various figures are taken together that they truly express the dislocated, disordered, dynamic, and ambivalent ground as it is experienced by those who rely on these devices.27
For Sobchack and others,28 ‘prosthesis’ is simultaneously literal and figural. It both incorporates and projects; moreover, it resists reduction to simplistic concepts of figuration, fixity and bodily boundaries. As Smith and Morra emphasise, ‘prosthesis’ needs to be considered in ‘diverse and convergent’ ways because these perspectives make up the dialectical ground in which it is situated.29 Massumi also recognises the expansive and constitutive potential of the prosthetic trope, which cannot be realised while it is understood simply as an augmentative attachment to the body. To confine prosthesis to the concept of augmentation is to limit an understanding of the body to what is known, to a presupposed notion of wholeness. Under these circumstances ‘its extension is limited to its prior definition: more of the same’. In Massumi’s view by considering the organism and its objects as ‘mutual prostheses, then what is being extended is that reciprocal action’. This porous milieu opens the body to ‘qualitative change, a modification of its very definition, by reopening its relation to things’.30 In this sense, the prosthesis becomes extension rather than substitution: it becomes ‘prosthesis’ in the full rhetorical sense—‘an addition’.31
As noted earlier, Garoian describes the way in which the space inscribed by the rhetorical prosthetic takes on the character of Bachelard’s ‘intimate intensity’—a poetic space that has the power to extend, or expand intimate space as ‘we discover within ourselves’ new ways of
27 Ibid., 26–27. 28 See also Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra, ‘Introduction’, in The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future, ed. Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006). and Diane M. Nelson, ‘Phantom Limbs and Invisible Hands: Bodies, Prosthetics, and Late Capitalist Identifications’, Cultural Anthropology 16, 3 (2001). 29 Smith and Morra, ‘Introduction’, 11. 30 Massumi persuasively argues that the reciprocal action between the body and architecture might be opened through ‘somehow integrating logics of perception and experience into the modelling [of structures]’. He claims that architecture that is allied with experimental art comes closest to achieving prosthetic action, citing the ‘Reversible Destiny’ works of Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, the ‘Relational architecture’ of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, and works designed by Lars Spuybroek as architectural examples that are moving in this direction. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 116, 191–192. However, the actions expressed in many of these examples lack complexity, and further, several appear to focus on novelty as an absolute value. For example, Lozano-Hemmer’s popular ‘Pulse Room’ (2006) translates the heartbeat of each visitor into a light pulse, and so fills a room with such ‘pulses’. Compare this direct bodily reference with the indirect bodily references encountered with the lyric poetry of Guillaume de Machaut. In Machaut’s poems, lyric structures connect the works to music and dance and thus bind them to the rhythms of the body—noting that this is but one layer of embodied meaning that can be drawn from the works. Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 169. It is suggested here that, since works such as the ‘Pulse Room’ lack obliquity and depth, expansive experience is limited. Consequently, although acknowledging a debt to Massumi, this project develops a different line of enquiry. 31 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation: 126.
274 perceiving familiar objects.32 This is because, unlike the dialectically framed medical prosthesis, the rhetorical prosthesis is an expansive concept (both in its form and ornamental action). According to Bachelard ‘the impression of immensity is in us, and not necessarily related to an object’, so that ‘small and large are not to be seized in their objectivity’.33 Bachelard describes immensity as the ‘philosophical category of daydream’, the irrational space that transports the dreamer infinitely elsewhere. Dreams, like nontrivial poetry, create an expansive spatium. In these moments the ‘poet [or dream] will help us to discover within ourselves, such joy in looking that sometimes, in the presence of a perfectly familiar object, we experience an extension of our intimate space’.34 The close association between Bachelard’s concept of ‘intimate intensity’, which suggests the interdependent enfolding of the space of the world with the intimate space of the bodily interior, and Merleau-Ponty’s flesh is highlighted by Garoian.35 These concepts share their fundamental nature with ornamental prosthetic space, where understanding unfolds through the interplay between an expansive and proximal sense. The notion of proximity and distance, according to Wills, ‘haunts’ all prosthetic relations which occur ‘on the threshold of the familiar in the liminal suspension between one register or language and another’.36 Proximity and distance37 associated with the prosthetic trope not only inscribes the material ground between subject and artefact but, when understood as rhetorical ornament, allows for a constitutive reading.38
By re-casting the prosthetic figure to encompass its ornamental rhetorical denotation and, together with this, a transitive mode of operation, a ‘thickened’ embodied frame emerges, one
32 Garoian, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Resarch and Practice: 133. See also Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: 183–210. 33 ———, The Poetics of Space: xxxviii–xxxix. 34 Ibid., 183, 199. 35 Garoian, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Resarch and Practice: 133. 36 Wills, Prosthesis: 20. Wills adds: ‘Prosthesis is about nothing if it is not about measuring distance—that of the necessary separation and unavoidable complication between animate and inanimate form, between natural and artificial … about the necessity for and impossibility of precision in these relations. It is about the close and distant connections of close and distant relatives’. Ibid., 40. 37 See also Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible for a description of the intimate relation between proximity and distance: ‘distance is not the contrary of this proximity, it is deeply consonant with it, it is synonymous with it. It is that the thickness of flesh between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication. It is for the same reason that I am at the heart of the visible and that I am far from it: because it has thickness and is thereby naturally destined to be seen by a body. What is indefinable in the quale, in the color, is nothing else than a brief, peremptory manner of giving in one sole something, in one sole tone of being, visions past, visions to come, by whole clusters. I who see have my own depth also, being backed up by this same visible which I see and which, I know very well, closes in behind me. The thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh’. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 135. 38 Garoian, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Resarch and Practice: 124.
275 that can be harnessed to re-frame (ekphrasis) or re-structure architectural experience. The validity of bringing the mediating concept of ‘prosthesis’ and architecture into proximal relation relies on the fact that both paradigms are founded on spatial articulations that inscribe meaningful bodily experience within the dynamic and emergent play of intimacy and distance—thus the thickened prosthesis operates as analogia did for the ancients. In conceiving architectural space within a prosthetic paradigm the dominance of vision is resisted, since perceptual experience also relies on hapticity, touch, gesture and kinesthesis; and so, the tropic complexion of this space is both dynamic and multivalent.
An entanglement of tropes
Although Jakobson based his theory of language on the relation between just two tropes, metaphor and metonymy, which problematically led to the binary (linear) ‘poetic–instrumental’ model of language,39 he himself recognised and described a more complex relation between these figures and discourse more broadly. Jakobson scaled metaphor along a vertical, paradigmatic axis and metonymy along a horizontal, syntagmatic axis, such that their interaction could be mapped as vectors within a tropic field.40 In a lengthy exposition ‘Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak’, Jakobson emphasises the way in which the poet Boris Pasternak successfully harnesses the metonymy generally attributed to prose, into the service of poetry. Indeed, metonymy is the source of Pasternak’s poetic innovation, blurring clear distinctions between the direct assignation of tropes to discreet modes of discourse. So despite the claim that metonymy is principally aligned with narrative discourse and metaphor with poetic discourse, Pasternak exhibits, according to Jakobson, an extraordinary ‘bilingualism’—a tropic command that exploits the entanglement of both figures.41
Jakobson writes that the ‘essence of poetic figures of speech does not simply lie in their recording the manifold relationships between things, but also in the way they dislocate familiar
39 Jakobson’s model was ‘linearised’, as metaphor, poetics, and humanism were situated at one end of a continuum and, metonymy, narrative discourse, and instrumentality situated at the other end. More recently however, there has been a move away from theories that focus on a linear continuum of relations, to theories that embrace a more organic way of thinking about tropes. For further detail see Faith, ‘Schematizing the Maternal Body: The Cognitive-Linguistic Challenge to Post-structuralist Valorizations of Metonymy’, 64. 40 Donald Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, in Global Perspectives on Critical Architecture: Praxis Reloaded, ed. Gevork Hartoonian (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2015), 51. 41 Roman Jakobson, Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1987), 301.
276 relationships’.42 He notes that while metaphor relies on a ‘straining’ of the relation between terms, metonymy changes their natural order. According to Jakobson, Pasternak plays with the serial nature of contiguity in order to effect new, dislocated spatial and temporal transformations. For example, a spatial disconnection occurs when Pasternak writes ‘suddenly it became possible to see far into the distance in all directions’, and a temporal disconnection occurs when objects ‘are jolted again and again from the past into the future, and from the future into the past, like sand in a frequently shaken hourglass’.43 In the latter example the folded temporal space of metonymy is bound with simile, which refuses the privileging of either image. As an apologist for metonymy, Pasternak’s works are founded on the ‘mutual interchangeability of images’. He considers all images, including (mutual) metaphoric images potentially contiguous, and random and inessential connections vital to his poetic art.44
Each detail can be replaced by another … Any one of them, chosen at random, will serve to bear witness to the transposed condition by which the whole of reality has been seized … The parts of reality are mutually indifferent.45
Through unrecognisable, juxtaposed relations, objects and their meanings become detached so that images ‘fall to pieces and lose their spelling book clarity’.46 This disintegration then necessitates a piecemeal reconstruction whereby a ‘whole’ lyric characterisation comes to be understood by what is minor, marginal, auxiliary, subordinate, askance, or missing—through situations, actions, attributes or remarks.47 This approach is revealed in his memoir ‘Safe Conduct’ (1930) in which the principal character, ‘a fully awake and vigorous man’, is denoted by qualities rather than by name.48 In Pasternak’s works the inanimate realm becomes anthropomorphic. It is the ‘surrounding objects’, rather than the characters, that ‘are thrown into
42 Ibid., 310. 43 Boris Pasternak, ‘Safe Conduct’, cited in ibid., 311. 44 Ibid., 312. This idea is sympathetic with a Lacanian concept of metonymy which is dealt with later in Prosthesis. 45 Boris Pasternak cited in ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., 314. Pasternak’s characters are often described in the marginal third person. In other words, the first person is relegated to the background, yet, made metonymically present by secondary means. Jakobson points out that this occurs in much the same way that Charlie Chaplin makes a train appear in the film A Woman of Paris. The viewer only recognises that the train has arrived indirectly, through the changing facial expressions of those awaiting its arrival, ‘as if the invisible, transparent train were making its way between the screen and the audience’. Jakobson notes that in Pasternak’s poetry, ‘images of the surrounding world function as contiguous reflections, or metonymical expressions, of the poets self’. Ibid., 307. 48 Ibid., 313.
277 turmoil’ as ‘the immovable outlines of roofs grow inquisitive’ and doors swing shut ‘with a silent reproach’.49
In a story included in The Childhood of Luvers (1922), the children that inhabit a house believe that the street observed from inside and outside the house represent two entirely different streets—this ‘mutual penetration of objects (the realisation of metonymy in the strict sense of the word) and their decomposition (the realisation of synecdoche)’50 aligns Pasternak’s concerns with those of the Cubist painters. While Pasternak employs ‘rich and refined’ metaphors, it is principally the metonymic figures that give ‘uncommon’ shape to his writing.51 In other words, despite the entanglement of figures, it is the weight of metonymy that prevails; this emphasis has also been recognised in the paintings of Cézanne.
Cézanne combines an ‘opaque’ modernist pictorial reality and its preoccupation with the literal surface where metonymy, materiality and touch preside, with a ‘transparent’ classical pictorial reality that relies on figured depth, metaphor and panoramic vision.52 Moreover, he emphasises the dynamic interaction between these two modes of representation.53 Richard Shiff notes that, as the entanglement between ‘literal surface’ and ‘figured depth’ increases, Cézanne’s paintings become more fragmented and appear incomplete because relationships within the works are only ‘half pursued’.54 Jakobson’s observation that ‘a poetic world governed by metonymy blurs the outline of things’,55 is made plain in Cézanne’s Wine Glass and Apples (1879–1882), (Figure 41), and Three Apples (1878–1879), (Figure 42), in which lines or outlines that are used to separate objects and act as barriers to contiguity and continuity are refused.56
49 Ibid., 307. 50 Ibid., 310–311. 51 Ibid., 307. 52 Richard Shiff, ‘Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch’, in The Language of Art History, ed. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 131–132. 53 Ibid., 142. 54 Ibid. 55 Jakobson, Language in Literature: 310. 56 Julia Friedman, ‘Cézanne and the Poetics of Metonymy’, Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 23, 3 (2007): 313.
278
Figure 41. Paul Cézanne: 'Wine Glass and Apples' (1879–1882) Oil on canvas
Figure 42. Paul Cézanne: 'Three Apples' (1878–1879) Oil on canvas
279 Cézanne’s ‘touches’ of colour also act to reduce transparency for, although they may in part permit the recognition of say, iconic ‘red’ apples, ambiguity is introduced as colour passages ‘bleed’ across natural boundaries that ordinarily define objects.57 Colour is also used to highlight analogies between disparate forms and domains, such as when the saturation and hue of a body is rendered equal to that of a tree, so severing conventional hierarchies. Fragmentation also occurs with the continuous pattern of surface brushstrokes that remain equal in scale and direction regardless of whether objects, or the space between them, are being depicted. In other words, brush marks bear no relation to the objects they represent but are, instead, as with Piranesi’s etchings, allied to the canvas surface.58 This reduces coherence since flat surfaces such as walls come to possess volume, and volumetric objects such as apples are flattened.59 And so, a visual paradox emerges, that is, a play between volume and planarity. Although Cézanne represents recognisable objects, the objects are not rendered in a way that matches how they would feel if they were held or touched in the natural world.60 Consequently, touch is displaced from its traditional role in painting as secondary support to a totalising spatialising vision that permits ready recognition of the solidity associated with the real.
[Cézanne’s] tactile gesture was never a matter of comprehending real objects by imaginatively tracing their contours, allowing a primitive application of touch (running the hand along a surface) to substitute for a more nuanced understanding. Thus the artist denied that (tactile) line could capture nature, which was instead to be realised through (optical) colour. Yet that colour, for the painter existed as touches—in French, both touches and taches (the terms are related metonymically).61
In a reversal of convention, Cézanne’s ‘touch’ acts as the ‘figuring agent for vision’, and ‘looking’ becomes a form of ‘touching’ that is undertaken procedurally, ‘touch’ by ‘touch’, (glance by glance) rather than in a moment of instantaneous survey.62 This idea aligns with the piece-by-piece reconstructions evoked with Pasternak’s characterisations. ‘To go from metaphor to metonymy’ according to Robert Kroetsch, ‘is to go from the temptation of the single to the
57 Shiff, ‘Cézanne’s Physicality: The Politics of Touch’, 140. 58 Ibid., 145–146. 59 Cézanne’s treatment reduces the apples to half apples ‘because they exhibit fronts without strong indications of backs’. Ibid., 140. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 146. 62 Tactile experience is particularising, probing and proximate whereas vision is all encompassing. Ibid., 149.
