EX LIBRIS: Archaeologies of , Architecture and Deconstruction

This paper explores the force of writing in ar- chitectural criticism, theory and history.Writing often plays the silent other to architecture, being continuously assumed rather than examined. Using the conceit of my library as an archive and repository for architectural and personal mem- ory, this essay in part revisits a critical moment in the late 1980s: the literary turn in architectur- al theory. Interrogating later anthologies des- cribing the transaction between writing, architecture and deconstruction (or post-struc- turalism), I note that the radical writing practices of the late 1980s have been largely excluded and marginalised in later collections of primary texts from the anthologised period. Curiously, when radical writing practice did appear in later anthologies it was conflated with feminist practice. A double marginalisation re- duced the mainstream location of and wayward writing to peripheral positions with seemingly little historical force or influence. This essay argues for attention to the business of writing as an act of theorisation. Work on and with the material of writing is a tactic and mode for producing change in the status quo of received histories and conventions of architectural criticism and writing.

ISSN 1326-4826 print/ISSN 1755-0475 online ª 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2010.524706 ATR 15:3-10 EX LIBRIS

’’ [T]he philosopher reworks elements of a technique (since one must pay in order to mode of discourse which philosophy else- acquire it) which permits the ruling classes where repudiates.’’ to gain ownership of speech.’’ Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Roland Barthes, ‘‘The Old Rhetoric: An Imaginary (1980) (trans. 1989), p. 5. aide-me´moire’’, in The Semiotic Challenge Collected October 1995 (1985) (trans. 1988), pp. 13–14. Collected May 1991 ‘‘[A]ny text is a rewriting of the field or fields of its own emergence . . . It is in the business After buying a book I write my name, city (the of transforming discursive material that, in its site of collection) and date of acquisition into untransformed state, leaves a woman no the front page. The reader’s autograph inscrip- place from which to speak, or nothing to tion is an everyday writing genre. Scratched say.’’ into the book’s crisp, white paper, this second Anne Freadman, ‘‘Sandpaper’’, Southern signature, posterior to the author’s, transforms Review, 16, 1 (1983): 162. Quoted by the surface it impresses. Under the pressure of Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Introduction: Feminism, handwriting the text changes hands, moving Reading, Postmodernism’’, in The Pirate’s from the general collection of bookshops or Fiance´e (1988), p. 3. amazondotcom into a personal collection, Collected March 1988 becoming property. Etched into the ‘‘front matter’’ before the text proper, the name of ‘‘[A] writing subject which has been pro- the reader meets, or even precedes the name duced in diverse encounters with other of the author. In this furrowed space we find discourses, other modes of thought.’’ material traces of the practice of becoming a Meaghan Morris, The Pirate’s Fiance´e writer via reading. Book collections attest to (1988), p. 77. the ways in which writing and knowledge Collected March 1988 formation issue partly from the library of already written texts. The writer’s personal ‘‘For writers are often carried away, as library is a historical archive and metaphor for though by drunkenness, into outbursts of the network of interlocutors who shape emotion which are not relevant to the writing. matter at hand, but are wholly personal, and hence tedious.’’ This paper uses minor writing genres—lists, Longinus, On the Sublime (c.50 BC)in quotations, footnotes, a library inventory and Aristotle, Horace, Longinus: Classical autograph inscriptions—to begin to write a Literary Criticism (trans. 1965), p. 103. memoir of how I came to be a writer. Collected 1983 Historians transform ephemeral, non-literary genres into archives. These transient, everyday ‘‘[I]t (rhetoric) is at once a manual of genres are used to construct the singular, social recipes, inspired by a practice goal, and a biography of an author in accounting for Code, a body of ethical prescriptions influences upon a life; or they present material whose role is to supervise (i.e. to permit for cultural biographies in the data they leave and limit) the ‘deviations’ of emotive about communities of reading, practices of language. . . Rhetoric is that privileged reception and consumption in histories of the

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book. The status and meaning of genre runs as deemed irrelevant, dissonant or drunkenly a constant thread through the weave of this personal (pace Longinus), a description which essay. Genre names the multiplicity of writing. might double as the outline of a feminist project (The personal is political . . .). As Teresa Genres are hybrid, never pure, but the de Lauretis observes, ‘‘Feminism has produced, identification of a text as belonging to one at least for feminists, a political-personal genre rather than another is an important act consciousness of gender’’.2 By displacing these of classification, assigning value and determining genres and the methodologies of their archival interpretation. In rewriting my collection as a interpretation from history to criticism, I use library I give it the status of an archive. them as a tactic to focus on the practice of Importantly for this essay’s focus on writing, writing and the relations between writing and genre collapses the form–content distinction criticism. because these two things are mutually entailed in genre conventions. For example, try writing The library is a space, but staging my scene of a footnote without using standard notational reading already places this essay in a distant, forms. This is not to argue that genre is a stiff uninteresting back room because of its appar- template that inhibits the flexibility of writing. ent failure to address disciplinary protocols. In However, as Meaghan Morris once observed, not being addressed to the apparent subject of some genres are more insistently formalist, that architectural criticism–building—the paper at- is form-determined, than others.1 Morris made tends to writing, the silent subject of ‘‘archi- this remark in an essay on the constraints tectural criticism’’. This subject is silent in part determining newspaper film reviews, as she because a shift in focus to writing runs the risk attempted to make finer distinctions rather of having one’s work ruled out as irrelevant to than read the genre as merely a poor, the discipline of architecture’s tasks, an un- ideologically constrained media instance of balancing of the architecture/writing couple. criticism. This essay will consistently reclassify The ‘‘dramatic’’ coupling Architecture/Writing writing material from one genre to another in is itself a well-rehearsed statement disguising order to change and disable the conventions of itself as a question: how does, how can one, interpretation that can create blind-spots in write on architecture? It is a familiar question, our vision. Books collected with autograph both an opening and a closing, part of that signatures belong to the ‘‘ex libris’’ genre but corpus of statements that constructs what is they are also an inventory of reading practice. knowable, allowable and sayable in an archi- Substituting familiar taxonomic labels with tectural discourse. Writing cannot perform in others shifts the shape and meaning of material the same medium as architecture, and archi- under review. One of the insights generated by tecture and writing are of different media. this practice is this essay’s uncovering of a Their differences of course do not have to be feminist, post-structuralist, architectural writing construed as oppositional, but they are practice. boundaries and relations under constant negotiation. Minor everyday writing genres are unlikely techniques for architectural criticism but their Never a stable medium, writing is a material methods can be pirated to construe connec- practice, emerging and assuming particular tions between material normally excluded, form in conditions of historical specificity.

