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ARCHITECTURE and ORDER Approaches to Social Space

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ARCHITECTURE and ORDER Approaches to Social Space More free books @ www.BingEbook.com ARCHITECTURE AND ORDER Approaches to Social Space Michael Parker Pearson and Colin Richards London and New York More free books @ www.BingEbook.com 6 THE SPATIALITY OF THE ROMAN DOMESTIC SETTING: AN INTERPRETATION OF SYMBOLIC CONTENT Clive Knights The undiscoverable house where this lava flower blows, where storms and exhausting bliss are born, when will my search for it cease? 1 Some of the finest examples of Roman domestic architecture that persist in modern times have been found beneath the volcanic debris of the Vesuvian eruption of the year AD 79. Entombed by natural disaster, a segment of first century AD Roman culture has been remarkably preserved in its embodied form, and in a manner which has the potential to provide an enhanced insight into the Roman understanding of the human situation. The extant remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum, in particular, exhibit not only an architectural articulation of space, as understood in our modern sense, but also a degree of pictorial articulation which confounds any attempts at categorization in terms of genre or style that has become the norm in art historical circles. Indeed, the four well-known Pompeian styles of wall painting are just such an attempt at classification which serves to lead the spectator towards preconceptions imposed upon, rather than revealed within, those works. To talk of architecture and to talk of painting in separation is currently a common misdemeanour, and one which is wholly inappropriate in the context of the discussion of symbolic representation and, as I hope to elucidate, in the context of the Roman domestic setting. The onus is on us to interpret rather than to classify—to throw ourselves into the depth of the situation as it is presented by the reality of the Pompeian house as a phenomenon. Our access to its nature and its significance as the result of human creative activity, as a product of ‘poiesis’, rests upon the conservation of the physiognomy of the spatial setting and its current availability for experience. To engage oneself bodily, as it were, in the situational paradigm that we call the Pompeian house is not to attempt a simulation of what it must have been like, in the literal sense, to be a middle-class Roman in the early Empire; but rather, it is to participate in a mode of dealing with being in the world. Authentic understanding, whether of Roman art or of art made yesterday, is never a matter of historical reconstruction, fact upon fact, event after event, piecing together information; it is a matter of revelation by interpretation. Above and beyond the distinguishing idiosyncrasies of a first century AD imperial subject and a twentieth-century democratic citizen a profound identity presides. The possibility of an encounter with the meaning of the Pompeian house is guaranteed by the persistent condition of being mortal, on the earth, beneath the sky, in the face of More free books @ www.BingEbook.com The spatiality of the roman domestic setting: An interpretation of symbolic content 103 unknowingness (Heidegger 1971). The symbolic representations that human beings make for themselves, as embodied in works of poiesis, become the residual evidence of participation in a common field: the cosmos. Through religion, philosophy, politics, art and social conduct a common direction was engendered by Roman culture. The underlying momentum of this imperial intent was a desire to produce the ultimate symbol of cosmic order: the Empire. It is imperative to keep this guiding notion in mind throughout all dealings with particular aspects of Roman culture so that particularities do not cloud the issue of participation. The explicit nature of, for instance, a certain arrangement of public buildings around a square, a certain arrangement of painted figures in a fresco, or a certain arrangement of mythic events in a Virgilian poem, is nothing but the thematization of an implicit predicament: the condition of humanity’s inescapable involvement with the cosmic order of things, its ineluctable situatedness. 2 The Pompeian house, then, is an embodiment of Roman culture; it is a conglomeration of symbols arranged in a way that testifies to a sense of belonging. Its symbolic organization is rooted with a great degree of complexity to its wider field of reference, the city, which in its turn is rooted to its wider field of reference, the Empire, and on to the cosmos. This is not to suggest a series of isolated entities linked by some all- embracing, determinable formulation. The integral rootedness of each mode of embodiment (house, city, empire, if we choose—artificially—to distinguish them) arises from a common urge to address the cosmic order through every avenue of representational possibility. The Pompeian house is not an object amongst others, moulded, smoothed and polished in perfect