280 allure of multiplicity’,63 to enact a shift in emphasis from the primacy of panoramic vision to the more intimate piecemeal experience of hapticity. It is the model of Cézanne’s touch that Merleau- Ponty harnesses in order to formulate his radical concept of vision, for in making ‘visible how the world touches us’, Cézanne creates an image of ‘undeniable physicality’.64 Unlike the transparency of panoramic vision which encounters no resistance, physical touch relies on the resistance of opacity, for this is the physical force responsible for the ‘reciprocal effect on the viewer’.65 According to Shiff, ‘Cézanne’s touch returns vision to the primordial experience of immediate physical contact, and perhaps even to a time before the body is distanced from objects, before it requires language or a symbolic order to negotiate a constructed reality’.66
While the ‘solidity’ that is often attributed to Cézanne’s paintings occurs on two levels, two- dimensionally in the paintings’ formal structure, and also representationally,67 Shiff posits that it is by ‘metonymic exchange’ that the spectator is able to match the solidity of the surface to the perceived solidity of represented objects such as mountains and apples.68 Although objects are recognisable in Cézanne’s paintings, touch is required for their illumination. Shiff emphasises that, despite harnessing the powers of metaphor, Cézanne’s paintings ‘never [attain] the visual integrity, distance and completion of the panorama’.69 In other words, it is the metonymic structure that prevails. Julia Friedman echoes this view claiming, with reference to Cézanne’s Large Bathers (1894–1906), that once the overarching metaphor, ‘nature is a temple’,70 is established, the notion is immediately overpowered by the contiguity and commingling of metonymy and its piecemeal reconstruction.71 (Figure 43) This idea was presaged in D. H Lawrence’s critique when he wrote that Cézanne, ‘not … content with the optical cliché’ wanted ‘to displace our present mode of mental–visual consciousness, the consciousness of mental concepts, and substitute a mode of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness
63 Robert Kroetsch quoted in: Shirley Neuman and Robert Wilson, Labyrinths of Voice: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch (1982), 117. Cited in Stephen Scobie, ‘The Allure of Multiplicity: Metaphor in Cubism and Gertrude Stein’, in Gertrude Stein and the Making of Literature, ed. Shirley Neuman and Ira B. Nadel (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), 100. 64 Shiff, ‘Cézanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch’, 151. 65 Ibid., 153. 66 Ibid., 168. 67 Ibid., 173 n.124. 68 Ibid., 148. 69 Ibid. 70 The ‘nature as a temple’ metaphor described by Friedman is drawn from the formal, compositional arrangement of the work. However, the metaphoric allusion can also be interpreted through the ancient Greek dialectic nomos (culture) versus physis (nature). If the metaphoric terms (nature and temple), so combined, are considered within the context of the nomos–physis continuum, this becomes a space where and nature and culture can coexist. For more detail see ‘Skin’, note 9. 71 Friedman, ‘Cézanne and the Poetics of Metonymy’, 317.
281 of touch’.72 According to Lawrence, Cézanne eluded cliché by capturing the ‘essence of flesh and matter’,73 the ‘appleyness’ of apples for, in these works, that which is ‘mobile’ (life forms) comes to rest and ‘the unmoving material world’ is set ‘into motion’, making the universe ‘slip uneasily’ about things.74 In order for Cézanne to move beyond the domain of representational perception, to capture something of an intrinsic animated nature that exists beyond form, he preferences the ‘metonymic over the metaphoric, the tangible over the imagined, the similar over the dissimilar’.75 Friedman surmises that, while metaphor was an important device in Cézanne’s work, metonymy remains the source of his great innovation, as it did for Pasternak.76
Figure 43. Paul Cézanne: ‘The Large Bathers’ (1894–1906) Oil on canvas
72 D. H Lawrence, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 211. Lawrence explains: ‘A cliché is just a worn-out memory that has no more emotional or institutional root, and has become a habit. Whereas a novelty is just a new grouping of clichés, a new arrangement of accustomed memories. That is why a novelty is so easily accepted: it gives the little shock or thrill of surprise, but it does not disturb the emotional and intuitive self. It forces you to see nothing new’. Ibid., 209. 73 Marianna Torgovnick, The Visual Arts, Pictorialism, and the Novel: James, Lawrence, and Woolf (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 55. 74 Lawrence, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Late Essays and Articles: 213. 75 Friedman, ‘Cézanne and the Poetics of Metonymy’, 313. 76 Ibid., 312.
282 Resonance beyond structure
Kunze asserts that all creative works, including architecture, rely on the ekphrasis or re-framing associated with metaphor and metonymy that invests ‘mute objects’ with ‘the power to speak’. He emphasises that without this communicative power, expressive works forfeit all relevance.77 Of these figures, Kunze singles out metonymy for special attention. However, his aim is to attempt a restoration rather than valorise the trope.78 He submits that architectural theory has failed to recognise metonymy as the occulted operation that lies at the heart of all metaphor and, therefore, it has failed to recognise and capitalise on metonymy’s expansive potential ‘as a means of knowing’.79 Kunze notes that, although metonymy ‘as a means of knowing’ is an idea that emerges with Vico’s original ‘imaginative universal’ together with the first architecture,80 it is Lacan that subsequently offers a theoretical paradigm to explain how the trope allows the subject to acquire knowledge of the Real.
In recognising that metaphor’s enigmatic power, or ‘signified effect’, is produced by metonymy,81 Lacan not only eschews binarisation, but underscores the trope’s importance in structuring experience. This is significant for, as Kunze explains, the ‘Real’ experience of architecture can only occur when the duality of mind and matter is negated, when a ‘divided field’ forms a ‘network of ideational—material exchanges’, such that ‘each intensifies and radicalises the normative meanings of the other’.82 Kunze emphasises that polemic dualism disappears the experiencing subject and, since ‘architecture is the “subjective object” par
77 Kunze’s defines ekphrasis as an ‘internally framed insertion of one work of art within another’, but adds that it includes ‘the more ancient belief that material objects have the capacity to speak’. Thus, ‘Ekphrasis is … both about framing (even in cases where the medium does not change as in anthology) and about the mute speech of materials (even when there is no obvious magic agency, as in the case of the unconscious, or when speech is simply defective in some way, as in the case of the unreliable or defective narrator)’. Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 51. 78 Ibid., 50. 79 Ibid., 49. 80 Kunze claims that the first architecture was not the primitive hut, but the clearing in the forest made by Vico’s first people in order to see the sky and access Jove who was thunder. While ‘Jove is thunder’ has been described as the first metaphor, Kunze points out that this metaphor is in no sense akin to contemporary metaphor as the relation between terms is unconscious rather than self-conscious. According to Kunze, the terms of the Viconian ‘imaginative universal’ possess ‘daemonic dimensions’ for ‘externalised human qualities’ exist inside and/or behind natural phenomena. Thus, the terms relate to one another through the operation of metonymy, not metaphor. Kunze argues that Vico’s daemonic account and its mythic strangeness ‘demonstrates the need for a metonymic account of an unconscious that works within subjectivity as an “occulted” signifier’. Kunze claims that such an account allows us to access the ‘mythic substrate’ by means of epiphany, which creates ‘an “opening” to critical thinking (theory) and personal experience (constructing architecture)’. Ibid., 69 n.64. 81 This notion was also understood and critiqued, albeit briefly, by Merleau-Ponty in his final work The Visible and the Invisible Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 125. 82 Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 50.
283 excellence’ truly expansive experience is deferred whilst ever the binary holds.83 According to Kunze, Lacan’s concept of metonymy offers a means of moving beyond dualism and thus realising significant architectural experience: ‘where everything wonderful/horrible and grotesque/beautiful happens suddenly and materially at any scale’ (an experience Kunze describes as ‘epiphany’), and where a ‘special form of learning (kenosis) that comes about seemingly from nowhere’ can take place (an experience Kunze describes as ‘divination’).84
Deferral and the desire for wholeness
Lacan describes two moments of alienation, or separation, in which the subject is constituted. The first occurs during the mirror phase, as the neonate, symbiotically joined with the mother, relinquishes the ‘pure plenitude’ of the Real and enters the Imaginary realm that is defined with the emergence of the Ego.85 This is closely followed by a second moment, as the child enters the Symbolic realm of language. The interpellation of these domains structures the world in which the subject is constituted.
As noted earlier, when an infant reaches a stage in its development where it is able to identify with its reflection in a mirror, a split or gap is introduced between an external, disembodied, specular imago (a unified vision of the self), which has to be reconciled with a prior, internally felt, bodied, and sensorially fragmented self. At this moment the child recognises that it is no longer one with its mother, or complete within itself. The infant that is thus divided, then projects the same (self/other) division onto their relations with others. The child that comes to distinguish between interior and exterior, self and other, subject and object, supplants the fulfillment and satisfaction that accompanied completion with the mother with a lack, and so is marked by an ontological split with the Real (its experience prior to separation) at the centre of its being.86 Henceforth, the infant will attempt to fill that lack with a desire for completion and mastery that, during the Imaginary phase, is achieved with the formation of the Ego. Yet, fulfillment is forever deferred, for there can be no permanent return to an original unified state.
83 Ibid. 84 Ibid., 53. 85 Elizabeth Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction (London: Routledge 1990), 34. 86 Ibid., 35.
284 The role of the ego founded on this ‘misrecognition’ is to maintain the illusion of identity and unity that is continuously under threat of disintegration. It is the human desire for a stable identity that Lacan suggests might explain the fascination we have for images of our own form.87 Orientating the self in relation to others and the world, and recognising the self as both subject and object, is the first step in forming an understanding of space in terms of perspective, distance, and position.88 While the construction of the libidinal subject by the Ego marks the beginning of a child’s social life, the imaginary subject is delimited by the extent of their body. Grosz writes ‘The mirror stage positions the child within a physical, psychical and familial space, but it does not empower the child to act as an agent or subject in a larger linguistic and economic community’.89 It is within the symbolic order of language that the subject-that-relates-to-others is constituted.
The classical subject was positioned external to language; they exercised mastery over the linguistic domain so that their intentions and desires could be translated into meaningful speech. However, Lacan challenged this idea.90 Once symbols and signs and the structures and laws that govern them appear for the infant, language begins to ‘speak the subject’.91 Lacan points out that when we speak or listen we are not merely conveying content (manifest speech), although this is necessary for us to survive in the real world, for there is always a latent meaning or ‘truth’ that is revealed independent of our intentions (mute speech). For Lacan, every speech act discloses the way in which the speaker relates to the content of the utterance.92 Paula Murphy notes that this latent truth ‘is situated in an unsignifiable space outside of language … concealed in the interstices of language, in the blank spaces between the words’.93 She adds that the reader must
87 ———, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism: 43. 88 ———, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction: 32. 89 Ibid., 50. 90 Ed Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 11. 91 Homer, Jacques Lacan: 45. Lacan refers to this as the phallic phase. The phallus in this context does not refer to a sexual organ but is a ‘privileged signifier’ that emerges with desire in relation to language. Fielding writes: ‘To be castrated, which is fundamental to entry into the symbolic order, is to be deprived of the phallus, which means that the subject will never be able to satisfy desire’. Helen Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 198 n.115. Žižek notes that in traditional rituals ‘the objects that symbolise power also put the subject who acquires them into the position of exercising power’. He describes the gap between ‘direct psychological identity’ and ‘symbolic identity’ (or the symbolic mask individuals wear) as ‘symbolic castration’ (the phallus). Žižek adds, ‘The phallus is a kind of insignia, a mask that I put on, which gets attached to my body, but never becomes an organic part, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive prosthesis’. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 34. 92 ———, How to Read Lacan: 16. 93 Paula Murphy, ‘The Linguistic Dit-mension of Subjectivity’, Minerva 8(2004): para. 3. http://www.minerva.mic.ul.ie//vol8/dit- mension.html.
285 refuse the literary demands of the text in order to become aware of its ‘unspoken desire’.94 The mute speech that always accompanies direct speech is a manifestation of the unconscious, which Lacan labels the discourse of the ‘big Other’. It is revealed to us through gaps, ruptures, or failures in language such as with slips of the tongue or in dreams.95 Kunze compares the operation of mute speech with the concept of the defective narrator who either reveals the hidden truth of an event without being aware that they have perceived or disclosed the fact, or with complete unawareness of the events taking place around them, will leave out key pieces of information that the reader will be compelled to complete. These two operations mimic the structure and actions of Lacan’s metonymy.96
Not only is Lacan’s unconscious revealed through language, it is also structured in the way of language. According to Lacan, the alienation between the self and the imago that occurs in the Imaginary realm is matched in the Symbolic order with the alienation between reality and language. This split occurs because a word (signifier) is always an impoverished representation of a concept or a thing (signified). Since a signifier is an approximation of reality (or an impression of meaning), it is forced to refer to other signifiers in an attempt to achieve full definition or form. Consequently, meaning is always suspended and can never be complete. The desire for meaning triggers a rhizomic, signifying chain reaction that recalls the smooth space of Deleuze. This results in the production of an impression of meaning or a ‘meaning (or signified) effect’.97 For Lacan, ‘the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke’.98
Lacan draws the idea of the signifying chain from Saussure as well as his emphasis on the constitutive role of linguistic structures. For Saussure, the linguistic sign binds the concept of a word (the meaningful component), or signified, and the word (the material phonic or graphic component), or signifier, into a single complete unit.99 However, the relation between the signified and the signifier is socially determined; it is not innate. There is no one-to-one correspondence between a word and a sign. Since signs do not possess any intrinsic value, their meaning can only be derived from their position within the linguistic structure in which they are
94 Ibid., para. 1. 95 Homer, Jacques Lacan: 68. 96 Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 52. 97 Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject: 30. 98 Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2006), 247. 99 Grosz, Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction: 93.
286 embedded.100 Signs are positioned along two (inter-dependent) axial directions/relations, paradigmatically and syntagmatically. Meaningful speech relies on the selection of particular signs over and above others to which they are either similar or different, which is a function of the vertical paradigmatic axis. However, the communicative act also depends on an arrangement of words that allows discourse to make sense—a function of the horizontal syntagmatic axis. Saussure’s linguistic structure (via Jakobson) would subsequently provide a frame for Lacan’s conceptualisation of the Symbolic order.101
Jakobson’s determination that Saussure’s paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes correspond with the operations of metaphor and metonymy allowed Lacan to map these tropes onto Freud’s mechanisms for governing the subconscious, namely ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’.102 In this way the concept of the unconscious was merged with an external process of signification. For Lacan, humans are born into a symbolic order that not only preexists them, but extends beyond their temporal time. This external model stands in contradistinction to Freud’s more classical, internal model of the unconscious—a structure that remains hidden yet governs human thoughts and actions.103
In seeking to define the ‘topography’ of the unconscious as he viewed it, Lacan inverted Saussure’s original algorithm, Sign =Signified/Signifier, and placed the signifier over a bar that separated it from the signified (Signifier/signified).104 The bar, he explained, is a barrier that resists signification.105 Lacan believed that the signifier must take precedence over the signified, for the signifier is all that can be known, since the signified, or full meaning, always eludes us. As there is no correspondence between a signifier and a signified, a signifier (a specific word, or concept) can only be defined by referring to other signifiers in an ongoing action: Lacan refers to this signifying function as metonymy.106 Notably, Lacan’s metonymy is less restrictive than Jakobson’s: it relies on the contiguous relation between signifiers rather than on any ‘conceptual
100 Homer, Jacques Lacan: 38. 101 Ibid., 39–40. 102 Russell Grigg, Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 160–161. These are the primary processes at work in dreams, which can be contrasted with the secondary processes at work in conscious thought. Homer writes: ‘Condensation designates the process whereby two or more signs or images in a dream are combined to form a composite image that is then invested with the meaning of both its constitutive elements’; and, ‘Displacement describes the process through which meaning is transferred from one thing to another’. Homer, Jacques Lacan: 43. 103 ———, Jacques Lacan: 44. 104 Ibid., 40–42. 105 Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English: 415. 106 Ibid., 421.
287 or real contiguity’.107 Lacan equates the perpetual deferral of meaning in the signifying chain with the perpetual deferral of desire. Consequently he declares: ‘desire is a metonymy’.108 In sum, Lacan conceives of his S/s in series, as two signifying chains separated by a bar with ‘an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier’.109 However, while Lacan’s subject is caught within the metonymic, horizontal signifying chain where they remain unaware that there are two orders of signification, the separation between orders is not complete. So, while language disguises and is resistant to signification, because language can ‘signify’ for other subjects ‘something altogether different from what it says’ (such as with the defective narrator), vertical connections between the chains must occur.110 Metaphoric structures called ‘button ties’, or points de capiton can create the vertical link between the two orders of signification, and with this, according to Lacan, enact ‘the dramatic transformation[s] that dialogue can effect in the subject’ such as with profound poetry.111
Points de capiton pause, or momentarily stabilise the continuous sliding of the signifying chains and thus allow meaning to become fixed, even if it is temporary, or illusory.112 Metaphor actualises these linkages as the manifest signifier displaces the original signifier forcing it to drop below the bar to become lodged in the repressed chain of signifieds, and so become occulted. However, within this structure the manifest signifier does not completely erase the meaning of the original signifier which, although obscured, still persists.113 Lacan, in a modification of Jakobson’s account of metaphor, claims that metaphoric meaning depends on the latent or occulted signifier continuing to relate contiguously to the other signifiers within the signifying
107 Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject: 34. 108 Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English: 439. 109 Ibid., 419. 110 Ibid., 421. 111 Ibid., 419. 112 It should be noted that for Lacan, a certain number vertical connections are necessary for proper psychological functioning. Psychoanalysis and Deconstruction diverge on this point. While Lacan’s theory of the subconscious recognises fixed points of meaning, there is no fixity in the signification associated with Deconstruction, which insists on ‘the openness and instability of meaning’. Murphy, ‘The Linguistic Dit-mension of Subjectivity’, para. 6 and 10. 113 Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject: 33.