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How we write, and not merely what we write syllables when two might do and ambivalent on, changes. A library is a useful place, both an in its meaning. It complicates, for good reason, archive and a metaphor for understanding the noun we normally use: writer. But as your the history of writing in the discipline of tongue or ear stumbles over this ugly formation architecture. In this essay my ‘‘biography’’ you attend to it, if only in irritation. These becomes a meditation on current construc- dislocations of our everyday writing practice tions of the late 1980s literary turn in send up signals of an active language, working in architecture and the possibility that these the production of knowledge. The phrase events, and the status of architectural writing ‘‘writing subject’’ is an audible disturbance, in particular, remain an unfinished project. My betraying not the muteness but the noise and ‘‘library’’ becomes a site for analysing the new work of writing’s instruments. Directed dissemination and reception of feminist/‘‘post- towards the structure of writing, the reader is structuralist’’ texts in , Australia called to witness the inventive capacities of through the differentiated geography of language: the art of transformation. Neologisms reception. Criticism is site specific, although and rearrangements of familiar nouns and verbs the geographical contours of knowledge are ‘‘work in the language material itself’’.3 formation can be invisible in the circulation of writing far from its home and origin. Walter Benjamin mischievously described wri- History is full of latent possibilities rather ters as people who write books ‘‘because they than dead ends. My library is mobilised as a are dissatisfied with the books which they site to contest the closure that history could buy but do not like’’.4 Whingeing is one making can bring. Issued from the borders synonym for discontent, criticism another. of accounts of the architectural significance of Benjamin’s aphorism can be generalised as an post-structuralism, my working library is a aspiration for some writers: a double transfor- place where the project was never closed, mation of self and discipline. His phrasing might merely withdrawn from the spotlight. And appear to be a classic restatement of the the books still being there can be taken up power of the author to inaugurate change, but and used anew. the library is his stage for dramatising writers as malcontents. In acknowledging a certain degree Texts, signatures and libraries are places and of intertextuality Benjamin notes the ways in emblems, signifying the labour undertaken by a which the writer writes through and is written critic who practises writing. This work is on by other texts. He observes of the book normally invisible although the working journals collector’s relationship to his objects, ‘‘Not that and notebooks of authors may be published they come alive in him; it is he who lives in later in their careers, after fame or the them’’.5 No author or book is an island. A continual reproduction of their texts and desire to write emerges within an archipelago citation of their proper name has been of culture. For those of us working in the bestowed. This paper is a kind of writing of academy, we swim in the currents of an this process ‘‘from below’’. It attempts, not institutionalised writing practice. Disciplinary necessarily systematically, to historicise the protocols are visible in the choices of form and conditions of my own emergence as a writing content, famously described as ‘‘institutiona- subject. ‘‘Writing Subject’’ is an awkward lised systems of interpretation’’, and, similarly, phrase, ungainly in shape, demanding four codes of conduct govern other material

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structures: apprenticeship, career management does not bear the professional apparatus of and patronage.6 The ‘‘author’s signature is public libraries with their files on borrowers always multiple’’, a phrase that acknowledges and statistical rates of books attracting high use. one’s unknown selves, fellow interlocutors and Instead, wear and tear and the ruins of the everyday political demands that shape corporeal damage remain an indexical trace labour.7 of use and influence. In turning to two texts I remember sharply as magnetic poles of attraction I discover that memory is supported To Begin by material evidence. My copies of Meaghan Morris’ The Pirate’s Fiance´e (collected 1988) Writing/Architecture and Gayatri Spivak’s ‘‘Translator’s Introduction’’ to Derrida’s Of Grammatology (collected 1991) If books are property so is speech. are ruinous. Their physical deterioration in- versely records my own interior expansion as I The white page at the beginning of a book is an moved amongst constellations of reading. almost empty space, a temptation to write rather than a pristine space that cannot be My uptight, inner archivist self diligently re- violated. I read and make marks, drawings of corded the dates of accession of items to my curves, double lines, stars and under-lining. My library collection so that I am able to return to graffiti are standard issue, I discover now, the shelves as a historian; tracing for example, confounding my attachment to these physical patterns of reading practice such as the galaxy traces as evidence of my earlier selves. On of feminist French theory books exploding inspecting the architectural critic John Ruskin’s around June to October 1992 in the feminist margin lines in his 1845 edition of Thomas universe of my collection, or the solid bank of Carlyle’s Past and Present, now in the British post-structuralist literary texts collected from Museum and recently scrutinised by architec- 1989 to 1991. This memoir of my own reading tural historians, I discover short parallel tracks practice is in turn a history of the reception of mapping the atlas of Ruskin’s voyaging. These certain kinds of books at a given historical margin lines were the mountaintops of Ruskin’s moment in architectural culture. journey through the text, but they flummoxed a recent historian who believed that ‘‘central One reads particular books for numerous passages’’ were ignored. Ruskin read differently. agendas. Trained in architectural history and His marginalia were records for posterity, theory in an art history department I came signposting the historical nature of the transac- into Melbourne’s particular urban, architectural tion between a reader and a text.8 The tracks culture as an outsider and was perplexed by of our reading deposit archives for later some of its customary arrangements, including histories. the under-representation of women and a rudimentary public feminist discourse. At the If marking books is one sign of the material same time I was increasingly aware that culture of reading, the residue of turned pages transformations within the discipline of archi- and creased spines is another. I collected and tecture were being driven by new theory read and read and read until I dangerously formations. My own identity formation would dismembered a few treasured texts. My library interlock with a sea change occurring in some

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places within the discipline. This is the point of excavated by this essay because how we write Roland Barthes’ designation of the writer as a now, what form our criticism takes, is inscribed scriptor not an author, transforming the writer by what we (the discipline) have already from the site of origin and the repository of the written. Rewriting the fields from which one’s meaning of a text, into an agent, a site where a own writing emerges may be a tactical number of writings mix.9 The word ‘‘writings’’ response to closure; staring into a discourse stands for many of the things I have outlined or description and failing to find oneself there, above, including disciplinary protocols and but rewriting, even when it renews a rewriting reading practices as well as desire. of twenty years ago, is a synonym for change.

In 1983 the semiotician, literary theorist and critic Anne Freadman remarked of George Reading Anthologies of Readings Sand’s writings, ‘‘[a]ny text is a rewriting of the field or fields of its own emergence . . . It is in ’’[W]hat am I participating in when I read?‘‘ the business of transforming discursive material Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference, that, in its untransformed state, leaves a 198712 woman no place from which to speak, or nothing to say’’.10 Muteness describes a The transformation of the recent present into number of formations, including the endless the recent past is a mode of delineating past repetition of familiar modes of writing—of from present and the field from which this well-worn genres and over-used fables that paper emerges. Inventories and lists are leave a woman literally speechless. It also amongst the earliest genres in the chronology denotes the place of a speaking subject whose converting today into yesterday. This paper speech may rain upon closed ears. Rhetoric, a writes in the margins of the contents page, code whose role is to supervise, permit and itself a list, plotting the contents of a weighty limit. Pace Barthes: ‘‘Rhetoric is that privileged book edited by Michael K. Hays, Architecture technique (since one must pay in order to Theory since 1968 (published in 1998). Scanning acquire it) which permits the ruling classes to Hays’ inventory of key documents and pro- gain ownership of speech’’. Updating Barthes’ jects, comprising that field of ’’architectural pronouncements on classical rhetoric we can theory’’, my memory and his memorial inter- see these comments as interrogations: what sect. I see an inventory of texts from the later counts as speech, for whom and by whom, or 1980s which I can recognise, but one in which I to give it a resonant imagery: what becomes cannot inscribe my own remembrance. Making visible, what is audible?11 How does one find a tracks across the terrain of Hays’ writing I work way to speak if the instruments of speech seem like all readers work upon printed matter. I am maladapted and obstruct entry into the inclined to scribble on and deface its surface charmed circle of fluency? with my own marginalia, to regionalise his history with my terrain, to testify to the In order to rewrite the field from which a difference of my own experience. Writing of, writer emerges the writer must trace that field. we write on. How is a genealogy of critical writing con- structed? Memory, inscriptions and anthologies When I first began reading and thinking for this are the various modes of history telling paper, knowing I wanted to write about reading