isolation like some jewel of Roman artistic achievement that we can slip beneath the lens of an analytical microscope. It is the manifestation of a way of being; it is a paradigm of a human way of acting in the face of the ominous insurmountability of the world. Every aspect of the Pompeian house in some way contributes to an immanentization of this transcendent condition. For the sake of common understanding it articulates, expounds and bears witness to the cosmic themes dominating the cultural field in which it participates as an expressive medium. Essentially, to discuss the house is to discuss, indirectly, the cosmos; and it is this discourse, this cosmology, that makes it and any other study of artistic production exhilarating and meaningful. By focusing on any one aspect of the house one finds oneself being drawn into an arena of digression whereby following the paths indicated one is led, in fact, not digressively, but ingressively to a core of significance which imbues each and every aspect with its unique and unchallengeable place in the symbolic network that we call the Pompeian house. To refrain from imposing validity upon the house in accordance with the criterion of objectivity is to remain open to its reality as a setting for the events of human existence. The Pompeian house, like all aspects of Roman architectural reality, is to do with the elaboration of ‘participation’ and ‘passage’. It is about being involved in a ‘movement- through’, whereby the mundane kinetic understanding of movement is, here, an analogical representation of a spiritual movement, that is, the force of divine activity which, in itself, is analogical in the face of the cosmic ‘given’. The notions of divinity and spirituality as manifest in the whole gamut of deities that saturate Roman culture are the first line of defence, so to speak, in the face of transcendence. The naming of the gods and the simultaneous apportioning out of responsibility for the workings of the cosmos More free books @ www.BingEbook.com Architecture and Order 104 (for example, the seasons, the movement of the stars, the passing of night and day, etc.) is the first act of ‘relief’ for humanity from overbearing unknowingness. These gods are perceived as active; they are busy bringing about storms, floods, earthquakes, the destruction of crops, the promotion of war, and so on. Of course, they are also active in preventing these events so long as they receive due recognition and generosity from human beings. In a sense, the creation of the gods is the primal poetic act of humanity— engendering divine personalities whose behaviour is based on the model of cosmic order but whose manifestation is based on the analogy of human action. As such, humanity’s involvement in the acts of the gods and the perpetration of its own conduct ensures a contributory role in the general cosmic process: The cosmos…is neither the external world of objects given to a subject of cognition, nor is it the world that has been created by a world transcendent God. Rather, it is the whole, to pan, of an earth below and a heaven above—of celestial bodies and their movements; of seasonal changes; of fertility rhythms in plant and animal life; of human life, birth and death; and above all…it is a cosmos full of gods. (Voegelin 1974:68) Here, Voegelin alludes to the essential intracosmic ‘one-in-anotherness’ that binds all differential aspects of an experienced reality to a unified cosmic ground: The intracosmic areas of reality, one may say, provide one another with analogies of being whose cosmological validity derives from the experience of an underlying, intangible embracingness, from a something that can supply existence, consubstantiality and order to all areas of reality even though it does not belong as an existent thing to any one of these areas. The cosmos is not a thing among others; it is the background of reality against which all existent things exist; it has reality in the mode of non-existence. Hence, the cosmological play with mutual analogies can not come to rest on a firm basis outside itself; it can do no more than make a particular area of reality transparent for the mystery of existence over the abyss of nonexistence. (ibid.: 68) In this sense, every aspect of Roman culture is involved in making ‘reality transparent for the mystery of existence’. Religion and art overlap in such a way that the distinction becomes purposeless; gods and men participate together in a mutual setting where the action of each is directed towards the attainment of a common understanding, the revelation of cosmic truth. The site of this mutual participation becomes etched out onto the surface of the earth; materiality falls in around activity as it passes through. The passage of being across the face of the terrestrial landscape installs permanent disfigurements; these are the tracks of activity, the response of the material earth to the flux of divine presence as it makes itself known via the motivation of human action towards the cosmic horizon.
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