288 chain.114 The original occulted signifier that, as explained, persists and insists from below the bar, creates a ‘rip or rent in the tissue of speech’ that is responsible for the metaphor’s effect.115
Although Lacan recognises that metaphor depends on metonymy for its expression, a seeming preference for metaphor is evident in much of his writing.116 This bias is revealed when he writes that the ‘poetic spark’ of ‘metaphor is situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning’, and in the paragraph that follows, ‘[metonymy] which gives oppressed truth its field, manifest a certain servitude that is inherent in its presentation’.117 While Jane Gallop recognises Lacan’s tendency to privilege the manifest, captivating and creative qualities of ‘masculine’ metaphor over the more submissive, hidden, or latent qualities of ‘feminine’ metonymy,118 she draws attention to a qualifying statement he makes in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan:
[T]he eternal temptation … is to consider that what is most apparent in a phenomenon is what explains everything … linguists have been victims of this illusion. The accent they place for example on metaphor, always given much more study than metonymy, bears witness to it … it is certainly what is most captivating.119
Gallop believes that it is possible to read Lacan’s theory of the unconscious in two ways, either as elevating a metaphoric interpretation of the phallus, or as recognition of the phallic power of metonymy. Lacan provides a rationale for undertaking the latter reading with his assertion that the phallus ‘can play its role only when veiled, that is, as itself a sign of the latency with which any signifiable is struck as soon as it is raised … to the function of the signifier’.120 In resolving her divided reading Gallop suggests, as does Kunze, that ‘One antidote to the ‘eternal temptation’
114 Lacan writes: ‘Metaphor’s creative spark does not spring forth from the juxtaposition of two images, that is, of two equally actualised signifiers. It flashes between two signifiers, one of which has replaced the other by taking the other’s place in the signifying chain, the occulted signifier remaining present by virtue of its (metonymic) connection to the rest of the chain’. Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English: 422. 115 Martin Thom, ‘The Unconscious Structured as a Language’, in Jacques Lacan: Critical Evaluations in Cultural Theory, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), 45. 116 Lacan writes, ‘Metonymy is there from the beginning, and its what makes metaphor possible’. Jacques Lacan: Seminar III (1981), 259. Cited in Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 129. 117 Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English: 423. 118 Gallop, Reading Lacan: 127. 119 Jacques Lacan: Seminar III (1981), 255. Cited in ibid., 126. 120 Lacan, Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English: 581.
289 to privilege metaphor might be … to recognise the horizontal line in metaphor’s cross, the bar of metonymy, which is fundamentally intricated in metaphor’.121
Ed Pluth also calls attention to the latent dimension of meaning associated with both metaphor and metonymy.122 According to Pluth, it is the ‘aura of ambiguity’ that envelops signifiers and signifying chains as opposed to their ‘easily determinable meaning’ that Lacan describes as a ‘signified effect’.123 Both metonymy and metaphor contain manifest and latent signifiers, and create meaning or ‘signified effects’, but they do so differently. In the case of the metonymic chain of signifiers, each signifier gives the impression that it is associated with a signified, or an approximation of meaning. This meaning is not, however, located in the chain of signifieds (otherwise it could not be known), nor is it located in the chain of signifiers. The ‘signified effect’ associated with the signifier echoes from afar, from beyond the signifying chain.124 In other words, metonymy achieves an absent ‘signified effect’ or, as Pluth describes it, ‘resonance’, which ‘suffuses the entire chain of signifiers with the absence of a signified’ as it unfolds.125
In the case of metaphor, the ‘signified effect’ is created with the substitution of one signifier for another, or with the incarnation of the latent term in the manifest term.126 Pluth illustrates the metaphoric ‘signified effect’ with an example that turns on a supposed pronouncement Freud made to Jung upon their arrival in America, ‘They don’t know that we’re bringing them the plague’. The metaphor is created with the substitution of ‘plague’ for an original signifier ‘psychoanalysis’. The signified or repressed meaning in this example is the signifier ‘psychoanalysis’; however, this in actuality is just another signifier. What is produced, according to Pluth, is a ‘signified effect’, not a ‘signified’. This is because a resonance is produced that
121 Gallop argues for both readings to be taken into account, since any simplistic polar opposition ‘is trapped in the imaginary order, subject to the play of identification and rivalry’. Gallop, Reading Lacan: 131–132. 122 Pluth, Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject: 30. 123 Pluth explains that a signified is what we end up with when we reduce the evocation of a signified effect. It gives the impression of ‘an apparently stable meaning and the appearance of a one-to-one correspondence of a signifier and a meaning. Of course, such an idea is mythical, but it does nevertheless play an important role in our lived experience of language’. Ibid., 32–33. 124 Pluth differentiates between the signified effect of metonymy and metaphor. He claims that while ‘metonymy creates an absent or a withdrawn signified effect … metaphor creates a verbal incarnation of a signified effect in a signifier by conflating a signifier with this effect, making that signifier act as a signified’. In other words, ‘The elusiveness that characterises the kind of signified effect produce by metonymy is, in metaphor, incarnated in one signifier’. Hence, the importance of metonymy for Lacan, as metonymy is ‘the framework “within which something new and creative can be produced, which is metaphor. In other words, there would not be metaphor if it weren’t for metonymy”’. Ibid., 35–37. 125 Ibid., 36–37. 126 According to Pluth, ‘Metonymy is a primary structure for any signifying chain and metaphor pre-supposes this structure. … In metaphor, what we have is a signifier that stands in for the ambiguity of the signified. Thus a metaphor is a kind of hieroglyph, an enigma, presented in a signifier. Another way to put this is to say that for interpreting a metaphor we have nothing else to go on but the metaphor itself. In metonymy, the context is always there to help us’. Ibid., 37.
290 cannot be reduced to either the signifier ‘plague’, or the repressed signifier ‘psychoanalysis’. Instead, meanings are evoked that extend beyond the metaphoric structure; for instance, one might glean the notion that the discipline of psychoanalysis will spread throughout America as quickly and widely as a contagious disease. In other words, the metaphor ‘evokes more than it informs’ and ‘what it evokes is not reducible to the information that we glean from it’.127 In sum, the occulted signifier that is incarnated as a signified within a metaphor is not really a signified because it is not fully present in this signifier. Instead, it produces and relies on a ‘signified effect’ that echoes from beyond the metaphoric structure for its power. According to Pluth, the signifying chain can be construed as a Mobius strip whereby the void that surrounds the strip represents the location where the signified effect occurs.128
Pluth believes that for Lacan signifiers are ‘the mode of [a] subject’s being’. A ‘subject effect’, as the ‘signified effect’, occurs in the gap between signifiers, it occurs when language ‘fails and stumbles’ and the symbolic chain ruptures.129 In this space, which eschews the subject’s intentions, the excess of the signifier is revealed, not only with slips of the tongue, but also through the creation and experience of works of art, negations and dreams. All are revelations that conceal and reveal at the same time.130 Tony Jackson describes this as a violent space.
The ontolinguistic aporia occurs in the fact that the instruments of violence (language and culture) become the subject’s means of overcoming the effects of that violence and attempting a return to a condition of Imaginary security, that is, a return to a condition of what we might call self-metaphorisation: the coming to be identical with oneself …131
The ‘signified effect’ produced by metonymy in the desire for a metaphoric instance of full meaning, or imaginary completion, is continuously being ‘torn apart’ as displacement continues along the chain of signifiers.132 Nevertheless metaphor, which can momentarily halt the ongoing metonymic displacement of signifiers, allows the subject to be temporarily stabilised, and thus prevents it from ‘bleeding away into a complete lack of identity’.133
127 Ibid., 33–34. 128 Ibid., 40. 129 Ibid., 40, 42. 130 Ibid., 40–42. 131 Tony E. Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1994), 120. 132 Ibid. 133 Ibid., 120–121.
291 Paradoxically, in the difficult space where the subject is constituted, the dynamic and tense interpellation of metaphor and metonymy enact a play between the subject’s fragmentation and completion whilst resisting both. This has the effect of eclipsing, or ‘disappearing’ the subject— aphanisis.134 Slavoj Žižek asserts that the ‘kernel of a subject’s being’, (its subject effect) or that which cannot be reduced to a subject’s imaginary identity, can only be confronted with a ‘temporary aphanisis’.135 At this moment, when confronted with the ‘terror’ of the Real (or the abyss), the subject can no longer make sense of their imagined self, and they acquire ‘full presence’.136 According to Kunze, it is through the same gap constructed by ekphrasis that we encounter architectural sites of exception. These are sites that resist ‘all attempts to resolve ambiguity and restore unity’ and so remain ‘permanently enigmatic’.137
The Real does not sit behind the symbolic order but, as Žižek describes it, is ‘the fissure within the symbolic network itself’.138 It is an effect produced by the curving of symbolic space by means of ‘gaps and inconsistencies’.139 The curved space (of desire) equates with the paradox that ‘the shortest way to realise a desire is to bypass its object-goal, make a detour, postpone its encounter. … more satisfaction is provided by dancing around it than by making straight for it’.140 Lacan illustrates this idea with an allegory based on Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors (1533). When viewed directly, or frontally, the image depicts two seated ambassadors in a room with an extended, ambiguous smear (anamorphosis) positioned in the lower half of the work. If, however, the image is viewed with a longer, lateral glance (by ‘looking awry’) the smear becomes distinct and a skull appears.141 (Figure 44) The painting can be read as a representation of both consciousness which is rooted in geometric space and the optics of perspective, and the unconscious which emerges with an oblique ‘gaze’. As with the two forms of visual representation included in the painting, the two orders cannot be comprehended simultaneously.
134 Since the space of aphanisis for Lacan is where the subject is constituted, it can be clearly distinguished from the aphanisis associated with Cartesian dualism. 135 When the symbolic order (the big Other that tyrannises us without our awareness) collapses, such as with ruptures in discourse, the subject is eclipsed. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 2001), 162. 136 Ibid. 137 Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 55. 138 Žižek, How to Read Lacan: 72. 139 Ibid., 73. 140 Ibid., 77. 141 ———, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 90–91.
292
Figure 44. Hans Holbein: 'The Ambassadors' (1533) Oil on oak
Žižek submits that, through withdrawal from the ‘symbolic reality’, the subject passes through a ‘zero point’ that allows it to form anew from a position of complete freedom.142 The confrontation with the Real that begins with terror, converts to bliss as symbolic ties are renounced and the subject experiences something mystic—an epiphany.143 Kunze, with reference to James Joyce, emphasises that profound epiphany is usually ‘stolen’ from inconsequential, or minor ‘material details’ and errors that ‘transform the identity of the thief’.144 No matter the source of the epiphany, the act of passing through ‘zero-point’ is transformative and permanently shifts the subject’s axis.145 However, Žižek stresses that the ‘symbolic suicide’ that is a condition
142 Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out: 43. 143 Ibid., 43–44. 144 Kunze refers to James Joyce: Stephen Hero, 211–213. In Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 67. 145 Žižek, Enjoy your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out: 44.
293 for passing through the Real ‘is possible only against the background of the symbolic order’ for, ‘the greatness of an act depends strictly on the place from which it was accomplished’.146 In other words, as a subversive act, it relies on the resistance of an original context from which it can be differentiated. Put simply, subversion requires something to subvert.
Helen Fielding claims that while Lacan’s theory of the body subject moves beyond the visual imaginary of the mirror stage to ‘an interpretation of words as corporeal imagery’, and finally the body of drives, there is no place for the body subject of mundane lived existence.147 She correctly points out that Lacan’s dualistic split between the intrapsychic and the intersubjective has produced a somewhat bodiless theory, and so properly suggests connecting with the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty to ground the Lacanian subject in the real world.148 Fielding’s focus centres on the immediate distinction between an approach that relies on vision, and an approach that recognises that vision is intertwined with touch and bodily movement149—an approach that, as has been observed earlier, overlaps with the medieval concept of ‘tactile vision’.150
Lacan differentiates between two forms of vision, both of which emerge from alienation. The first of these is ocular vision, or sight; it emerges with the Imaginary (Ego) and is synonymous with the space of consciousness, geometry, and perspectival optics. This form of vision defers to the laws of physics.151 For Lacan, sight is not particular to the subject, but an abstract construct.152 The second form of vision—the gaze—determines the way the unconscious structures consciousness. According to Lacan, the gaze ‘is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other’.153 Since the gaze belongs to the symbolic order, it is associated with both a lack and desire.154 The gaze relates to the curved, topological space of anamorphosis,
146 Ibid., 44–45. 147 Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 191. 148 Ibid., 186. 149 Ibid. 150 As described in ‘Tactile Vision’, Merleau-Ponty’s space of ecart is closer to the medieval notion of vision which possesses a kinesthetic dimension for, according to Bacon, it is a movement or ‘extension of the visible soul (or, in a different context, the flesh) beyond the body’s visible limits’. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 97. Clearly, this concept of vision can be contrasted with Lacan’s fixed visual gestalt. Biernoff notes that, for the medieval subject (influenced by the writings of Aristotle and Bacon), ‘Seeing is feeling in every sense: a physical “touch”, a sensation of pleasure and pain, an emotion “expressed in Matter”’. Vision is very much ‘mobile’ and ‘palpating’, it roams and grasps, not metaphorically, but literally. Ibid. 151 Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 190. 152 Ibid. 153 Jacques Lacan, ‘Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a’, in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (1981), 84. Cited in ibid., 188. 154 Castration for Lacan represents the lack that marks a subject’s entry into the symbolic order. It is symbolised by the phallus. Ibid., 198n115.
294 and is the space of the Real. Where the eye is on the side of the subject, the gaze is fixed in the other/Other, and so, from a Lacanian perspective, placed on the more privileged side of the object.155
Merleau-Ponty, as Lacan, accepts that the subject is not unified or transparent. He also recognises that in order to develop a child must transition through the mirror stage, and that a form of alienation results.156 However, for Merleau-Ponty this alienation is not a source of paranoia, but is constitutive and expansive in that it allows a child to see its body in a new way. Merleau-Ponty believes the split or otherness that occurs within the child’s body goes beyond the merely visible, an idea illustrated with his account of one hand of the body touching its paired hand that is touching an object.157 Further, projecting beyond the confines of the body to identify with a specular image subsequently allows a child to identify with others (a step that Lacan also agrees is necessary).158 However, for Merleau-Ponty this transition enacts a shift whereby the child no longer understands itself as a fragmented entity, but rather as a social being. Thus, Merleau- Ponty’s mirror stage describes an intercorporeal spatiality that, unlike Lacan’s, is not grounded in deception.159 World and subject intertwine for Merleau-Ponty in a mutual act. A body ‘possesses this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it’, and the means by which the subject possesses the world involve perception and movement of the body through space.160 Lacan’s subjective disunity is based on intrapsychic experience, whereas Merleau-Ponty’s subjective disunity is fundamentally bodied. And, while Lacan’s subject relates to others through a visual
155 Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan’, in The Žižek Reader (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 15. 156 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘At the same time that the image of oneself makes possible the knowledge of oneself, it makes possible a sort of alienation. … This forces me to leave the reality of my lived me in order to refer myself constantly to the ideal, fictitious, or imaginary me, of which the specular image is the first outline. In this sense I am torn from myself, and the image in the mirror prepares me for another still more serious alienation, which will be the alienation by others. For others have only an exterior image of me, which is analogous to the one seen in the mirror. Consequently others will tear me away from my own immediate inwardness much more surely than will the mirror’. Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 136. 157 Although the two hands are united in the same body they do not share the same tactile experience because of an internal gap, or ecart. ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 272. 158 Gail Weiss, ‘Body Image Intercourse: A Corporeal Dialogue between Merleau-Ponty and Schilder’, in Merleau-Ponty, Interiority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and the World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James Morley (New York: State University of New York Press, 1999), 125–126. 159 Ibid., 141 n.149. 160 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen Johnson and Michael Smith (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 104.