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Meaghan Morris and others I worried that one memories of reading this material at the time of, of the numerous ways in which this piece of or soon after publication provide another writing risked being ruled out as irrelevant was shorthand route into the archive. my interest in texts consigned at least a decade ago to the museum of 1980s historical Hays’ collection was by far the largest and artefacts. Hays’ text with its dates and over- perhaps the most prestigious of the three arching chronology (1968–1993) confirms the contemporary architectural theory anthologies historical nature of these writings. Where does issued in the period 1996–1998, a prestige the contemporary begin and end? In memor- enhanced by his status as founding editor of ialising the writings (and sometimes projects) Assemblage and through the book’s MIT Press of Derrida, Eisenman, Tschumi, Wigley and imprint. Hays’ book of transatlantic architectur- Bloomer, as documents of that event termed al theory since 1968 calibrates certain ex- architectural deconstruction indexed to the changes in the North American and western late 1980s, his anthology possesses latent value. European tier one architectural academies. Of It is an instrument of canon formation. My the 20 essays and projects representing the present reception of his text is an interruption, period 1984–1991 in Hays’ text, seven of the an interference with the transmission from reprints engage with ‘‘Derridean’’ deconstruc- anthology into stable historical narrative and tion, and four of these seven with the Eisen- authorised canon. man/Derrida and in part Tschumi interchange. In Kate Nesbitt’s 1996 anthology Theorising a Sylvia Lavin has described the rush of architec- New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of tural anthologies at the turn of the millennium Architectural Theory 1965–1995 the ‘‘Poststruc- as performing a will to closure, although their turalism and Deconstruction‘‘ section is heavy prevalence may attest otherwise, creating a with Tschumi, an interview with Derrida, one long genealogy of theory as the transformative Eisenman essay and another essay on Derrida. force in post-war (American) architectural There is a separate ’’Feminism, Gender and the culture.13 Collections of primary texts keep Problem of the Body’’ section with an essay very recent texts in circulation, so that these each by Bernard Tschumi, Diana Agrest and writings do not have to await the tunnelling Peter Eisenman. These anthologies allow us to activities of future historians on the treasure reflect on the redistribution of post-1950s hunt for archival material. In the ‘‘post-theory’’ French essays outside France, a phenomenon moment of the late 1990s, theory collections generally but problematically described as deposited the work in an accessible public post-structuralism. domain.14 Anthologies of course have numer- ous uses and afterlives. They can perform the Walter Benjamin, unpacking his library, sat first strip mining operation, and it may take amongst half-emptied crates and the packing some time before later prospectors search for boxes released the phantoms of memory. He other primary artefacts from the ‘‘period’’. Hard remembered the many places of book graft can result in discovering less visible or less collecting: the cities, dealers and bookstores, canonical primary material but it demands and the varied domiciles for his texts in a intensive labour and usually entails detailed range of down-at-heel student lodgings. The familiarity with journals, pamphlets, exhibition Mitteleuropa circuit of his collecting and manifestoes and texts from the ‘‘period’’. My residences (Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig,

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etc.) mapped his voyages within a European The slant of rewriting—the angle of the pen— cosmopolitan cartography. My books were is different in each reception. This difference in acquired mostly in Melbourne but sometimes rewriting is not inherently problematic unless in New York, Princeton, Boston, Los Angeles the new iteration/interpretation/difference is and London, in the journeys of an academic disguised and authority and legitimacy sought career in the closing decade of the twentieth for the unstained translation. The critics of the century. In contrast to a general history of Yale group charged the Yale men with an ideas the regional uses of texts, names, institutionalised absorption and eradication of ideas, marks the force of specific and fractious material, thus neutralising challenges localised organisations; the resistance and to the discipline’s centre. North American intervention of networks, institutions deconstruction by this account was an ironic and events in rewriting texts. Place names inversion of the strategic focus of Derrida’s can act as metonyms for geographies of work on institutions. As Derrida remarked in distribution and reception. conversation with an architectural audience at Columbia University in 1992: ‘‘[d]econstruction was not primarily concerned with discourse, United States/French Regional with text in the trivial, traditional sense but with institutions, that is with the solid, real, A recent book-length analysis of the North building of social constructs in which discourse, American reception of Derrida’s texts traces texts, teaching, culture, literature, are pro- the peculiar regional and discipline-specific duced’’.17 Disciplines are also institutions, as are nature of ‘‘deconstruction’s translations’’.15 In the social and conversational networks that contrast to the flattened geography of the circulate and produce reading matter. I have architectural anthologies this text offers an been using ‘‘place’’ and regional location (Yale) understanding of situated reading. Derrida’s as historical facts and metonyms for reception. first public appearance in North America Architectural readings of deconstruction in the occurred at a symposium in 1966 at Johns 1980s concerned themselves with reception in Hopkins University but it was the later one register: the disciplinary difference be- uptake of Derrida’s work by the Yale group tween architecture and philosophy. I will briefly (Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hart- explore this before turning to other modes of man and to a lesser extent Harold Bloom) reception, in which feminism and genre con- which promulgated Derrida’s estate through ventions allow us to see the architecture/ the 1970s and early 1980s. As early as 1980 deconstruction interchange differently. a literary theorist labelled the Yale club’s ‘‘use’’ of Derrida an appropriation, claiming In North America the discipline of architecture, that the clan’s earlier allegiance to ’’formal- like the discipline of literature, found itself ism‘‘ (not my term) merely continued dealing with issues of translation. Although the unrevised.16 The Yale cartel was accused of lineage was shorter (Derrida was invited to de-politicisation (divesting Derrida of his Georgia Tech along with Bernard Tschumi in interest in the institutionalised production of 1976 by Jennifer Bloomer), debates and re- certain significations), although one might marks on the architectural ‘‘mistranslations’’ of argue that this is precisely the site of the Derrida emerged within a few short years of Yale group’s politics. the intense formal interchange period in