295 projection that is founded on a mis-representation or an illusion, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of perception reveals that subjects and objects share a world.161
Merleau-Ponty recognises an unconscious, but it is not aligned with the psychoanalytic account of Lacan. Lacan’s unconscious is relatively fixed, with access granted fleetingly as it is glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, revealed in dreams, or heard to mutely speak. Merleau-Ponty’s unconscious, on the other hand, is incomplete; it exists as a ‘depth of horizon’ to conscious existence.162 While Merleau-Ponty’s unconscious ‘pervades’ our thoughts and actions it does not directly control them. Importantly, this allows opportunity for change.163
Although Lacan and Merleau-Ponty diverge in their conceptualisation of the unconscious, Fielding notes that there is a degree of overlap in their approaches to perception.164 Both recognise that the perceptual relation between subject and object is founded on an internal division and a notion of bi-directionality. However, what Merleau-Ponty recognises as a reversal or chiasm, Lacan considers a split or disunity. Fielding points out that this difference manifests in two movements, one that is ultimately positive and associated with a turning outward, and the other that is founded on a negative action and a turning inward.165
Žižek describes Lacan’s gaze as the ‘the point in the object (the picture) from which the viewing subject is already gazed at: it is the object which is gazing at me’,166 or it is ‘the [insurmountable] frontier separating reality from the real’.167 The gaze surveys the subject from a point beyond, from a point the subject can never see; consequently, the gaze is excluded from the subject’s vision.168 The gaze pre-exists the subjective eye (I), which only emerges when the ‘object seen’ constructs the subject’s internal identity by what is ‘visible … not intentional’.169 As discussed, Lacan illustrates the difference between the eye and the gaze with reference to the split view in
161 Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 191. 162 Dorothea Olkowski, ‘Merleau-Ponty’s Freudianism: From the Body of Consciousness to the Body of Flesh’ in Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 18, nos. 1–3 (1982–1983), 114. Cited in ibid., 192. 163 Ibid. 164 Ibid., 193. 165 Ibid., 194. 166 Žižek, ‘The Undergrowth of Enjoyment: How Popular Culture can Serve as an Introduction to Lacan’, 15. 167 Ibid., 14. 168 Ibid., 15. 169 According to Fauvel, ‘the trajectory of vision starts in the “there”—the object seen, the image in the mirror and ends up in the “here”, its bodily origin, the body/subject, the eye’. Lysane Fauvel, ‘The Blind Spot of the Sovereign Eye: On the Gaze in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan’, Philosophy Study 2, 7 (2012): 452.
296 Holbein’s painting of The Ambassadors.170 The direct eye (I) view of the painting is founded on the illusion of the subject ‘seeing itself seeing’. However, as soon as the anamorphosis materialises into an apparition of death, the subject becomes momentarily disoriented, certainty and identity fail.171 While the apparition for the most part eludes the subject, the repressed gaze or smear is ever present. Lysane Fauvel points out that the spectre of the gaze ‘is nothing less than the gaze with that which was first denied’ through the original formation of the Imaginary identity, ‘and then repressed’.172 This idea underscores Fielding’s comment regarding Lacan’s reversibility, namely that ‘subjectivity is a negativity structured by the gaze of the other turned in on myself’.173 Lacan’s notion of negativity turned inward stands in contrast to the outward positivity associated with Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility.
While Merleau-Ponty’s subject and object can ‘never exactly overlap’ since there is a surface of separation between them, this is also a place of union or, as Merleau-Ponty sumarises, ‘the geometrical locus of projections and introjections, [this site] is the invisible hinge upon which my life and the life of the others turn to rock into one another’.174 In encountering one another, subject and object have opportunity to be changed by the experience; the divide between body and world is not an insurmountable schism but the site of mutual ‘engendering’.175
[O]ur body is a being of two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees them and touches them; … it unites these two properties within itself, and its double belongingness to the order of the ‘object’ and to the order of the ‘subject’ reveals to us quite unexpected relations between the two orders. … it teaches us that each calls for the other.176
For Merleau-Ponty, signification in prosaic language remains at the level of thought and thus at the level of representation; it is only in the tissues and ‘fabric’ of the body (accessed through the
170 As noted earlier in this section, consciousness is associated with the eye and represented in the immediately apparent perspective image. The unconscious is associated with the gaze and represented by the less readily accessible anamorphic image. 171 Fauvel elaborates: ‘The authoritative position of the subject and of (self-)recognition is exposed as illusory mis(self- )recognition, and replaced by a position where the subject has no choice but to submit, to be subjected to the logic of the gaze. Any illusion of omnipotence, origination, and comfort provided by consciousness disintegrates because of the confrontation with the radical lack at the very core of subjectivity’. Fauvel, ‘The Blind Spot of the Sovereign Eye: On the Gaze in Merleau-Ponty and Lacan’, 459. 172 Ibid., 460. 173 Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 194. 174 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 148, 234. 175 Ibid., 90. 176 Ibid., 137.
297 language of the senses) that representations are actualised at the level of corporeal being.177 Fielding draws on Merleau-Ponty’s claim that signification must stand ‘between our acts and aims and not behind them’,178 emphasising that a theory of intersubjectivity that is divorced from corporeality is resistant to change and limits our ability to commune with others. It is Merleau- Ponty’s embedded corporeal subject chiasmically intertwined with its world that allows for the possibility of both shaping and being shaped through perceptual Being in the world.179
And so, this thesis proposes something of a merger, whereby Lacan’s mechanisms for accessing the subconscious based on the interaction between metaphor and metonymy are re-interpreted through an embodied frame—that of the rhetorical prosthesis.
Metonymy as prosthesis
Singer who, in her account of the therapeutic function of medieval lyric poetry, examines the structural link between metonymy and prosthesis declares that ‘Late medieval prosthesis is not an “opportunistic metaphoric device”, … but, rather, a “metonymic strategy”’.180 Subsequent to her analysis of Guillaume de Machaut’s Livre du Voir Dit, she submits that the complex, round lyric forms sutured181 into the text in order to rebuild Guillaume’s defective eye fails as an augmentative structure, leading her to ponder two questions. Firstly, she asks if it is valid to consider the substitution of the eye with a lyric prosthesis as a metonymic process; and secondly, she questions whether it is valid to consider metonymy a form of prosthesis: ‘are they overlapping categories?’ she asks.182 In answer to the first question, Singer agrees that the prosthetic lyric insertion does, indeed, represent a metonymic strategy. In drawing this conclusion she relies on the generally accepted definition of metonymy, which involves the substitution of a word or phrase with another word or phrase that is internally related, such as cause for effect. Consequently, the replacement of an eye with a lyric form that mimics the organ’s shape, and the fact that the lyric poem is inspired by a vision of Guillaume’s beloved
177 ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 162–163, 169. See also Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 192. 178 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 232. See also Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 196. 179 ———, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 196. 180 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 152–153. 181 While some commentators refer to the lyric forms that are included in Machaut’s narrative as ‘insertions’, Singer argues such descriptions ignore the forms’ integral contribution to a ‘dynamic reading’ of the text. Ibid., 167. 182 Ibid., 185.
298 whom he is unable to see, is undeniably a metonymical structure that involves the substitution of both form and content.183
With regard to the second question, Singer asserts that metonymy and prosthesis cannot be considered overlapping structures, for metonymy’s contiguity implies organic unity whereas it is impossible for the prosthetic artefact to become organically included in the body. On this reading, metonymy is made synonymous with inclusion and prosthesis is made synonymous with a lack or deficiency, and so the two cannot be reconciled. Accordingly, Singer claims, it is the deficiency associated with prosthesis, not metonymy that dooms the lyric prosthesis to failure.184 However, it is posited here that with the substitution of Lacan’s definition of metonymy, a convergence in the structures of prosthesis and metonymy is revealed; this convergence brings metonymy closer to prosthesis rather than the other way around. Moreover, this re-reading in which the two structures now overlap counters claims of failure by recasting the lack of closure and completion as constitutive of the subject.
Lacanian metonymy and prostheses are both founded on a lack or gap, and a shared desire for completion that is ultimately deferred. The metonymies of the Voir Dit are dislocated at levels of the text, narrative and characters. A structural and narrative dislocation is introduced with the insertion of round lyric forms into a linear text, disrupting temporal and directional coherence and diverting the Voir Dit from its ‘narrative axis’.185 The complex forms that act as a substitute for the eye introduce the curved space of the detour, a topological journeying. They represent a circuitous attempt to regain the optical vision that permits self-identification, and so allow Guillaume to see his idealised beloved through the projection of his unified self. However, the metonymies introduce complications and ambiguities: they signify beyond any linear signifying chain, and so there can be no complete healing over.186 The space of Eros operates at the level of the narrative, at the level of the trope and at the level of the prosthetic itself.187 The double
183 Ibid. 184 Citing Wills’ remark, ‘the body to be found at the scene of prosthesis is deficient, less than whole and has always been so’, Singer surmises that, because of a fundamental ‘gap’, the lyric prosthesis ‘writes its own failure’. Ibid. 185 Ibid., 153. 186 The metonymic substitution of a round form for the structure of an eye and a lyric form for its function, if arranged vertically, can be construed as metaphors that produce signified effects beyond the meaning associated with either the manifest or occulted term. And so, the signifiers raise broader questions: Does Guillaume’s idealism blind him? Is his beloved real or a figment of his imagination’? ‘Is he sane’? 187 This usage of the term Eros refers to the gap between desire and fulfillment that can never be completed. It is a state related to the space of chora, which is a bounded communicative space that mediates between Being and becoming—a space that can only be grasped indirectly. Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 45–47.
299 framing of the prosthetic eye generates confusion with regard to Guillaume’s bodily coherence. He cannot see the round forms that make him appear whole to others. As Singer explains, ‘prosthetic eyes allow the wearer not to see better, but to be seen as better. Their healing is effected from the outside in’.188 The ambiguity and dislocations surrounding the text, the narrative, and Guillaume’s predicament mean that metaphorical completion is suspended. This makes space for the constitution of the subject through mutual ‘engendering’, something that Singer alludes to in her concluding comment when she writes that, although the lyric fails to restore eyesight ‘and thus [Guillaume’s opportunity] to love’, it can provide a temporary fix. This relief, she declares, ‘fleeting as it is, comes of a therapy that [only] lyric prosthesis—but not surgical prosthesis—can provide’.189
By recognising Lacan’s metonymy and prosthesis as overlapping rhetorical structures founded in the material folds of the sensual body, an embodied strategy for re-framing and structuring expansive architectural experience is revealed. It is a strategy that relies on a complex interweaving of both medical and rhetorical prosthetic denotations. Garoian alludes to the interpellation of these operatives when he describes the prosthetic space of art as ‘an emergent space where socially and historically constructed, dissociated, and uncritical images and ideas of abstract space are brought together in a contiguous relationship for a lingering on their juxtapositions’.190 To reframe the medical prosthesis rhetorically as ornament, rather than dialectically as augmentation, opens up the figure to an expansive reading. In Singer’s account, there is a doubling over in which prosthesis constitutes a form of bodied metonymy that structures a revelatory understanding of spatial experience. Signifying relations of both lack and excess, this prosthetic space is a dehiscent space, a space of slippage and disquiet that makes its expansive presence felt through the complication of indirect means.
Prosthetic ornament and the space of architecture
Presaging de Sola-Morales’ call for a minor architecture, the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik (1872–1957) declared: ‘I don’t want anything great. I want things small; these I will make
188 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 186. 189 Ibid. 190 Garoian adds: ‘within the delay of [this] differential space the social fragmentations and sedimented practices of academic, institutional, and corporate power can be exposed, examined, and critiqued, and their unity reconstructed and restored prosthetically’, and further, ‘Differential space is the space of possibility where prostheses can operate’. Garoian, The Prosthetic Pedagogy of Art: Embodied Resarch and Practice: 18.
300 great’.191 He was motivated by a desire to create an ethical architecture that could ‘speak’ of a better world both spiritually and materially.192 Drawing motifs from nature as well as cultural and historical symbols, hieroglyphs and allegory, his was a mystical quest underpinned by a strong social and democratic conscience. For Plečnik, architecture offered a means of affirming cultural identity.193 Plečnik’s aims were sympathetic with the first Czech president Tomas Masaryk who, in 1920, commissioned him with the task of transforming Prague castle from a symbol of Austro– German oppression and domination into a site that properly represented the seat of a new democratic government. The President’s brief included a requirement to integrate the castle within its urban and rural surrounds.194
Plečnik’s approach was typically modest. He did not seek to displace an original unified edifice with a grand all encompassing scheme but, instead, chose an indirect, subversive approach that was all the more insistent for its marginality. Plečnik’s series of relatively small-scale ‘prosthetic’ interventions metonymically shift an original narrative ‘from its axis’ in the way of Singer’s lyric forms, creating ruptures, intrusions, and digressions within an orthodox, linear signifying chain.
The hierarchy and symbolism associated with the castle’s ceremonial entrance, which was to be undone by sealing it off to form an antechamber, is called into question by the two rustic wooden flagstaffs on gilded bases that mark it. The flagstaffs not only juxtapose material simplicity with opulence, or low culture with high culture, but also reference a variety of historic precedents and so signal broader cultural relevance.195 To further compromise the symbolic hierarchy of the first gate, a series of alternate entry sequences were introduced along a southern path that had remained abandoned since the seventeenth century. 196 See (Figure 45) and (Figure 46). The reworked rampart gardens configure a spatium, as understood in in its original, expansive sense. The relation between the castle (as the seat of power) and city (state) below is mediated through the embodied practice of pleasurable ‘strolling’ in the ‘expanded space of time relaxed’.197 .
191 Caroline Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 93. 192 François Burkhardt, ‘Modern or Postmodern: A Question of Ethics?’, in Jože Plečnik: Architect 1872–1957, ed. François Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 115. 193 Ibid. 194 Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape: 96. 195 Constant suggests that these forms might be derived from the pylons of Egyptian temples, or the flagpoles of San Marco’s Square, Venice. Ibid., 98. 196 Damjan Prelovsek, ‘The Life and Work of Jože Plečnik’, in Jože Plečnik: Architect 1872–1957, ed. François Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 59. 197 Rowland, ‘Renaissance Ideas of Space: Introduction’, 1–2.
301
Figure 45. Jože Plečnik: Plan of Prague Castle highlighting the southern path, or ramparts (commenced 1920)
Figure 46. Jože Plečnik: Entrance to the southern ramparts (commenced 1920)
302 Ple"nik carefully transforms boundaries into thresholds, enhancing the transparency of the site in keeping with his democratic objectives. These new thresholds introduce a re-mapping or complication.198 Just as the metonymy of Pasternak focused on the action of the man rather than his moniker to reveal more of his character, Ple"nik’s circuitous approaches allow objects and structures to be encountered in new ways and so reveal more of their nature. Other interventions create disquiet. An obelisk incongruously positioned in the Third Court obstructs clear views of the surrounding historic façades. Since, traditionally, obelisks marked the terminus of an axial viewpoint, the object’s siting confounds convention, and so its ‘mis-placement’, or ‘displacement’, stands as a visual riddle.
The modest scale and inconspicuous siting of the Bull staircase at the southeast corner of the Third Court, belies the symbolic significance of this intervention. Its principal axis aligns with the golden door of the cathedral and an ancient coronation site of the Czech kings.199 Moreover, the staircase penetrates the castle wall, thus providing a direct link between the court, Rampart Gardens and city beyond. The ornamental treatment of the formal entry to the Bull stair further emphasises its importance. (Figure 47)
Figure 47. Jo!e Ple"nik: Prague Castle 'Bull Stair' entrance gate and canopy (1920–1932)
198 Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape: 99. 199 Prelovsek, ‘The Life and Work of Jo!e Ple"nik’, 61.
303 Modelled on the style of a monumental gate (in miniature), four marble columns crowned with bronze bulls support two round wooden beams over which a copper roof is draped, evoking notions of Gottfried Semper’s cloth, or skin. Here too, Plečnik celebrates the liberation of materiality and form and, in doing so, reveals a Baroque sensibility.200 The four bulls, which allude to Minoan iconography, also have Athenian and Slovakian mythical antecedents.201 The links to local mythology are reinforced with sculptural reliefs moulded into the gold sleeves fitted at the exposed ends of the beams. As with Serlio’s bestial gate, plural references introduce an irreducible ambiguity or ‘signified effect’. Beyond this threshold, a narrow staircase carves space in a way that draws the participant into intimate relation with stone, brick, metal and concrete forms and surfaces. Structural elements hint at Mycenaean and Neoclassical origins, 202 however, it is not possible to be certain of these antecedents as, once begun, forms and surfaces are transgressed, interrupted or left unfinished. (Figure 48) The outline of things becomes blurred. Plečnik connects historical fragments with unique contemporary elements, and so opens the past to the present through a reinterpretation of forms; this allows for a lingering on their juxtapositions. The folding of the past into the present creates an undifferentiated moment in space and time.
200 Vladimir Slapeta cites an article from Styl 1 (1908–1909), 129–130 (author unknown): ‘Just as the baroque artist did not concern himself with the rules governing centuries-old elements, but used them as he pleased provided they suited his conception, so Plečnik does not worry about the origins or stylistic stamp of his details. The decisive factor is not for him the form as such, but its logic and intention. Thus, we find historical elements juxtaposed without the slightest interest in history, brought in simply because they lend themselves to his goal. When Plečnik has recourse to new forms and new technologies, these too are the logical result of extensive reflection, without any of the contingency attached to innovation for the sake of innovation. Where another architect might use artifice freely, Plečnik’s use of form is arrived at following a prolonged meditation, during which he might weigh the pros and cons hundreds of times. When others imitate his methods, the results are weak and disappointing’. Vladimir Slapeta, ‘Jože Plečnik and Prague’, in Jože Plečnik: Architect 1872–1957, ed. François Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 85. 201 Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape: 102. 202 Boris Podrecca, ‘Columns, Walls, Space’, in Jože Plečnik: Architect 1872–1957, ed. François Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 167.
304
Figure 48. Jože Plečnik: Prague Castle, 'Bull Stair' interior (1920–1932)
Within the Bull Stair’s crypt-like closeness, tactile surfaces and fractured light heighten sensation. The staircase is a certain fissure that becomes uncertain as excessive signification opens experience to new possibilities. The dislocation at the site operates programmatically, metaphorically (read as a new order that displaces the old), as well as metonymically (with the inclusion of cultural trophies), and so is unambiguously bodied. This is a place of intertwining, where there is no certainty and no metaphoric instant of total comprehension. Space is drawn around the body as one descends or ascends, and fragments are encountered rhizomically within the folded temporal pause. It is at this moment that the fissure takes on the poetic quality of Bachelard’s intimate immensity: it ‘transports the dreamer outside the immediate world that bears the mark of infinity’. In this poetic space, individuals are not ‘cast into the world’ but ‘open the world’, such that consciousness becomes enlarged.203
203 Bachelard, The Poetics of Space: 183, 184.
305 While Plečnik’s vocabulary is plural, he does not combine indiscriminately nor does he innovate for the sake of innovation.204 His details, as Frascari’s ornamental monsters, are inventive expressions that mediate and meditate on the connections between forms and materials; they are the site of both mental construing and construction. Plečnik’s very personal approach, which sought to create a visually rich communicative architecture, could not have been achieved with simple typologies and morphologies.205 Eschewing abstraction, he sought specificity. Plečnik drew on whatever means available to accomplish his objectives: what mattered was logic and intention.206 Although his forms are carefully grounded, meaning remains elusive. This is deliberate. Caroline Constant points out that Plečnik ‘favoured the profundity of the unspoken to the clarity of the spoken’.207 One could add that he also favoured richness and decoration over clarity, and the indirect over the direct, for he was critical of ‘the principle of economy’ that threatened the ‘very essence of art’.208
Plečnik was influenced by the Austrian Baroque building tradition which innovatively combined rustic structural elements with sumptuous ornament, such that the ornament lends ‘form and figure to the building’.209 In accordance with this tradition, facings were not a ‘thin skin’, or superficial surface, but (as Deleuze described it) constituted the façade for, during the Baroque, form is content.210 Meaning and depth remain present regardless of what is displayed on the surface, and equally, remain independent of the intended values or codes that applied at the time it was constructed.211 Plečnik sought to recuperate this same hidden depth in the surface of his forms, so that ‘dualities are overwhelmed by an effusive celebration of the symbolic materiality of the architecture’.212
Plečnik’s ‘eclectic montages’ have been heralded as precursors to postmodernism. However, as François Burkhardt points out, while there are some parallels that might be gleaned from superficial stylistic resemblances and a shared desire to develop a communicative code, Plečnik’s
204 Slapeta, ‘Jože Plečnik and Prague’, 85. 205 Burkhardt, ‘Modern or Postmodern: A Question of Ethics?’, 113. 206 Slapeta, ‘Jože Plečnik and Prague’, 85. 207 Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape: 114. 208 Alain Arvois and Cristina Conrad von Eybesfeld, ‘Plečnik, Vienna, and the Arcana of the Baroque Tradition’, in Jože Plečnik: Architect 1872–1957, ed. François Burkhardt, Claude Eveno, and Boris Podrecca (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 19. 209 Ibid., 22. 210 Ibid., 23. 211 Ibid., 24. 212 Ibid., 23.
306 very personal aims were ethically motivated.213 Burkhardt claims Plečnik would have opposed those postmodern architects that trivialise tradition and memories in pursuit of ‘novelty as an absolute value’. For, as he explains, such libertine excess values the experience of the architect above all others.214 Burkhardt summarises:
Plečnik stands apart from the postmodern movement’s ‘spectacular commercial’ vein in which forms and symbols, often without content, bear no relation to a philosophical position striving to express itself through formal expression.215
Plečnik was not the ‘author’ or precursor of a new and seminal architectural style. Instead, his work embraces the monadic, Leibnizian principle that submits: ‘There is a similar infinite number of universes that are, nevertheless, only the aspects of a single one as seen from the special point of view of each monad’.216
Plečnik’s interventions and new connections together produce a discontinuous effect that makes each presence felt, this generates a resonance. A piecemeal reconstruction is effected, for there is a prolongation of sensory exposure as the body opens to a range of scaled encounters. Recalling Alberti’s Palazzo Rucellai, with this new relation of part to whole, each ‘complex’ element is complete within itself yet forms part of ‘an incomplete and implied whole’.217 While meaning is revealed iteratively through the hermeneutic that moves between a shared ground and the included objects, the metonymic fragments that ‘violently’ re-figure the body cannot achieve metaphoric completion. The narrative remains open-ended, enigmatic and unresolved: erotic fulfillment is deferred.
Plečnik’s work embodies many of the qualities Stan Allen is seeking when he argues in favour of a theory of ‘distracted’ architectural reception as a new form of subjectivity that can move architects toward a ‘post collage aesthetic’.218 Allen claims that there is little value in seeking
213 Further to this, Burkhardt notes that Plečnik’s ‘democratisation’ is the exact opposite of the ‘standard’ that functionalist architects adopted during the nineteen twenties. Burkhardt, ‘Modern or Postmodern: A Question of Ethics?’, 112–113. 214 Ibid., 114. 215 Ibid. 216 Leibniz’ principle cited in Arvois and Conrad von Eybesfeld, ‘Plečnik, Vienna, and the Arcana of the Baroque Tradition’, 15. 217 Constant, The Modern Architectural Landscape: 94. 218 Both Allen and de Sola-Morales make reference to Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘distraction’. For de Sola-Morales, this ‘distraction’ possesses the character of ornament—that which ‘enhances or embellishes reality … without presuming to impose itself, to be central, to claim for itself that deference demanded by totality’. de Sola-Morales, Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture: 69–70. For both, distraction manifests as a form of revelatory understanding that is achieved indirectly. See the section ‘Folds’ in this dissertation for more detail.
307 recovery of an authentic experience, or unmasking the simulacrum. Since the power to shock, based on violent juxtaposition and difference, is ultimately lost through habituation, a more nuanced relationship between parts and forms must be sought, one that looks for ‘meaningful differences’ as well as ‘uncanny similarities’.219 He believes that it is not so much forms that matter as the ‘forms between things’.220
Allen asserts that, as a tectonic practice which is necessarily less transparent and fluid than other discursive practices, architecture can only be properly understood within a materially grounded spatial frame.221 Since architectural experience cannot be understood in a singular, all encompassing, instantaneous, revelatory view prefaced on the notion of wholeness the discipline is better served by an approach that allows built forms to be understood through movement and hapticity.222 For Allen, as for Cézanne and Merleau-Ponty, ‘the tactile is a model for the optical, and not vice versa’.223 However, Allen qualifies the sense in which he understands the term ‘tactile’: it is not ‘about a kind of close, attentive, phenomenological connoisseurship of materials’ but, instead, ‘about a kind of unconscious intimacy that we can assume with regard to buildings, such as the way an escalator or handrail directs movement through space, or the way the body loses itself in the rush of an elevator’s drop’.224 Allen claims that a ‘distracted state’ is not one of inattention but rather a state where attention is ‘simultaneously directed and dispersed’.225
Allen acknowledges that Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Coop Himmelblau’s deconstructed architectural forms constitute a form of ‘distraction’ since traditional static space is compromised and habitual perception challenged. However, he submits that the deconstructive spatial model, in many instances, remains too closely bound to, and thus limited by, the idea of the work as an
219 Stan Allen, ‘Dazed and Confused’, Assemblage, 27 (1995): 52. 220 Ibid., 53. 221 Allen writes: ‘Compared to [other discursive] practices, architecture is relatively inert as discourse. It cannot approach the transparency of these other media. And so there is a great temptation to leave architecture behind and move toward these other practices. … In contrast to this attitude, which sees architecture’s materiality as an impediment to be overcome—something that is slowing it down in this world of speed and communication—I have tried to look more openly at the specific opportunities presented by architecture’s material and instrumental properties’—in other words, think of architecture ‘as know how, as a specialised knowledge’. In response to Kenneth Frampton’s distinction between a representational model versus a tectonic model of architectural production, Allen writes, ‘I think material practice implies a more open field. Tectonics is a material practice, but so is topology, so is the art of decorating surfaces’. ———, ‘Article by Stan Allen’, Assemblage, 41 (2000): 8. 222 ———, ‘Dazed and Confused’, 48. 223 Ibid., 50. 224 Ibid., 48–49. 225 Ibid., 48.
308 object. Whilst each of these architects destabilises subjects and objects, the problem remains that, no matter how fractured and fragmented an object, over time its reception becomes muted or worse, rendered trivial or banal. According to Allen, it is only with the operative concept of ‘perception in a state of distraction’ that architectural reception avoids reduction and retains its power.226 He illustrates this point with reference to Mies van der Rohe’s National Gallery and Hans Scharoun’s State Library, both located in the same precinct in Berlin. (Figure 49) While the National Gallery and State Library might be considered typical examples of a unified, formal architecture, and model of fragmentation and dislocation respectively, Allen is critical of this reading, believing it remains at the level of the object. He claims that, by ignoring the way in which a work operates, superficial and misleading conclusions are drawn. Counterintuitively, yet properly, he posits that the work of Mies operates to disjunctively reframe its immediate and more distant surrounds, while Scharoun’s fragmented library attains ‘clarity’ based on the ‘continuity and connection that emerges through … use over time’.227 And so, stylistic debates are effaced.
Figure 49. Hans Scharoun: Staatsbibliothek, Berlin (1967)
Allen’s operative ‘perception in a state of distraction’ is an effect that might be produced within a prosthetic frame, but it does not represent a strategy. It does not illuminate the complex site where architectural bodies and human bodies encounter one another for, as Frascari writes, the process of making meaningful architecture involves both the corporeal body and the architectural
226 Ibid., 52. 227 Ibid.
309 body which, at times, ‘are so near that they merge’, and at other times ‘far apart’; yet, it is ‘[t]his tension between them [that] allows the elaboration of a meaningful constructed world’.228 The prosthetic frame, not only gives substance to the dynamic, convergent and divergent dehiscent space in which the two bodies mingle, but also represents a strategy that allows for specificity and differences in design approach.
Günther Domenig’s architectural intervention, the Documentation Centre at the Nazi Rally Grounds, Nuremburg, is a quasi-parasitic form, an aggressive ‘spear’ shaped circulatory conduit that is at once organic (functionally) and high-tech (materially). The intervention evokes the metaphoric image of an augmentative bodily prosthetic, a connective ‘bypass’ designed to keep crumbling and diseased ‘flesh’ alive.229 (Figure 50)
Figure 50. Günther Domenig: Documentation Centre (2001) Nazi Rally Grounds, Nuremberg
228 Frascari, ‘A New Corporeality of Architecture’, 22. 229 Graeme Brooker defines a ‘diseased’ building as an existing building whose history or narrative has become contaminated by its past (either ideologically or politically), hence he contends Domenig’s Documentation Centre ‘reactivates the narrative of the contaminated place’. Graeme Brooker, ‘Infected Interiors: Remodelling Contaminated Buildings’, IDEA (2006): 6.
310 The Documentation Centre was opened in 2001 and is incorporated into a nineteen thirties Neo- Classical Congress Hall that was never completed.230 The Hall itself was but one element of an architectural assemblage designed to demonstrate, through a combination of architecture and theatre, the power, and ‘permanence and grandeur’ of the Third Reich.231 The affective power of the combined works was deliberate. Built from stone quarried by concentration camp prisoners, the scale of the structures and their settings was designed to overwhelm and diminish the individual, and sublimate any sense of self in order to promote the collective project.232 The manipulation of material, colour and light all served to heighten the bodily experience of awe and spectacle and achieve the ultimate aim of exerting political influence. Today, the Congress Hall embodies a different narrative. Its original agency has been transformed with time and the attendant shift in German cultural, political and social identity.
Constructed principally of glass, steel and concrete, Domenig’s futuristic ‘spear’ generates an intense spatial experience.233 Diagonally piercing the original structure, the intervention is constrained neither vertically nor laterally. (Figure 51) The conduit moves through a sequence of entries and exits; it pierces an external wall only to re-enter through an impressive, unlit meeting hall, before again exiting and reaching its conclusion at a point high above the amphitheater. The airborne structure not only transgresses boundaries but, folds an anxious relation between insides and outsides into vertiginous anxiety. This structure cultivates an uneasy relation between the introduced and the original order.
230 Designed in accordance with a master plan developed by Albert Speer, and constructed by the National Socialists post 1935, the original Hall was never completed. Günther Domenig and Matthias Boeckl, Günther Domenig: Recent Work (New York: Springer, Wein 2005), 232. 231 Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000), 90–91. 232 Sharon Macdonald, ‘Words in Stone?: Agency and Identity in a Nazi Landscape’, Journal of Material Culture 11, 1 (2006): 111. 233 It has been suggested that Günther Domenig’s name for the intervention, ‘spear’, is a pun on the surname of Albert Speer who was the architect of the master plan for the precinct. According to The Economist, ‘Günther Domenig, an Austrian architect has virtually driven a glass and metal stake through the north wing of the massive brick congress hall. He calls it Speer im Speer—a spear into Albert Speer’. ‘A Shift in the Landscape: Atoning for Germany’s Past’, The Economist December 18 (2004): 40. https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2004/12/16/a-shift-in-the-landscape.
311
Figure 51. Günther Domenig: Documentation Centre ground floor plan (2001)
Space is re-defined, made complicated, paradoxically, by a form that is direct. The real and the ideal slip uneasily about one another, recalling the vacillating orders that mark the ornamental surface of Serlio’s bestial gates. For here too, species (the rusticated, decaying, earthbound, dark, prosaic elements and the ideal, contemporary, airborne, light, clear, direct, technological elements) do not blend. The manifest metaphorical term, the contemporary ideal, cannot obscure the occulted term, a diseased monstrous reality (and its shadow, a diseased monstrous ideal) which continues to signify from beyond any linear signifying chain. Here, there is an ongoing struggle with chaos.