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architectural deconstruction (1984–1988). The dialogue of post-structuralism’s difference from scattered remarks on the peculiarly architec- itself within the discipline of architecture: the tural nature of the translation were foot patrols many things that taxonomic label might signify. on the borders of disciplinary difference, The uneven and differing reception of French examining how architecture reconstituted texts in the Anglophone world, and specifically French philosophical and literary writing as the texts produced out of these translations in Architectural.18 Australia, offer a different way of remembering and reviving that architectural moment and of At its boldest these readings claimed that critically reflecting on it. Let me supplement architectural deconstruction was ‘‘non-Derri- Wigley’s sharp observations on the interfer- dean’’, directing attention to the disciplinary ence of disciplines in the translation moments work of transforming and altering material into of deconstruction by examining other modes architectural matter.19 Mark Wigley notably of reception and genre conventions, in order rewrote architecture’s status as a supplement to think about the architecture/deconstruction to outsider discourses such as deconstruction relationship. It occurred differently in Australia or psychoanalysis, where the given terms of the and for myself (and others) in Melbourne. relationship normally construed architecture as the event after the ‘‘idea’s’’ emergence. Wigley tactically responded by locating an architecture An Australian Romance anterior to the emergence. He traced the ways in which architectural metaphors were founda- Wigley discusses disciplines as potent transla- tional to other disciplines such as psycho- tion frameworks, but genre is another mechan- analysis or deconstruction. His readings ism shaping the invisible power in the examined philosophy’s long-standing reliance architecture and philosophy coupling. Like on the metaphorical status of architecture as Peter Eisenman I had a theory romance. ground or foundation, and studied architec- Romance is a genre with conventions for ture’s formative role in the categories of the specifying how differences between people can mirror phase or the fetish, key terms of be conducted. Muse is a conventional, and now psychoanalysis.20 Thus monuments to a one- rather ‘‘old fashioned’’ allegory for the relation way trade (from philosophy to architecture) between source material and the labour of were scribbled on to denote a two-way traffic making. Muses, being divine, semi-divine and and dependant relationship. But we await, still, sometimes ordinary women, of course entail the analysis of institutions, academic appoint- relationships between key protagonists. We ments, institutional politics and career making might imagine Eisenman’s deconstruction as a as the extra-philosophical investments in romance governed by the familiar features of certain modes of post-structuralist theory. the genre. His was a public epistolary affair, (Here lies the terrain of the semi-autobiogra- shaped by the familiar features of the romance phical.) genre: a pair of star-crossed Stars, an American architect and French Philosopher, meet and Since I began writing this essay a small revival of despite numerous obstacles (different conti- interest in ‘‘Derrida’’ and ‘‘deconstruction in nents, different cultures, different disciplines architecture’’ has begun.21 My essay does not and wives) fall for each other and find a way of sit with this recent work but continues the being together. The courtship between Jack

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and Pete was played out in a series of public My choice of genre (romance) and allegorical texts. Like many celebrity marriages it ended in figure (muse) plays on the homosociality of this public tears, when Jack famously wrote Eisen- event, a wry feminist reading sparked by Jeffrey man a ‘‘Dear Pete’’ letter.22 Derrida had been Kipnis’ 1991 essay on this affair which is a long called into architecture to play Muse (inspira- defence of Eisenman against Derrida’s charge tion for design) and ended up becoming a of Eisenman’s ‘‘misreading’’ of ‘‘deconstruction’’. Harpy (an architectural critic). Philosophy had (Derrida’s ‘‘J’accuse’’ is included in the Hays been asked to play the Other, in which theory anthology, although without the public ‘‘corre- is in fact a mirror of the same, and had then spondence’’, the 1990 Assemblage exchanges refused to play this game (‘‘you believe in it, between Derrida and Eisenman occasioning absence, too much’’).23 To rewrite Derrida and Kipnis’ defence, and thus is somewhat devoid Eisenman’s exchange as a romance allows us to of its context and of Derrida’s voice.) In his investigate powerful writing/storytelling con- 1991 rally to Eisenman’s side, Kipnis observes, ventions operating outside and across disci- ‘‘Lest we think his (Derrida’s) chase a matter of plinary boundaries. mere academic exercise, let us eavesdrop on one of the author’s private postcards, sent to a Genre conventions identify the determining, lover but destined for Eisenman’’.24 Seeing formal, working rules that accompany specific these tangled affiliations, with their desire and modes of storytelling. To talk about a powerful disappointments as instances of the romance interlocutor or source may invoke the con- genre reclassifies the archives. They move from ventions of muse and the romance genre the room marked ‘‘history of ideas’’ to the entailed in that relationship. Let me be clear. I feminist room where a scrupulous apparatus am not insisting on a literal romance but has been established for examining modes of pointing to the simple idea that writing involves identification between powerful men. Here the stories, key characters and plots and that these anger and hurt of betrayal puncture the basic demands govern even a mode of writing patrician speaking voices of the interlocutors. (theory) assuming a status outside stories, a point exemplified in Derrida’s own work on Jane Gallop has written most famously about the inevitable force of writing in such a the relations between pedagogy, eroticism, ‘‘rationalist’’, non-literary discipline as philoso- desire and the excitement of coming to phy. By re-classifying the architecture/decon- knowledge. The perversity of the French struction exchange as, in part, a romance, the post-structuralist critique of the status of the identification of genre conventions provides a proper name and the North American, space for a feminist critique. It is a doubly architectural consolidation of Derrida as the tactical strategy. Writing never arrives as a key figure of the proper name, cited and cited useful, neutral instrument but comes coded over again in architecture, might be explained with prior histories. Beyond the singular power in the erotic terms offered by Gallop and those of each author, both ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ genres to which I am about to confess: the desire in corrupt the space of individual autonomy. We that theory transference. Keeping oneself close write in part according to what we already on the heel of the philosopher or feminist know. We are written on by social and cultural writer is also a recourse to a tactic most conventions, including those that seem to be famously at work in Derrida’s writings and extra-architectural. others working on Derrida: the careful,

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prolonged inhabitation of a master (or mis- liberating. I was busy trying to trace various tress) text, so that one name would work on writers in a discourse, reading both French another name. In this way patterns of reading writers and their Anglophone translators and easily slip into patterns of writing. But the muse commentators. Instead of the master name figure is also a sign of the desire operating in Derrida my library has a shelf of Derrida and his alignments with intellectual authority figures: interlocutors (Gasche´, Weber, Gallop, Cle´m- inspiration, awe, affirmation and a creative ent, Cixous, Spivak, Koffman, Le Doeuff, De jump start that propels our own work in Man, Ulmer, Johnson, Kamuf, Culler, Benjamin). I startling and important new directions. did not have to invest in radical differences between particular philosophers as Singular In contrast to Pete, I had more of a quiet Authors and somehow embodiments of Major stalker romance with Meaghan Morris or MM Positions. My chronology was one of discovery as I affectionately refer to her, in that disturbing and pursuit. I was intensely puzzled by the intimacy fans project onto distant stars. My strange architectural chronology which would writer crush uncannily arose from my difficul- later monumentalise Deleuze as a Speaker after ties with the very conditions reproduced in the Derrida and by the spurious emergence of Jack/Peter/Jeff texts: how to find a way through Deleuze as a corrective to Derrida’s errors. In the intense homosociality of architecture, one I contrast I read the careful plotting of different encountered in the then Melbourne architec- French writers, their works, relationships to tural community, but also one structuring the each other and institutional context, in books conditions of architectural discourse (what such as Alice A. Jardine’s Gynesis: Configurations counts, who counts, who listens?). Contingency, of Woman and Modernity (published in 1985 and circumstance and fate, as in most stories, each collected by me in April 1992), or Vincent played a role. Entry to the writers I most Descombes’ study of the post war philosophes needed to read to deal with this problem was (Modern French Philosophy, 1980). solved by local conditions: the circulation of Morris and Elizabeth Grosz (in person and Reading in Australia, I scoured footnotes to text) in the small magazine, art world and find other writers to read. Reading Morris first, Melbourne University humanities departments she introduced me to writers who radically in 1987, 1988 and onwards. The intersection shaped my work, most notably Anne Fread- of post-structuralism, feminism and architec- man, Michelle Le Doeuff and Catherine ture was by and large, in those early years in Cle´ment through her citation and re-reading Melbourne, an affaire des femmes.25 of their texts. Morris thoughtfully appended a bibliography of ‘‘women and post modernism’’ The timing and sequence of reception produce to her Pirate’s Fiance´e introduction. And I different knowledge formations. Discovering combed my way through its lines, like a diligent Derrida first, in 1987/88, would have been a doctoral candidate. different frame for me, rather than finding traces of his project in the feminist texts I was reading at that time. My ‘‘discovery’’ of ‘‘post- Muse Material structuralism’’ via feminism, at some distance removed from France and the Anglophone- Morris was a traditional Muse in being much North American architectural academy was admired, but her alternately sharp, laconic and