Sensual discord is heightened as the linear circulation spine continuously re-frames space. Perceptual distance diverges and converges creating unlikely encounters, approaches, and views that are entirely uncoupled from the original floor plan. In other words, Domenig’s spine operates in the same way as Plečnik’s re-mapping of Prague Castle and Scarpa’s enfolded space about the statue of Cangrande I; it renders that which is ordinarily hidden, visible.
312 Domenig’s intervention creates a disordered ‘bodily’ encounter with the building’s original ‘skins’. The reduced experience of an ideal inside-outside dialectic is replaced with a confusing reality: a thickness, or depth, is introduced. Decayed, profane, ruptured and pitted surfaces and the skin’s ‘deeper attachment to the body’ are revealed with the conduit’s slicing path. At times it is not possible to differentiate between floor, wall, and ceiling. Dissection is used to puncture and penetrate; yet, here there is no possibility of reconstructing ‘clearly articulated forms out of a state of incoherence and confusion’.234 Clear forms do not materialise; there is an oscillation, a tension, between orders that cannot be resolved. As with the unresolved plot of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, there is no closed ending, no ‘culminating flash point of narrative desire’; instead, there is only an ‘ineluctable unendedness, this constitutive remainder, [which] is precisely what the notion of the metonymic function entails’.235
It does not follow that the notion of ornamental prosthesis must be limited to temporal additions or insertions for, as with Lacan’s metonymy, any disruption that occurs in the signifying chain creates a gap and thus a signified effect. Consequently, prosthetically constructed meaning can also be ‘born of the mundane’.236 This idea is illustrated with the multiplied stair-ramp assemblage designed for La Llauna School in Barcelona designed by Enric Miralles and Carme Pinos.237 (Figure 52)
234 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 128. 235 Jackson, The Subject of Modernism: Narrative Alterations in the Fiction of Eliot, Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce: 121. 236 Harry F. Mallgrave and David J. Goodman, An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 175. 237 Stan Allen declares a preference for the work of Enric Miralles, who uses conservative theory in relation to place, tectonics and construction, yet produces architecture that is experimental and original, versus those who harness ambitious theory to produce conventional and highly derivative architecture. Allen, ‘Article by Stan Allen’, 8.
313
Figure 52. Miralles and Pinos: Stair-ramp assemblage, La Llauna School, Barcelona (1984–1986)
Lauren Kogod notes the expressive, anthropomorphic qualities of these circulatory structures and the way in which the elements sculpt space in the manner of Oskar Schlemmer’s ‘Dance of the Slats’.238 According to Kogod, Schlemmer’s constructivist dance was designed to articulate movement and extend the body in three dimensions. And so, she suggests that Miralles’ and Pinos’ assemblage can be construed as both ‘an active body and a site for action’.239
The poetic combination of hybrid elements shift habitual patterns of movement, and so enhance and expand embodied experience. Serres harnesses the example of mountain climbing to illustrate the way in which raising the perceptual awareness of the body through motion unites the senses, and further, unites these ‘federated’ senses with the world.240 The sensory expansion associated with re-framing movement is emphasised with Miralles and Pinos’ multiplied assemblage. The playful, ornamental redundancy transforms the structure into a circulatory
238 Lauren Kogod, ‘A Commentary on the Work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós’, Assemblage, 7 (1988): 110. 239 Ibid. 240 In Variations on the Body Serres submits that ‘climbing reveals space’ for, in this ‘total activity’ in which ‘muscles, nervous, digestive and sympathetic systems are engaging themselves, together and without reservation’, where stone loses its hardness and instead ‘gains an astonishing softness’, a detached panoramic vision is replaced with an expansive form of experiential sight that is iteratively shaped through bodily engagement with the world. Serres asserts that with mountaineering ‘Vision … loses its flyover distance and concerns the entire body … so what, from above, remains spectacle, becomes integrated into the body whose size grows in return, to the gigantic dimensions of the world’. During this activity ‘Sight reposes on touch. Tissues and bones become so elastic I think I’m touching the valley, three thousand meters below, with my fingers, and, already, the peak, before having reached it. While my skin, extensible, is fitting itself closely over the region to the point of covering it, the contemplative or theoretical soul, dormant, is shrinking and taking refuge in the forgetfulness of abstraction. This second vision entirely reverses the flyover kind’. Serres concludes ‘Metamorphosis’ with the claim that ‘Incarnation is the pinnacle of the concrete as well as of the most abstract knowledge’ for, ‘just descended from the summit of the Matterhorn, … I exquisitely mix my inmost extremities, miniscule, with the multiple external tremblings of the treetops’. In this way spaces or ‘habitable places multiply, inside and out, and are knotted together like the various times—my time, the Earth’s, history’s and evolution’s’. Michel Serres, Variations on the Body, trans. Randolph Burks (Minneapolis, Minn.: Univocal, 2011), 8–10, 30.
314 wall.241 The wall not only supports movement in three dimensions, but configures depth through enhanced kinesthetic perception, which again folds the idea of the monster into the idea of prosthesis.
The prolongation of sensory experience associated with the conceptualisation of prosthesis described in this dissertation is expressed with a single metonymic gesture in Christo and Jeanne- Claude’s Big Air Package installed in the Gasometer in Oberhausen (2012–2013).
The Big Air Package is the first of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works able to be experienced both internally and externally. Rising over one hundred metres to fill the entire gas chamber, the intervention is made entirely of a soft white translucent fabric bound with rope stays. (Figure 53)
Figure 53. Christo and Jeanne-Claude: 'Big Air Package' Gasometer, Oberhausen (2013)
241 Kogod, ‘A Commentary on the Work of Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós’, 110.
315 Described as a ‘strangely transitory, tender and almost fragile’ work, the Package immediately invites the substitution of skin for fabric,242 a projection that metonymically forces the ‘abstraction to become figural’.243 The perceptual distance between subject and object is made proximate yet complicated as vision yields to touch. Christo explains:
[W]hen I … obstruct the normal view of things. I am creating something invitational. Using fabric is not like building a brick wall which is by its very nature intimidating or arrogant; fabric is a sensual medium … It is teasing and invitational. And it is also very touchable.244
The first encounter with the Package does not permit a total panoramic view. Since the intervention fills the space proximity is forced, and a sensual encounter becomes inescapable. Perceptual distance is complicated with the uncanny object’s audible ‘breathing’. However, it is upon the threshold, at the point of crossing from the outside to the inside of the Package, that the world shifts on its axis. The internal space, which can be taken in with an all-encompassing gaze, is, paradoxically, overwhelmingly haptic—a hushed, womb-like cathedral. (Figure 54)
Figure 54. Christo and Jeanne- Claude: ‘Big Air Package’ Gasometer, Oberhausen (2013)
242 Matthias Koddenberg, ‘It Boggles the Mind’, in Christo Big Air Package: Christo and Jeanne-Claude Projects 1961–2013, ed. Wolfgang Volz and Peter Pachnicke (Essen: Klartext, 2013), 141. 243 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 128. 244 Koddenberg, ‘It Boggles the Mind’, 142.
316 It is an ambiguous, destabilising and disorienting space, for without ‘natural’ divisions between floor, wall and ceiling there are no visual reference points. The monochromatic translucent fabric allows a diffuse light to penetrate at the object’s apex, but its fuzzy articulation does not permit any rational comprehension of scale. Perceptual paradigms pertaining to the world of the lived are transgressed. Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s prosthetic skin structures a paradoxical, veiled, primordial, vertiginous, magic space, where bodied and disembodied sensations cannot be distinguished. It is an expansive moment, a folding of the skin of the object with the skin of the subject, a sustained moment of depth.
317 Summa
This thesis was conceived in an effort to understand the relation of the body to architecture, of corporeity and its implications for constructing meaningful architectural experience—a form of experience that lies beyond the self-conscious intentions of the architect and the limited vision of the participating subject, and so is expansive. In the Western tradition the relation between body and building has moved from deep intimacy, where built forms were understood as metonyms of the body, to the virtual disappearance of the human subject, ‘slain by … modernist objectivity and postructuralist nihilism’.1 As outlined in the introduction, this profound shift raises questions for architectural practitioners and theorists who seek to conceive and make buildings that evoke an embodied response and permit a form of shared reading.2 Kunze underscores the substance of these questions when he points out that it is the ability of architecture to create meaningful experience that not only imbues it with communicative power but, as a discipline, grants it relevance.3
The figurations of the monster and more contemporaneous prosthesis were harnessed to ‘re-view’ and illuminate this inquiry, it being posited here that these disordered figures are uniquely placed to accomplish such a task. Both figures create an ambiguous (simultaneously porous and opaque) or enigmatic relation between the body subject and world of objects, which imbues them with transformative power. They signify hidden agency, but they also reveal the processes of signification and the relationship between these processes and events. In each instance the figure actualises a sensual form of knowing that is disclosed indirectly through a dynamic revealing and
1 Whiting, ‘Introduction: Subjectifying the Modern’, x. 2 The following questions were raised in the introduction: Is it still possible in a plural, fragmented world defined through selfhood to create architectural experiences that permit a form of shared reading? How can architecture allow individuals to feel, and therefore know things in new ways, expand human horizons, and so become transformative? Is it possible for an embodied architecture of the past to fold into, and somehow illuminate an embodied architecture of the present? And where to begin to find purchase in explicating these questions? 3 Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 51.
319 concealing that resists closure and completion, and so they are perpetually open to the construction of new meanings. It is the ambiguous nature of disordered figures, their full embrace of corporeity, that led Harpham to conclude that one of the ‘paradoxes of wholeness’ is that it can only be ‘imagined or figured … in monstrous or distorted form’.4 While the canonical body remained dominant up until the eighteenth century, it did not signify beyond this time. Accordingly, its ever-present shadow, the monster, is similarly relegated to the past. However, as this dissertation demonstrates, monsters and prosthesis, despite signaling either end of a temporal locus, cross or trespass into opposing domains. The contention that underscores this thesis is that the moments of interpenetration when woven together, not only draw strength from both figural positions, but vitally connect past, present, and future. This temporal linkage which derives points of reference from the past as a basis from which to reconsider the present is important, as it offers a means of countering, in the words of Gregotti, the ‘intangibility of vulgar pluralism’, while at the same time is a stratagem that eschews the narrow recuperation of history associated with ‘nostalgic yearning[s] for ideological certainty’.5
The three intersecting moments that underpin this dissertation’s structure and method each inscribe a communicative and constitutive spatium that draws deeply on the figures’ shared rhetorical foundation, a foundation that binds spatial experience to imagistic language, and sensual notions of skin and touch. The claim made here is that, in combination, these multiplied moments allow for the construction of a rich and expressive frame that derives complexity and value from earlier traditions—not through imitation of form, but rather, through a foundation that draws on process and affect.6
Ornament reveals that monstrous and prosthetic figures first coincide in classical rhetoric, and that they overlap as structures in significant ways. Notwithstanding their dislocation in time, differences related to temporal duration and signifying intensity,7 these figures first share the space of rhetorical ornament. Critically, the ornamentation of classical rhetorical speech established a communicative ground between orator and audience that spoke to the senses.
4 Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature: 55. 5 Gregotti, Inside Architecture: 35–39. 6 Gregotti’s writing has been influential in formulating this position and structure. ———, ‘Mimesis’, 13. 7 Although recognised in ancient rhetorical texts, the ornamental prosthesis comes to prominence in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique first published in 1553. While the ornamental prosthesis enjoys but a relatively brief hiatus, the rhetorical monster’s life has been long and troubled.
320 However, this sensual appeal founds ornament’s inherent structural problematic for, although ornament could be harnessed to persuade and move an audience through a form of rhetorical touching, its sensuousness also harboured the latent potential to overwhelm reasoned thinking. Rhetorical monsters and prostheses were emblematic of this problematic. As inventive mixtures that combined unnatural parts they disrupted unified, natural orders, and so these sensually charged figures that were most deeply invested with the power to arouse were also most deeply invested with the power to confuse. It was decorum that moderated this domain.
With the binding of architecture and rhetoric, the complex attitude toward monstrous rhetorical tropes expands into the architectural domain. In architecture, as with speechmaking, ornament established a communicative ground, although the shape of this ground changes over the course of history and with it, the expressive character of the monster.
Although Vitruvius was the first to fix the monstrous topos in architectural discourse, and thus secure the conceptual link that would eventually be taken up by Renaissance theorists, these figures remained, for the most part, marginalised within what was essentially a recuperative project. In keeping with this principal aim, Vitruvius harnessed rhetoric as a vehicle to introduce ancient Greek architectural terms and techniques into standard Roman discourse.8 While the Roman elite had limited understanding of ancient Greek architecture, they had been trained in rhetoric and so the discipline acts as a bridge that permits access to a foreign domain.9 To this end, Vitruvius adopts Cicero’s notion of decorum, which he transforms into the concept of decor in order to address the appropriateness of content, ethics, and style in architectural works. However, decor manifests as an authoritative set of rules based on identity and likeness, or precedent that does not allow for exception or invention.
While Vitruvius largely derided novel and inventive mixtures that defied logic and common sense, he made space for monstrous mixtures in the context of the mythical origins of the orders. Given his focus on a return to origins this is perhaps unsurprising; however, with this gesture Vitruvius pointedly alludes to the profundity of ornament’s ritualised, embodied beginnings, an idea that draws strength from the placement of these monstrous mythical accounts within his two books on temples.
8 Patterson, ‘What Vitruvius Said’, 358. 9 Ibid.
321 Built almost exclusively for the purpose of sacrifice, the ornamentation of ancient Greek temples, which combined trophies derived from hunting, battle, funerals, and sacrifice into monstrous mixtures, effectively rendered these works a ‘trope of sacrifice’.10 Founding symbolic structures on such profound corporeal acts inevitably produced spatial and material meanings that intimately referenced the body. This not only bound body and building, but connected worshippers through ritual and the communal reading of meaningful architectural signs. However, it was not until some fifteen hundred years later, as humanists sought to process ancient Roman fragments or trophies within an unrelated historical context, that the monster would exert influence over the derivation of architectural forms and, in doing so, again found a powerful space of communion.
Although Alberti, as Vitruvius, was attracted to the writings of Cicero, they drew separate influence. Alberti not only derived his innovative two-part textual form that attributed equal weight to ornament and structure from Cicero, but also his more vital notion of decorum. Significantly, in assigning the principle of decorum to architecture, Alberti ascribed to building, the same requirement for agreement between form and content as applied to human behaviour.11 In this way decorum becomes a moral basis from which to determine the appropriateness of built and decorated forms. It is this conceptualisation of decorum that informed Alberti’s notion of invention, for it permitted the creative interpretation of forms and their ornamentation for the purpose of gesturing and persuading, or inviting spectator participation. It was in the communicative space of the ornamental façade that the revealing and concealing that distinguished monstrous invention found fullest expression.
Grotesque images operate in a manner akin to Giambattista Vico’s first embodied metaphors, or ‘poetic monsters’. As pre-linguistic, embodied signs of communal meaning, poetic monsters were constituted through the direct association of imagistic forms since the first people that created these metaphors were immersed within their worlds, and so were unable to undertake objective, critical reflection. The space in which these tropes operate is not Cartesian space, where an individual stands before their world and surveys it with a panoramic gaze, but an immersive topological space inscribed by the senses—a space in which humans and objects are made
10 Hersey, The lost Meaning of Classical Architecture: Speculations on Ornament from Vitruvius to Venturi: 9. 11 Onians, ‘Alberti and ΦΙΛΑΡΕΤΗ: A Study in Their Sources’, 101.
322 proximate. The nature and significance of this communicative space was explored here with reference to the ideas of Paul Ricoeur who emphasised that, for a metaphoric structure to be considered expansive (or ‘world referencing’), its meaning must lie beyond the self-conscious idea of the creator and the subjective appropriation of the idea by the interpreter.
This thesis posits that the non-hierarchical association of terms that constitute Vico’s poetic monsters are more closely allied to the structure of metonymy, more particularly a Lacanian concept of metonymy, than the structure of contemporary, intelligible metaphors. Frascari notes that with metonymy there is no need to state or imply a connection between forms, as the relation is readily understood, and therefore a shared reading is permitted. In architecture, the expressed metonymical form is principally visual, while the associated, morphological characteristics are perceived indirectly, through the other senses, and so metonymy achieves a depth, or state of embodiment that cannot be realised with intelligible metaphors.12 Rhetorical monsters rely on the metonymic relation to undo established hierarchies and challenge habitual ways of thinking. The claim advanced here, is that the ‘horizontal’ operation of metonymy that is foundational to the expressive power of the monster is also foundational to the expressive power of the prosthetic trope and, further, it is by means of this tropic action that new meanings are created.
The ornamental figurations of the monster and prosthesis coincide during the tumultuous post- Renaissance period during which discourse was being deconstructed and reconstructed. For a short time, both figures signal from within two already diverging domains (rhetoric and science). However, as scientific disciplines assume dominance over rhetoric and the arts, the figures become principally understood in terms of their medical denotation. While this effectively erases the monster, it represents a different kind of problem for the prosthesis for, once medicalised, rhetorical references point exclusively to the term’s new form. While the original ornamental prosthesis, as a superadded attachment to a word body, was an expansive embodied construct, the medical prosthesis is framed more narrowly: augmented parts are defined in dialectic relation to a unified, whole body, whether directly or indirectly. This dualist way of thinking has resulted in the prosthesis being conceived as an ‘unfleshed’, disembodied construct—a conceptualisation that is epitomised with fantastic post-human speculations. And so, this thesis contends it is necessary to consider the prosthesis more broadly, to re-view the figure and its structuration
12 Frascari, ‘A New Corporeality of Architecture’, 22.
323 through the lens of its earlier ornamental denotation in order to counter the abstraction associated with idealism, and allow for an expansive reading.
The series of readings that constitute the second part Skin were selected to give substance to the ambiguous inside/outside continuum and, overlaid with this, the ambivalent medical/rhetorical continuum inscribed by monstrous and prosthetic figures in pre-modern discourse. Through conceptualisations of skin and touch, this part not only discloses the fluid relation that exists between diverse forms of discourse and body and world during this period, but also highlights the critical role that rhetorical language plays in inscribing the topological, sensual domain that in each case is drawn around the skin. Significantly, these notions, which demonstrably impact the practice and experience of architecture, connect with the philosophical notions of Merleau- Ponty’s ‘flesh’ and ‘depth’, together with Serres ‘skin’, and so possess contemporary relevance. Here, there is recognition that the expressive, ‘indirect’ language that is entangled with the senses enacts tangible corporeal effects. This phenomenon is studied in order to posit, in the third part Prosthesis, the notion of prosthetic ornament—an embodied form of metonymy that can, by indirect means, effect changes in the subject through the mediating experience of architecture.
The ambivalent subject–object categories explored in Skin recognise a plurality of relations between body and world. In these studies the gap or difference (ecart) between subject and object is sustained while at the same time orders intertwine through the ‘flesh’ or ‘chiasm’. During the moments of intertwining, distance and envelopment paradoxically combine for, in order to perceive an object it is necessary to be separated from it and, conversely, to identify with an object it is necessary to coincide with it. In each study the subject is enlarged through their perceptual intertwining.13
It is the depth associated with Merleau-Ponty’s flesh that is elaborated with Serres philosophical notion of skin. Depth, which is the spatio-temporal dimension of distance that folds within the chiasm or flesh, is a space that exists simultaneously in the present, past, and future.14 According
13 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 144. 14 ———, Phenomenology of Perception: 308–309.
324 to Merleau-Ponty, depth is disclosed obliquely, by ‘unhearing historicity, advancing through the labyrinth, by detours, transgression, slow encroachment and sudden drives’.15
Serres, as Merleau-Ponty, does not valorise a single space but believes bodies are situated in multiple, varied, and an ever increasing number of spaces, and that a unique blend of spaces characterises, and makes each culture distinct.16 Serres claims it is essential to journey between these various spaces—a movement that can only be achieved with the ‘category of between’.17
The ‘category of between’, of which ‘skin’ is paradigmatic, represents a deliberate attempt by Serres to resist the vertical dimension of positivist critique and its inherent hierarchies. Implied within the concept of hierarchical ordering is the idea that a body of knowledge can ideally be known—that it can be complete or whole. Such ordering is accompanied by the misguided view that knowledge leads to clarity and illumination.18 Serres’ philosophical notion of ‘skin’ recognises that new connections and thickenings are continuously being made and unmade, and that the opacity and confusion associated with non-knowledge is an ever-present shadow that accompanies knowledge formation.19 So, while discourse underpinned by metric theories harness methods that seek the quickest and most direct route to arrive at experience and understanding, Serres, as Merleau-Ponty, recommends that human journeys and experiences be topologically extended, or ‘optimised’, in order to ‘maximise feedback’. Journeys that include shifts in the body’s viewpoint or orientation, maze-like structures that reflect on and fold back over themselves, myth, and poetic language all create opportunities to vary and test concepts.20
Monsters and prostheses are emblematic of, but also instantiate, the ‘category of between’. Critically, as this research reveals, both figures derive their enigmatic character through the inscription of this spatium.
Classical monsters challenged the concept of unity that underpinned metaphysical philosophy and classical aesthetics. They emerged whenever the perceived natural order and its associated established hierarchies were compromised, ideas that had their origin in ancient theories of
15 ———, ‘Eye and Mind’, 189. 16 Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 87–88. 17 Serres, Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy: 45, 46. 18 This idea stems from the conceptualisation of the body as an a-priori structure. It is discussed in more detail in the section ‘Masterful touch’. 19 Gibson, ‘Serres at the Crossroads’, 95. 20 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 143.
325 generation.21 During the pre-modern era, the Aristotelian concept of generation, and the idea that the mother could negatively affect or shape her foetus, combined with an enduring tradition that held the mother’s imagination responsible for producing monstrous offspring.22 Consequently, monstrous births came to be regarded, not only as warnings, but as visible manifestations of maternal desire.23 Yet, the maternal imagination was only one of many factors believed to contribute to monstrous births. Generation theories were also interpreted through the atomist theories of Lucretius, whose perceptual ‘membranes’, or pneuma, relied on the porosity of the mother’s skin for images to be imprinted on her unborn child. However, the porosity that made mothers vulnerable (or transmissive) to simulacral impressions was also considered the means by which individuals learned and acquired knowledge.24 And so, body and mind are united in pre- modern skin: an ambiguous, complex, expressive site that opened the subject to new ‘possibilities’.25
The ‘founding moment of all difference’26 that emerges with the monstrous category described in Plato’s Symposium discloses the stratagem for deriving revelatory experience that is adopted here. In the parable of Aristophanes, ‘original humans’ (or fused couples) are dissected into fragments, or symbolons, sounding the genesis of a desire that will remain unfulfilled since sexual gratification will forever remain a proxy for an original unity that can never again be recovered.27 This parable was not only read as an allegorical expression of the philosopher who sought the token of true knowledge, but was extended by Gadamer to the experience of ‘the beautiful in art’. Gadamer claimed that, as with the ancient Greek token (or symbolon) and allegory, art reveals ‘the whole and holy order of things’28 by secondary means.29 In this context, meaning ‘presents itself’ through a play of revealing and concealing that invites spectator participation. Significantly, this prolonged revealing, because it denies complete understanding, also avoids idealism.30
21 Dorrian, ‘On the Monstrous and the Grotesque’, 310. 22 Huet, Monstrous Imagination: 5–7. 23 Ibid., 6. 24 Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 67–68, 80. 25 Connor, The Book of Skin: 117. 26 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 184. 27 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays: 32. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 32, 47. 30 Ibid., 33–34, 53.
326 This dissertation explores the way in which monsters, expressive skins, and the revelation achieved by secondary means combine in the works of Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio, who effectively elevates inventive ornament into an autonomous discourse. Serlio developed an assemblage strategy that expanded the expressive power of the orders (inventio), and so was able to reveal through the building’s ornamental ‘skin’, the character and nature of the client (imitatio).31 However, Serlio’s exuberant prescription for appropriation was combined with a strategy that embraced the cautions of Horace, and so he amplified an uneasy tension that already existed between these two approaches during the Renaissance.32 This discord manifests most profoundly with the designs for his licentious, bestial gates. However, although these works teeter on the uneasy, perilous edge of monstrosity, they avoid descent into the abyss, for they still bear some resemblance to their patron father. And so, in constructing the communicative space of his façades Serlio relies on the dynamic interpenetration of identity (or resemblance) and difference. In Rustic Portal XXIX this uneasy relation shimmers in the form of a double articulation that recalls the transformative moment during an Ovidian metamorphosis. Monstrous/sensate and refined/intelligible ornamental layers are not arranged hierarchically, nor do they blend; instead, they are perceived through a dynamic merging and separating between two levels of signification.33
Conceptually allied to materialist notions of perception, Serlio’s expressive skin-like ornamental façades participate in a sympathetic cosmos in which all bodies communicate through the animated medium of pneuma.34 Pre-modern bodies extend beyond the skin boundary; they emit and exchange vapours and secretions, so any single body cannot be viewed as entirely discrete from another.35 The fragile skin surface does not demarcate body from world but, rather, continues to express an interior state by means of signs that reveal the ‘complexion of the soul’.36
Although ocular centrism prevailed prior to the Enlightenment, a complex and fluid relation existed between vision, the remaining senses, and diverse forms of discourse during this time. The pre-modern conceptualisation of vision was plural; it encompassed a number of optical
31 Payne, ‘Mescolare, Composti and Monsters in Italian Architectural Theory of the Renaissance’, 279. 32 ———, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance: Architectural Invention, Ornament, and Literary Culture: 121. 33 Rosen, ‘How can we Signify Being? Semiotics and Topological Self Signification’, 259. 34 Shirilan, ‘Francis, Bacon, Robert Burton, and the Thick Skin of the World: Sympathy, Transmission, and the Imaginary Early Modern Skin’, 67. 35 Ibid., 68. 36 Connor, The Book of Skin: 26.
327 traditions. Extramission, the sensory or incarnated optical tradition inherited from ancient Greece, 37 was participative. The eye was believed to both emit and receive light rays, and so vision was construed as a form of touching with the object being viewed. This bi-directionality endowed medieval sight with substantial powers.38 ‘Looking’ could enact an emotional transformation, but it could also exact physical changes; it was both receptive and active.39 The two-way ‘corporeal flux of medieval vision’ converges with Merleau-Ponty’s concept of intertwined, perceptually incarnated ‘flesh’.40 For an incarnated concept of vision, despite distancing, instantiates a distance that remains proximate, subject and object still ‘touch’.
Julie Singer’s critique of the ‘lyric prosthetic’ in which the protagonist’s missing eye was replaced with a poetic structure in a metonymic act of substitution, highlights the ambivalence of medieval ocularity.41 She asserts that, because metonymy and the medical prosthesis share a structural logic, the substitution of one form for the other would have been well understood and readily accepted during the Middle Ages.42 This medieval view of optics does not consider the medical condition of blindness (or sight) in the context of homogeneous discourse, but in a context that is heterogeneous and interconnected.
The interrelation between touch, erotic space and the irrational space of dreams was explored with reference to the syncretic Renaissance architectural treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (strife of love in a dream), a didactic narrative that takes the form of an inventive assemblage. The hybrid (monstrous) structure of the text and its eroticism occurs on many levels. While it was the erotic impulse of desire that drove the protagonist Poliphilo (in pursuit of Polia) toward his sensual encounters with architecture, the narrative is an allegory, and Poliphilo’s search for love was in fact a search for knowledge. However, his desire on both accounts remains unfulfilled. A parallel was drawn between the erotic space constructed within the narrative and Pérez-Gómez’ conceptualisation of Eros, which he describes as a revelatory ‘middle’ space with thickness and depth that holds desire and fulfillment in permanent tension. In the space of Eros there can be no
37 Gadamer, Truth and Method: 122. 38 Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: 71. 39 Ibid., 3. 40 Ibid., 5. 41 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 147–148. 42 Ibid., 19.
328 union (or fulfillment) for the gap, or thickness that reveals self-knowledge and ultimately world knowledge, is irreducible.43
While all of Poliphilo’s senses were stimulated in his search for Polia, it was touch that brought him closest to the moments of fulfillment.44 The sensualism contained in the text has been attributed to Aristotle, for whom the sense of touch via the skin offered an unmediated, or direct relation (like love) between the senses and world of objects. For Aristotle, direct encounters were the primary means by which humans could acquire knowledge of the divine in their lifetime.45 Yet, while the desire to ‘reach out’ and ‘know’ offers pleasure, the fact that desire remains unfulfilled produces pain.46 According to Pérez-Gómez, it is in the liminal zone between pleasure and pain, or by means of the ‘category of between’, that Eros enacts a revelatory, thickened dance between Being and becoming, which is the space where self-understanding is constituted.47
The erotic touch encountered in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is distinguished from the concept of touch associated with agency and epistemological certainty that emerges with the elevation of the anatomical sciences during the early modern period. While the erotic desire that impelled the anatomist toward the acquisition of knowledge by means of masterful touch (touching without being touched) shared something of the desire that drove Poliphilo in pursuit of Polia (knowledge) there was a significant difference for, in the case of the anatomist, there was the promise of fulfillment, or the potential to achieve complete understanding.
Early modern anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius and Helkiah Crooke, who both continued to address two worldviews (metaphysical and scientific), conceived the body as an a priori structure.48 And so, as Crooke’s model of anatomisation, which recognised that partition was required prior to any form of reconstruction being possible,49 comes to stand as a model for acquiring knowledge that is applied to other forms of discourse, an idealised corporeal unity that denies the facts of reality (upheld by both Vesalius and Crooke), projects a false image onto other
43 Pérez-Gómez, ‘The “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning’, 96–97. 44 Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream: 71–72. [§ D8] 45 Smick, ‘Touch in the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili’, 210, 214. 46 Pérez-Gómez, ‘The “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili” by Francesco Colonna: The Erotic Nature of Architectural Meaning’, 96. 47 ———, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 48–51. 48 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 594. 49 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 131–132.
329 domains, and with this, the illusion of epistemological mastery.50 However, during the early modern period the painful facts of death remained ever present despite the overlay of classical corporeal unity and so, as science was not yet completely separated from other forms of discourse, the vision of dissection as violent partition was, as with the unified vision, also transferred into other cultural domains.51 The dark, monstrous side of anatomisation was explored in this dissertation with specific reference to the architectural space of Piranesi.
Notably, this thesis contends that the architectural space revealed in the works of Piranesi represents a hinge about which the figures of the monster and prosthesis turn and fold one into the other.
While Piranesi harnesses a rational and objective epistemology based on the systematic documentation of ancient Roman ruins to his task, he also adopts a conflicting approach that embraces the concept of invention and the logic of anatomisation, not to project a corporeal order onto knowledge or rhetorically ‘open it up’ and create the illusion of mastery, but to disfigure it. Although Piranesi’s disfigured anatomical strategies rely on notions of tactility rather than a valorised concept of vision, this was no masterful touch, for Piranesi’s ambiguous spaces preclude the bifurcation of subject and object.
In the first two of three series of etchings, Vedute di Roma (Roman Views), Antichità Romane (Roman Antiquities), and the Carceri d’Invenzione (Imaginary Prisons) Piranesi applies, according to Stafford, ‘surgical procedures taken … from medical illustrations, to turn the still- living fabric of architecture inside out’.52 Yet, the decayed depictions of ruins, ruined fragments, and architectural wounds, although incomplete parts, are still are able to evoke the reconstitution of an original whole and so remain formally defined. However, there is a significant shift with the Carceri series, as the temporality that defines the earlier series yields to a pre-occupation with space.53 In The Gothic Arch (second state), the classical canons (of proportion, composition, and order) and the rules of classical perspective have been either set aside, or distorted, creating a de- centred, labyrinthine, infinite expanse of arched colonnades, ramps, and stairs. Characterised by
50 Williams, ‘Disfiguring the Body of Knowledge: Anatomical Discourse and Robert Burton’s “The Anatomy of Melancholy”’, 594–595. 51 Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture: 2. 52 Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine: 59. 53 Yourcenar, The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays: 112.