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pomposity-puncturing voice drew her away between the everyday world and the way of from the traditionally divine orbit of muses into speaking is very important, particularly for the daily business of confronting disciplinary feminist voices flowing against the current. protocols and rusted-on habits of speaking. Morris was insistently wicked, irreverent and Her constant attention to writing strategies, somewhat disrespectful. She titled her inter- her earthy detonation of apparent problems or rogation/demolition job on Jean Baudrillard crises, ‘‘the impossibility of thinking that’’ and ‘‘Room 101 or a Few Worst Things in the her line-by-line examination of the business of World’’. Puncturing piety marked a feminist constructing a speaking position, exposed the rebellion against certain kinds of implicit sweaty labour of trying to think differently. mastery. Her tone might well have been a Moreover she consistently demonstrated a deliberate recoil against the reverential voices refusenik attitude to disciplinary institutionalisa- advertising the wares of French or continental tion, showing that writing work could issue theory but the use of everyday speech modes from scrutinising expectations about how one was a tactic for disinterring work from the should speak and write. And you find the faint history of ideas genre, from ‘‘schools of fall-out from this here in my adoption of an thought’’ and the saint-like status of certain irreverent tone towards Eisenman and my use thinkers whose prestige deflected critique. She of an unexpected and low literary genre (the shared her strategies of anecdote, allegory and romance) in my tactics of analysis. The terms energy with her French counterparts. For conventionally associated with the transition example Catherine Cle´ment’s The Lives and moment from apprentice to writer (becoming Legends of Jacques Lacan (1981, translated authentic, original, critical, well-read) did not 1983) was written in colloquial French and encompass the range of tactics she taught me: the title’s allusion to the genre of Christian about the politics of how one speaks and hagiography declared its revisionist status. where one speaks from. Her mobility over different genres, each entail- Many of her techniques underlie the moves of ing different speaking voices, was used to this essay but let me focus on one mode: the neutralise and transform dissonant or outsider constitution of a writer’s voice. Her range over or seemingly un-feminist material, to produce tone and genre constructed a mobile relation- unexpected conjunctions and mark the inter- ship to the material she dealt with. In moving section of criticism and political activism. The from close-reading, high-level academic cita- motive force of her criticism was transforma- tion, to anecdotal, idiomatic, funny and caustic tion and feminist theory is a politics of change. modes, she actively constructed both content Her repertoire of techniques marked out a and form as the basis for the material practice larger spatial zone of operation, because her of writing and the substance of criticism. It was project was about the operative use of, dare I an extremely well crafted production of a voice say it, Francophone theory in feminist and leftist on the job. zones in Sydney. The Academy’s borders were expanded ‘‘to include a whole range of activities She demonstrated that one could speak shuttling between pedagogical institutions and intelligently and critically in other guises more the culture industries’’: the range of places connected to the inflections of everyday where we perform and revise and exchange speech. This semblance (for it is crafted) what we know and say.

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I can see now in Morris’ essays in The Pirate’s struction the discipline may have missed one Fiance´e what I did not see in 1988 but which I of the most important forces of that coupling: had unconsciously felt. She was struggling hard the prospect of writing. The unbending gaze of against pieties and rules about what could be feminism and post-structuralism towards writ- said. Her enclosures were the orthodoxies ing was not merely a focus on the me´tier of the promulgated by certain leftist political rhetoric theorist practitioners but, in Freadman’s re- and certain feminist declarations, what she marks, a strategy for producing new speaking called the impossibility of thinking that. And positions; in a discourse which ‘‘in its untrans- the sense of struggle, of finding a way out, formed state, leaves a woman no place from marks the tone of Morris, Cle´ment, Le Doeuff, which to speak, or nothing to say’’. In the Freadman, Cixous. disciplines of philosophy and literature the philosophy/writing coupling examined the mu- tual dependency of the terms, exploring ‘‘the Writing Tactics transgressive borders or margins of tolerance between philosophy and writing’’.27 Derrida’s Through writing, through the hard work of examination of the dependence of philosophic getting the words down, of choosing certain writing on metaphor despite the discipline’s words and refusing others, we address the claims to be an unmediated transmission of discursive conventions that establish the limits ‘‘ideas’’, freed from the taint of poetic or of what counts as critical subject matter or figurative language, was a tour-de-force exam- methodology. A different shape to writing is ple and worth revisiting for architecture. The one tactic for unsettling protocols. Revisions of everyday career politics of patronage and writing strategies make both methodological preferment make it punitive to analyse the and content innovations. One could write a conditions of speaking: what counts as speech, history of writing in the discipline of architec- for whom and by whom, what becomes visible, ture. One of the forces in that history would what is audible. The deconstructive literary be the struggle between those claiming that turn in part traced the conditions and rules writing is a communication tool and those determining speaking even if it could not quite understanding writing as a material force divulge the contemporary players and power whose technology (inscriptive capacity) shapes politics of who speaks, who is attended to. It ‘‘thought’’. Writing is a powerful and dominant was at least an acknowledgement of this apparatus in architecture: noting, circulating, problem and a metaphoric of its contemporary explaining, and attending to certain names and condition. buildings. Although it can make a whipping post for polemic (‘‘Despite the common wisdom of Writing strategies are considered interven- recent history and theory, architecture is a tions. In the 1980s some of the truly inventive verbal, not textual discipline’’, complained writing modes developed in French post- Robert Somol in 2004), ‘‘writing’’ is also a structuralist texts leaked a little into architec- master metaphor for the structures that ture, including Derrida’s painfully bad puns. His organise knowledge.26 piss take on the boosterist effects of so-called criticism, ‘‘Why Peter Eisenman Writes Such Let me suggest provocatively that in the Good Books’’ does not quite come off.28 (No anthologisation of architecture and decon- comment from Jeff here, and this particular