330 unendedness and dislocation, the perspectival vision composed from multiple vanishing points, produces an incoherent and uncertain reality, with no possibility of ever reconnecting fragments into a unified whole.
The de-centred space of the Carceri series heralds the fragmented space of Campo Marzio. According to Tafuri, Campo Marzio marks the decisive historical moment when the part yields to the modern fragment, for this work does not recover and re-assemble ancient parts (or trophies) into inventive hybrids but, instead, contests and re-interprets the past.54 Fragments do not permit a reconstruction of ‘wholeness’, for broken or disfigured beyond recognition they are symbolically, and therefore meaningfully uncoupled from their original contexts.
Vesely correctly asserts that it is only with poetics that the restorative, or symbolic meaning of fragments can be recovered. So meaning, which was once inscribed through a shared reading of rhetorical ornament, must in the present age be accomplished hermeneutically with a tropic reframing that establishes a communicative (or erotic) space between fragments and their common ground.55 Significantly, this thesis contends that by the end of the early modern period, the enigmatic prosthesis, which had become linked with the dissociative and reconstructive processes of medical anatomisation (underpinned by an idealised corporeal unity) that ultimately dissects the world into fragments, also holds the constitutive potential to enact the fragment’s embodied restoration—and it does so because it still retains its earlier, expansive, embodied rhetorical denotation.
The third part Prosthesis demonstrates that Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty and Serres each consider that transformative moments in art, literature, and architecture occur when an individual is subjected to a forced spatial shift, and further, that monstrous and prosthetic figures can effect this shift. The claim elaborated here is that an expanded reading of prosthesis, one that ascribes to an ornamental as well as medicalised denotation, creates an ontological fold through a re-structuring or reimagining of space that is enacted obliquely. Combining the ideas of Lacan and Merleau- Ponty, it is posited that this indirect reading founded on an embodied and expansive form of metonymy, is constitutive. In other words, this mode of structuring architectural space, like the second order reference that Ricoeur associates with the interpretation of texts, discloses ‘new
54 Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development: 14–16. 55 Vesely, Architecture in the Age of Divided Representation: The Question of Creativity in the Shadow of Production: 334.
331 modes of being’, through providing opportunities for the subject to know themselves in new ways, or be ‘enlarged’ by experience.56 In this context, identity is not derived by means of a subjective hermeneutic, but a hermeneutic that has an ontological foundation: understanding emerges through movement between a subject’s mode of Being and the mode of Being revealed with the space of prosthetic ornament.57
Deleuze’s monstrous category—the simulacrum (later labelled ‘assemblage’)—is encountered when individuals relinquish the habitual, lived, spatio-temporal modality that prevents them from properly perceiving their world. Freed from the constraints of representation, the simulacrum exists to make new connections. The nature and implications of this spatial shift in relation to architectural experience, was again, explored through the etchings of Piranesi, whose approach and concerns in the Carceri series, as Stoppani highlights, can be read alongside the ‘smooth space’ of Deleuze’s topological ‘field of immanence’. Within this field, the fleshy bodily boundary is transgressed as it undergoes a continuous process of being made, remade, and unmade by the material forces that act upon it during a continuous becoming.58 Piranesi’s ambiguous spaces, in which the participating spectator moves from a singular, expansive optic spatiality, to a multiplicity of intensive, proximal, haptic spatialities that are relational and qualitative, evokes an in-between state of dynamic change. In this way, architecture, as art, comes to occupy a mediating ground between the realms of the virtual (smooth space) and the actual (striated space). The ability of art (and architecture) to prise open a (chaotic) ground that permits access to the virtual field of univocal Being converges with the way in which creative works permit access to Merleau-Ponty’s disordered reality, ‘brute’ or ‘wild’ Being—the primordial chiasmic condition that pre-exists concept formation and is constitutive of all Being. However, a significant difference remains, for Merleau-Ponty does not effect the complete disappearance of the subject.59
There has been a tendency (most notably from the philosophers themselves) for scholarship to position Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze (and also Serres) at either end of a continuum that sets phenomenological philosophies of transcendence against post-structuralist philosophies of
56 Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 107. 57 Ibid., 108. 58 Stoppani, ‘Translucent and Fluid: Piranesi’s Impossible Plan’, 102–103. 59 See the section, ‘Vico’s epistemology and ontology’.
332 immanence. However, this thesis accepts the position expressed by Reynolds et al., namely that there is benefit, not only in paying attention to correspondences between these thinkers, but in drawing on the strengths of each.60
The fold (and the depth it produces) emerges as a key ontological paradigm in the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze and Serres. While Deleuze is careful to distinguish his folds from those of Merleau-Ponty based on the issue of intentionality,61 there appears to be an inexplicit consensus regarding the fundamental spatial structure of the world from which other spatialities derive. However, the Deleuzian fold that emerged just as computer-aided design was taking hold in architectural practice manifests initially as a literal spatial metaphor. These early architectural manifestations ‘smoothed’ material complexity and consequently produced disembodied spaces that ultimately reinstated a dualist way of thinking. Despite the fact that architectural interpretations of the Deleuzian fold would subsequently reference process rather than form and, notwithstanding Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence on immanent materialism, a tension is introduced with their tendency to valorise smooth space.62 Rosen labels this tendency a form of meta-dualism for, he claims, whenever Deleuze and Guattari posit an opposition, such as identity and difference, being and becoming, unity and multiplicity, they always negate the first term in favour of the second leaving little room for ambiguity.63
The position accepted and argued for here is that, while the form of humanism that ‘adopts centre stage’ is to be eschewed, the situation of the perceiving subject is required to fulfill the ontology of phenomena.64 The significance of monstrous and prosthetic figurations centres on the fact that their rhetorical expression, and the ornamental space they inscribe, relies on the dynamic interplay between subject and object, identity and difference, or proximity and distance in order to effect enlargement or revelation. In the space created by these figurations neither opposing term is privileged over the other, which is not to say that relations are symmetrical or static, new understanding can only occur through the orders’ dynamic interrelation and so an irreducible asymmetry is inevitable. The importance of recognising the position of the perceiving subject is underscored by Serres when he claims that without the self or an ‘internal sense’ we would live
60 Reynolds and Roffe, ‘Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology’, 228. 61 Deleuze, Foucault: 110–112. 62 ———, Difference and Repetition: 53. 63 Rosen, Topologies of the Flesh: A Multidimensional Exploration of the Lifeworld: 16. 64 Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect: 13.
333 on ‘the point of fading away’.65 It is a point also made by Pérez-Gómez who correctly observes that ‘philosophy, science and architectural theory’ could only have been brought into existence by means of self-conscious acts made possible through ‘awareness of a distance between the mind and world that is revealed through desire’—through the dance between Being and becoming.66
On the issue of intentionality, Taylor points out that although Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty both embrace dynamic concepts of divergence (difference versus ecart), Merleau-Ponty’s divergence never loses sight of human ‘involvement in the world’.67 While recognising that Deleuze’s desiring machines can break down sedimented ways of thinking, Taylor takes issue with the arbitrary sign associated with the notion of the eternal return of difference, for this results in a purely relational form no longer delimited by space, identity, truth, or the body, and so is positionless.68 Taylor concludes his critique by reiterating Merleau-Ponty’s caution against the ‘tendency to project ourselves outside our own situation … which ultimately empties itself of content’.69
For Merleau-Ponty, ‘immanence and transcendence are indistinguishable’, and so neither possess an ontological value greater than the other.70 According to Johnson, it is precisely because of Merleau-Ponty’s inclusion of intentionality that his philosophy of the fold (or the chiasm) properly accounts for the crossing over of interiors and exteriors, and so, offers a foundation for understanding the ontological complexity associated with this continuum. However, Dillon properly points out that the ontology of phenomena can only be understood in ‘conjunction’ with their ‘epistemological correlate’71 for, as Merleau-Ponty explains, ‘the perceived world is the always presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence’.72 Yet, Merleau- Ponty does not elaborate the epistemological and material shape of this ambiguous spatium, and so this research harnesses Serres’ philosophy of folded skins and membranes to make the sensual
65 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 22. 66 Pérez-Gómez, Built upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics: 45–47. 67 Taylor, ‘Phantasmic Genealogy’, 157. 68 Ibid., 156–157. 69 Ibid., 158. 70 Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible: 89. 71 Dillon, Merleau-Ponty’s Ontology: 156. See also Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 13. 72 ———, The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics: 13.
334 ground that entwines body and world tangible—to balance the notion of uninterrupted flow with acts of resistance73 and so avoid privileging a situationless, disembodied, shadowless, perpetual becoming.74
Serres recognises the way in which the senses and their milieu, ‘skin’, are fundamentally entangled with inventive language. This interpellation was studied alongside James Elkins’ discourse on ‘pictured’ bodies, and a parallel drawn. Elkins asserts that because of the complex and ambivalent identity humans have with their skins, simplistic conceptualisations and projections do not provide the thickness, or dimensionality that allows the subject to explore and come to know their world.75 As with Elkins, Serres submits that, because our bodies emerge from the tangled ‘state of things’, we do not find understanding through ‘unveiling’, or through ‘removing an obstacle [or] taking away a decoration’.76 He adds that it is only through involvement in this mixture, through an immersive exploration amongst veils that individuals can, as with the space of myth, stray from the rationalist path.77 According to Serres, human journeys (experiences) can only be extended and thus ‘optimised’ by drawing on topological concepts. To perceive only with the eye and mind is, for Serres, to refuse reality. He claims that language associated with the intellect overwhelms us to the extent that we are no longer attuned to the voice of the senses. It is only with the irrational and ‘fabulous’ language of myth and poetry, which refuses prosaic language’s hegemony, that it is possible to recover sensory experience.78 Thus, embodied language can play a role in reuniting subject and world. This research reveals that the discursive, corporeal space inscribed by circuitous and oblique paths, the space of myth, fable, and profound poetry is not only a space shared with monstrous ornament but, more contemporaneously, is a space shared with the complex figuration of the prosthetic.
Drawing on studies undertaken by Vivian Sobchack and Julie Singer, the section ‘Prosthetic ornament’ establishes that through harnessing ornamental rhetorical language to re-embody the medicalised prosthesis the trope can be expanded.
73 Marks, ‘Information and Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics’, 210–211. 74 Connor, ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the Shapes of Thought’, 106. 75 Elkins, Pictures of the Body: Pain and Metamorphosis: 7. 76 Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies: 82. 77 Ibid., 82, 263. 78 Kavanagh, ‘Review of “Les Cinq Sens” by Michel Serres’, 938–939.
335 Herself reliant on a prosthetic device, Sobchack is critical of simplistic conceptualisations that view prostheses as supplements designed to complete defective, or disabled bodies, for she claims these objective views based in Cartesian optics, ignore lived experience. She notes that she herself does not feel incomplete. Drawing on the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur, specifically their recognition that lived experience depends as much on language, in this case rhetorical language, as on bodies for expression, she suggests that the theoretical frame ‘tropological phenomenology’ offers a richer and more responsible discursive tool for critiquing the prosthetic paradigm.79 The subject that lives with prostheses understands the subject/object relation dynamically, by means of the interplay between proximity and distance, a relation that is continuously being deconstructed and reconstructed, a relation that simultaneously incorporates and projects, and so defies simplistic notions of bodily boundary. According to Sobchack, this spatial relation corresponds with the tropic actions of metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche. She notes however, that it is only when the tropes are taken together that they truly express the figurative and dynamically structured ground in which the prosthesis is situated.80
Massumi properly points out that the expansive and constitutive potential of the prosthetic trope cannot be realised so long as it is understood simply as an attachment to the body, for such a view problematically presupposes the body as fixed and pre-determined. He claims that it is only by considering objects and organisms as ‘mutual prostheses’, by ‘reopening [the body’s] relation to things’, that the body can be extended. It is in this sense that the prosthesis recovers its earlier rhetorical denotation as an ornamental addition, rather than augmentation, to the body. This thesis develops this idea through recollection of Singer’s account of the lyric prosthesis and the way in which it turns on the relation between the structures of prosthesis and metonymy.
Although Singer’s lyric prosthesis and metonymy both rely on the same operation of substitution, Singer claims that the lyric prosthesis ultimately fails because the two structures do not properly overlap. She points out that prostheses can never be organically included in the body, whereas metonymy (as defined by Jakobson) is founded on the notion of inclusion. However, it is posited here, that if a Lacanian concept of metonymy is substituted for Jakobson’s, the structures align, for Lacan’s metonymy, just like the medical prosthesis, is founded on an irreconcilable
79 Sobchack, ‘A leg to stand on: Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality’, 18–19. 80 Ibid., 24.
336 alienation, a lack, or gap. In this context, both structures resist organic union. This re-reading of metonymy, and by extension prosthesis, counters the claim of failure because success is not prefaced on metaphoric completion or closure. It resists the closed dialectic frame in which the medical prosthesis operates. It is a re-reading that recognises that the subject might be expanded by a circuitous journey that resists unified completion, an idea that Singer herself alludes to in her concluding comments when she writes that although the lyric prosthesis fails to restore eyesight, it can provide a temporary fix, or healing, which, though fleeting, represents a therapy that only it can provide.81
Both Merleau-Ponty and Lacan recognise the metonymic action of the occulted signifier that accounts for the production of metaphor’s enigmatic power or ‘signified effect’. This effect ‘calls’ from beyond the metaphoric structure and so exists in excess of either the manifest, or occulted term. According to Kunze, it is the reframing of metonymy and metaphor with metonymy at its heart that allows for the type of expansive subjective experience that characterises ‘sites of [architectural] exception’.82 Although this re-framing, which evokes ‘mute’ meaning, is on the side of Lacan’s gaze—a view external to the subject—it occurs in topological rather than perspectival space—and so is a notion that can be read alongside Merleau-Ponty’s ecart.
While noting that the theories of Lacan and Merleau-Ponty share certain structures, including the notion of reversibility, Fielding correctly observes that Lacan makes no place for the body of mundane existence.83 She points out that there is an important difference between Lacan’s external gaze founded on an alienation or a gap, and Merleau-Ponty’s ecart which, although it is a space of separation, is also a space of union. Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeal spatiality, as opposed to the externalised Lacanian gaze, involves a mutual act where the body, by means of perception and movement through space, ‘possesses this world at a distance rather than being possessed by it’.84 For Merleau-Ponty, signification in language needs to move beyond the level of thought and representation into the tissues of the body in order to be corporeally actualised and allow for mutual engendering. This is noteworthy for, if signification is divorced from
81 Singer, Blindness and Therapy in Late Medieval French and Italian Poetry: 186. 82 Kunze, ‘The Unsung Role of Metonymy in Constructing Sites of Exception: Ekphrasis, Divination, Epiphany’, 51. 83 Fielding, ‘Envisioning the Other’, 191. 84 Merleau-Ponty, ‘Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, 104.
337 corporeality, or merely understood as that which lies behind human acts, the ability to commune with others and effect change is limited. Only through intertwining with the world does the corporeal subject remain open to the possibility of expansion.85 And so, in the section ‘prosthetic ornament’ this thesis posits a merger. Lacan’s expansive concept of metonymy with its open spatium of contiguous relations, although accepted, is reinterpreted through the corporeal structure of Merleau-Ponty’s ecart in order to properly explicate the revelatory space of prosthetic ornament.
The notion of prosthetic ornament ‘bodied forth’ in this dissertation is interpreted through a series of case studies in the final section ‘Prosthetic ornament and the space of architecture’. These studies establish that by steering an indirect course through the moments in which monsters and prostheses coincide, a thickened, spatial structure emerges, and together with this, a corporeal strategy for re-framing revelatory, architectural experience. The significance of this embodied frame rests both with its constitutive power and its ability serve as a communicative intermediary that permits a form of shared reading. To find sense in the shared experience of architecture, whether transient, minor, or oblique is significant for, without attribution of value or meaningful relation to place, the self remains not only disassociated from others, but also divorced from broader culture. This diminishes the value of architectural discourse and, moreover, diminishes the will and/or ability of individuals to act with a common purpose.
85 ———, The Visible and the Invisible: 143–144.
338
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