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Derrida piece remains un-anthologised in the Hays’ anthology where the wayward writing millennial collections of architectural theory, tactics of ‘‘post-structuralism’’ achieve notice. In instead relegated to an architectural collection his introduction to Jennifer Bloomer’s ‘‘Abodes of ‘‘non-architectural’’ theorists writing about of Theory and Flesh: Tabbles of Bower’’ essay, architecture and space.)29 These tactics Hays opens his account by situating Bloomer’s refused philosophic conventions, often defied text at the intersection of feminism, architec- the communication paradigm of language, tural theory, deconstruction, psychoanalysis busted rules of aesthetic grace, patrician and literary theory in the 1980s. He begins politeness and norms of elegance or coher- successfully enough by noting that the ‘‘phallo- ency. Of course Derrida’s title also exposed centric codes of analysis and production . . . the public relations/perfunctory purpose of posit the feminine as that condition which is much architectural project description and always already repressed, misrepresented and theory. violated in the very structure of architectural thought’’. Hays observes Bloomer’s call for Much of the deliberate ‘‘folie’’ of the ‘‘post- aminorarchitecture fe´minine following the structuralist’’ project dropped out of the model of l’e´criture fe´minine. Let me contextua- Atlantic architectural translation. Although, not lise Hays’ remarks by offering a feminist quite every piece of writing had its queerness reference work’s definition of this central but straightened. Daniel Libeskind’s lapidary script contested term: can be found in a characteristic piece published in AA Files (May 1984). Here Libeskind mixed e´criture fe´minine is experimental writing, quotations, script writing conventions, lists, initially French, whose impulse is to questions, definitions, French and English, inscribe femininity. It writes that for which literature and philosophy as well as images of there is as yet (in phallocentric culture) collectibles (transfer pottery and dry-goods no language, and which has been margin- tins). His bricolage piece offends any straight- alized, silenced and repressed in the forward demand that writing communicate in masculine symbolic order. Its context is clear English but it might stir even sympathetic the range of feminist moves to produce readers to wonder if too much playful text discursive spaces, in and from which might be tiresome. (Dear readers, you need to feminine difference and desire may be see the images.)30 Libeskind’s brand of ‘‘ficto- creatively articulated . . . aims to articulate criticism’’ is not included in the Hays or Nesbitt embodied female/feminine subjectivity.32 anthologies and surfaces just a little in Charles Jencks’ later, more eclectic and differently So far Hays’ account of Bloomer in received taxonomic collection (Theories and Manifestoes feminist terms is reasonably cohesive and is of Contemporary Architecture) where Libeskind is maintained when he proceeds to a more described thus: ‘‘At times gnomic in his writing, detailed analysis of her writing style: Libeskind uses juxtaposition, oxymoron and paradox as heuristic devices to reach beyond Bloomer’s characteristic excessive pun- the limits of the verbal’’.31 ning, etymological play, and oversupply of texts, and her deconstruction of bound- Jencks’ description of Libeskind’s writing tactics aries between those texts and her is usefully compared with a rare moment in architectural object (‘‘theory and flesh’’)

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refuse traditional modes of presentation play the Other, to be the minority. Bloomer’s and exegesis even at a stylistic level.33 piece is the only notable ‘‘feminist’’ text in the collection. ‘‘A certain metaphor of woman has His account is a fair description of Bloomer’s produced (rather than merely illustrated) a modes and one with which I cannot take issue. discourse that we are obliged ‘historically’ to My problem is that Bloomer is the sole call the discourse of man’’.36 Feminism and monument designating a mode of tactile post-structuralist writing practice are conflated writing, a mode that was resolutely central to together in a kind of double marginality. deconstruction and to French feminism. In being the exception, and through standing in Thus a discourse and tactics shared by a for a way of writing I know to be widespread, number of feminists (Irigaray, Cixous), post- tactical and mainstream to deconstruction, the structuralist philosophers such as Derrida, or tactics of incendiary, innovative writing have collaborations between male and female become a woman’s sign of her otherness. Hays’ writers, such as Cixous and Derrida’s joint description of Bloomer’s techniques and sub- work Veils (1998), and a particular collaged ject matter is equally applicable to another mode of architectural writing (Bloomer, Segr- essay included in Hays’ collection but not est, Libeskind, Bergren, Kipnis), in its public, described in these terms: Robert Segrest’s visible forms drops away.37 The fragmentary 1984 ‘‘The Perimeter Projects: Notes for architectural writing of the later 1980s is Design’’. Some of these interventions might comparable to Cixous’ famous ‘‘Sorties’’.38 be traced to the typographic innovations However, the architectural mode is much produced by French post-structuralism. For more discontinuous, a writing tactic which I example, Derrida’s own writing strategies in think reflects architecture’s permeability to Glas (1974, trans. 1986) and afterwards were many disciplines and source material, and the remarkable.34 Glas had four separate columns problems of suturing the proper architectural in differing font sizes on double-page spreads, canonical texts, and ideas referred to, with with no notes, no chapter headings, no table of these others, including the autobiographical. contents, and it appeared to finish in mid sentence. A number of architectural writers In trying to explain Bloomer as a feminist other than Bloomer, such as Libeskind, Segrest, deconstructionist Hays got a bit tangled up: ‘‘It and even occasional essays by Ann Bergren should be noted that, despite the inscription of and Jeffrey Kipnis, produced collaged, lapidary a specifically feminine discourse, the terms texts characterised by disjunctive quotations, masculine/feminine do not correspond to men/ ruptures, headings, metaphors, allegories, lit- women as strictly biologically conceived’’.39 The erary material and traditionally non-architec- methods invented by post-structuralist philo- tural writing genres such as dialogue and lists.35 sophers like Derrida to disrupt the phallolo- I remember this being fairly virulent and trying gocentrism of philosophy by controversially in architectural studio presentations; both in reading as a Woman or in attention to the wall texts and oral presentations. My problem metaphors of Woman could have been usefully is not really with his description of Bloomer’s mentioned.40 Hays’ confused remarks conflate work but the sole position accorded to the thorny problem of whether gender is Bloomer here as an exponent of the ‘‘ex- culturally or biologically inscribed (or how one cessive’’ text. It is too easy for feminist work to might imagine both together). Moreover he

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combines the problem of origin (is woman a tactics and politics? Moreover, how can the problem of biology or culture?) with the tactic discipline deal with feminism’s assertion that of reading/speaking as the other (the feminine). the place of women might be foundational to This collapse will probably puzzle readers the discipline’s capacity for interrogation? unfamiliar with the complex and heated Feminism’s status as a place of outsider vision feminist debates around essentialism and exceeds the discipline’s relegation of those biology on the one hand and the deliberate claims to marginality. A marginal position tactics of writing and reading as a woman. arguably provides innovation and critique These tactics of trying to read otherwise, (remember the avant-garde?). To use the term against norms, are tactics that of course signify outsider acknowledges that that which was differently when they are attached in architec- once mainstream has been relegated and so ture to the name of Bloomer and not the the struggle over taxonomy and occupation of name of Derrida. Bloomer not Libeskind nor centrality begins again. Segrest nor Derrida here embodies the ‘‘excess’’ of French e´criture. She is the Other. Writing Utopia The solitary remains of Bloomer in this anthology as the sign of feminism, wayward He´le`ne Cixous once declared of writing, writing and architecture fe´minine point to a ‘‘Everyone knows that a place exists which is larger problem in the anthologies under not economically or politically indebted to all interrogation. As one of the sensitive, acute the vileness and compromise. That is not reviewers of this paper observed, a double obliged to reproduce the system. That is occlusion of ‘‘gender and genre’’ can be noted Writing’’.41 One plays with this possibility of in these anthologies: ‘‘Not only were innovative invention and transformation against the sharp textual practices from deconstruction ex- limits of discourses, disciplines and of writing as cluded both through their absence and by the ownership of speech. Or as Meaghan being marked as feminine, but key feminist Morris once demonstrated, a piece of writing texts from architectural culture (both those can be about the scouring effects of a Few of that engaged with deconstruction and those the Worst Things in The World. But disciplines that did not) were excluded’’. We might also move in their focus and sometimes against describe this expulsion as the marginalisation of particular politics and strategies. For complex sexual and textual difference. Difference here reasons beyond the scope of this essay, the marks the on-going work of active agency in deconstruction/architecture focus was lost and, the remaking of categories, taxonomies and with it, its attention to the disjunction of the nomenclature. But the point is well made. This materiality of writing. occlusion is beyond the terrain of an already too large essay but it resonates with the basic Perhaps in disciplines outside literature, the polemic of the paper: feminist reading and first rush of anthologies of ‘‘historical’’ primary innovation is all too easily marginalised in the pieces must automatically pay attention to rush to found mainstream innovation without content rather than form (to revive an negotiating continuing political pressures and established and problematic distinction, col- self-introspection. How might we include, and lapsed by the very material I have been not suppress, the ongoing claims of feminist tracing). The Australian presence of cultural

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studies theorists, geographers and philoso- Demetri Porphyrios once argued that the phers and in particular Meaghan Morris and reconstitution by the writer of the building as Elizabeth Grosz as important sources for a consistent object projected the assumption architectural theory was later internationally of the Architect as Author, possessed of a memorialised in a 2000 anthology Gender deep individual coherency, possessor of a Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduc- ‘‘unity of thought’’.44 Such unity can of course tion.42 The particular force of writing was be modified and challenged by reconstructing under-analysed in the anthology and it was the complexity of architectural process and unable to discuss the impact of Morris and production. But this is a large task and the Grosz et al. on local Australian architectural resources necessary for such projects are theory and history. (I leave a trail of a few often those of the historian (archives: textual, sources here in the footnotes for future oral, drawn) rather than the critic who tends historians.43) These inventive modes of writing to write to the contemporary. and speaking do not have to be ‘‘revived’’, for this is to participate in the historical fiction that Another starting point for the critic is recep- they have been lost. tion. Reception, and the contest or subtle differences over program, use of space and the There are many ways one can use, be engaged meaning of an architectural project, provide with, be moved by and interested in history. A important terrain for architectural historians. conventional and important definition of The shifting tilt of who owns, or defines, or specific historical knowledge is the history of reads an architectural project is much harder a discipline. This existing knowledge is usefully to capture for criticism, with its demand on read as we discover other people’s research, contemporary response, more difficult access insights and experiments. Amongst the many to reception, and with a less available or things that architecturally deconstructive writ- comprehensive ‘‘archive’’ of different voices. ing and other feminist post-stucturalist writing However, new formations are suggesting other achieved was that it worked energetically with ways to generate multiple proper names as different genres (kinds) of texts. It recognised readers and writers working on contemporary that conventions of speaker’s tone, content, buildings, or still-occupied older buildings, language use, word choice and presumed whose meaning remains under negotiation addressee were written into genre forms. and production. The writing practices I have described in this essay were marked by intertextuality—some- A recently founded Melbourne journal Post times physically present in the typographic writes on architecture in different ways. Post arrangements or less obviously, but insistently, attempts to examine architecture post-inhabi- there in the multiple appropriation of genres tation, post the moment of its box-fresh and varied modes of speech. The conjunction newness and with a number of voices of different genres staged the multiple voices of involved. It seeks ‘‘multiple attitudes towards an author, performing the different impulses, architecture’’ and is sold in a range of demands and frictions troubling any unity of bookstores, presumably to elicit a wider self presumed as a necessary prerequisite audience beyond the confines of the archi- to demonstrating an authoritative speaking tectural community. Its call for submissions ran voice. as follows:

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POST is an accessible student-initiated review. In so doing it draws on a general magazine. Architecture journals tradition- notion of writing, outside the oppositions of ally critique buildings just after comple- high and low, using a category that recognises tion, contributing to their portrayal as interviews or questionnaires as writing. These static and uncontaminated objects. POST ‘‘minor’’ writing forms are also governed by sits outside this convention, revisiting genre conventions.47 Post reworks the new spaces. It explores architecture as an work genre, not by ruling it out but by ever-evolving process, acknowledging enlarging its boundaries, and suggesting that that the success of a space largely the category might be invaded by hybridity: depends upon its relationship with the more genres rather than fewer, a pirating of inhabitant. POST aims to represent multi- other techniques and domains. The role ple attitudes towards architecture from played by the Other in conventional architec- inhabitant through to practitioner; archi- tural discourse, as Philosopher, Critic, Muse or tect, developer, builder, artist, interior Scapegoat (capitalism, property developers, designer, writer, etc. We are calling for suburbanite etc.) slips out of its generic submissions based on the theme of the costume. The inventive writing strategies of first issue—social/community housing. the late 1980s were part of a sustained We welcome personal accounts, critique attention to writing, and the questions remain and articles.45 alive: who speaks, in what name do they speak (on whose authority) and on behalf of In its first issue—titled ‘‘(Anti) Social Hous- whom or what do they speak? Deploying ing’’—Post included responses from inhabitants multiple voices, genres and tones was one of the Atherton Garden Estate, a 1960s way to address the unity of a singular voice public housing project in inner city Melbourne. that seems to cover the tracks of these Responses were elicited by letterbox drops questions. To introduce another example or and on-the-spot interviews with the Man and topic now would break the conventions of an Woman in the Street asking for their essay—which in part achieves its force responses to the spaces. In part the magazine through unity of material and structure— was stimulated by an editor’s participation in a whereby a conclusion reunites all of the parts contemporary undergraduate history class of the essay experienced. However, my old within an architecture department in which technology of the library or the multiple she was being trained. The course genres/voices of the deconstructivist essay was explicitly directed towards the under- might be read as a synonym of new social standing of genre conventions as a constraint media forms such as blogs and posts. producing the content and forms of criticism.46 Post This magazine reinvents the genre of archi- tectural criticism by mobilising a wider range This paper has argued both polemically and of genres than those generally made available conventionally that genre counts. Genre spe- for architecture. Using questionnaires, letter cifies, but does not demand, that writing boxing and interviews on the street, the conventions of plot, character choice, symbolic journal challenges the formulaic building status of key figures, or relations between

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characters, in part shape the subject matter at order, how to transform authors, autograph hand. Theory work, or criticism, or history inscriptions and autobiography into some- work can be over-run by pre-existing genre thing else. How to make a unity of the bits conventions which it may choose not to and pieces that comprise the everyday and recognise by operating in the more bland not sequester them from the material ‘‘history of ideas’’ arena. In the flattened, business of writing. A library offers individual universal space of architecture’s reception of filings and provides a disparate but overall philosophy/theory depicted in later antholo- collection: a place for imagining and describ- gies, other forces intervene: geographical ing this movement towards a different reception, history (the timing of reception) memory. and the sometimes invisible structures of writing as a pre-given story-telling relationship. Acknowledgments Whilst history-making offers (temporary) clo- sure it is never too late to re-write and re- Sincere thanks to Dr for adjust the margins. convening a symposium on criticism which unconsciously solicited this essay and my The question of how to speak remains sharp gratitude to my two anonymous referees, in for me: how to rewrite the academic or particular ‘‘Reviewer1’’, for their intelligent journalistic genres in which I practise, how to and careful observations which have left invent methods (usually pirated) in order to an indelible imprint on the final form of this find a way of saying something different. essay. How to run the risk of being ruled out of

Notes

1. Meaghan Morris, ‘‘Indigestion: 4. Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My bridge: Cambridge A Rhetoric of Reviewing’’, Library’’, p. 61. University Press, 2003, pp. in Meaghan Morris, The Pi- 165–168. rate’s Fiance´e,London:Ver- 5. Benjamin, ‘‘Unpacking My so, 1988, pp. 116–121. Library’’, p. 67. 9. Roland Barthes, Image, Mu- Thanks to my anonymous sic, Text, London: Fontana ‘‘Reviewer1’’ who reminded 6. Samuel Weber (ed.), De- Paperbacks, 1977, p. 146. me of this important refer- marcating the Disciplines: Phi- ence. losophy, Literature, Art, 10. Anne Freadman, ‘‘Sandpa- Minneapolis: University per’’, Southern Review, 16, 1 2. Teresa de Lauretis, Tech- of Minnesota Press, 1986, (1983): 162. nologies of Gender: Essays p. i. on Theory, Film and 11. Barthes’ remarks are com- 7. Sneja Gunew (ed.), Feminist Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana parable to Michel Foucault’s Knowledge: Critique and Con- University Press, 1987, p. on the difference between struct, London: Routledge, 114. a history of ideas and the 1990. history of discourses and 3. Anne Freadman, ‘‘Taking the importance of the 8. Brian Hanson, Architects and statement for forming the Things Literally (Sins of My the ‘‘Building World’’ from Old Age)’’, Southern Review, latter: ‘‘what is said about Chambers to Ruskin: Con- something’’. See Anne 18, 2 (1985): 161–188, p. structing Authority, Cam- 170. Freadman, ‘‘On Being Here

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and Still Doing It’’, in 17. Jacques Derrida and 21. See Mark Jarzombek, ‘‘A Peter Botsman, Chris Burns Mark Wigley, ‘‘Jacques Conceptual Introduction to and Peter Hutchings (eds), Derrida: Invitation to A Architecture’’, Log,15(Win- The Foreign Bodies Papers, Discussion, Moderated by ter 2009): 89–98, and Peter Sydney: Local Consumption Mark Wigley’’, D: Columbia Eisenman, ‘‘There are No Publications, 1981, p. 152. Documents of Architecture Corners After Derrida’’, The visible and sayable and Theory, 1 (1992): 7–15, Log, 15 (Winter 2009): descriptors are of course p. 11. 111–119. those of Jacques Rancie`re, The Politics of Aes- 18. See Mark Wigley, ‘‘Decon- 22. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘A Letter to thetics, London: Continuum, structivist Architecture’’, in Peter Eisenman’’, Assemblage, 2004. Philip Johnson and Mark 12 (August 1990): 7–13. Wigley (eds), Deconstructi- vist Architecture, New York: 23. Derrida, ‘‘Letter to Peter 12. Barbara Johnson, A World of Museum of Modern Art, Eisenman’’, p. 7. Difference, Baltimore: The 1988, p. 11: ‘‘A deconstruc- John Hopkins University tive architect is therefore 24. Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘‘Twisting the Press, 1987, p. 7. not one who dismantles Separatrix’’, in Michael K. buildings, but one who Hays (ed.), Architecture The- 13. Sylvia Lavin, ‘‘Theory into locates the inherent dilem- ory since 1968, Cambridge, History or, The Will to mas within buildings’’. MA: The MIT Press, 1998, Anthology’’, Journal of the See also Catharine Ingra- 2000 rpt, p. 711. Society of Architectural Histor- ham, ‘‘The Faults of Archi- ians, 58, 3 (September tecture: Troping the 25. At the symposium that 1999): 494–499. Thanks to Proper’’, Assemblage, 7 (Oc- occasioned this essay, Julian Ari Seligman for suggesting tober 1988): 9. Raxworthy observed that this reference. Peter Connolly, working in 19. This remark is attributed the Landscape Architec- 14. See for example R. E. to Mark Wigley in ture Program at RMIT Somol and Sarah Whiting, Charles Jencks, ‘‘Decon- University was also enga- ‘‘Notes around the Doppler struction At the Tate Gal- ging with post-structuralist Effect as other Moods of lery’’, AD ‘‘Deconstruction in work, but my recollection Modernism’’, Perspecta,33 Architecture’’, 58, 3/4 is that Peter Connolly (2002): 72–77; Reinhold (1988), p. 7. arrived later than the Martin, ‘‘On Theory Critical 1987–92 period I am dis- of What?: Towards a Uto- 20. For the relations between cussing. However, a pian Realism’’, Harvard De- philosophy and architec- longer, historical study sign Magazine, 22 (Spring/ ture, see Mark Wigley, would note the impor- Summer 2005): 1–5; The Architecture of tance of the independent George Baird, ‘‘Criticality Deconstruction: Derrida’s art, writing, architecture and its Discontents’’, Har- Haunt, Cambridge, MA: journal Pataphysics, vard Design Magazine,22 The MIT Press, 1993; founded 1988 and edited (Spring/Summer 2005): and for psychoanalysis by two RMIT architecture 16–21. and architecture, see Mark students. The magazine Wigley, ‘‘Theoretical Slip- linked local and interna- 15. Michael Thomas, The Recep- page’’, Fetish: The Princeton tional currents and a tion of Derrida: Translation Architectural Journal,4 1989 issue included an and Transformation, Hamp- (1992): 89–90, and Mark essay on deconstruction shire: Palgrave Macmillan, Wigley, ‘‘Untitled: The in architecture. 2006, 22–28. Housing of Gender’’, in Beatriz Colomina (ed.), 26. R. E. Somol, ‘‘Pass it on . . .’’, 16. Thomas, Reception of Derri- Sexuality and Space, Log, 3 (Fall 2004): 5. da, 25–28, examines Frank New York: Princeton Archi- Lettrichia’s After the New tectural Press, 1992, pp. 27. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘‘Derrida Criticism published in 1980. 327–389. and the Limits of Philoso-

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phy’’, Thesis Eleven,14 nal, 4 (1992): 130–157, See Joan Kerr, ‘‘Response to (1986): 26–38. and Jeffrey Kipnis, ‘‘Freudian Judith Brine’s Paper’’, Transi- Slippers’’, Fetish: The Prince- tion, 22/23 (Summer 1987): 28. Jacques Derrida, ‘‘Why Peter ton Architectural Journal,4 p. 37; Karen Burns and Eisenman Writes Such Good (1992): 158–173. , ‘‘Women Books’’, in Marco Diani and and Architecture’’ issue, Catherine Ingraham (eds), 36. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Transition, 25 (Winter Reconstructing Architectural ‘‘Displacement and the Dis- 1988); and the essays by Theory, Evanston, IL: North- course of Woman’’, in Mark Mirjana Lozanovska, ‘‘Abjec- western University Press, Krupnick (ed.), Displace- tion and Architecture: The 1989, pp. 99–105. ment: Derrida and After, Migrant House in Multicul- Bloomington: Indiana Uni- tural Australia’’, in G.B. Nal- 29. It is reprinted in Neil Leach versity Press, 1987, p. 169. bantoglu and C.T. Wong (ed.), Rethinking Architecture: (eds), postcolonial space(s), a Reader in Cultural Theory, 37. He´le`ne Cixous and Jacques New York: Princeton Archi- New York: Routledge, Derrida, Veils, Stanford: tectural Press, 1997, pp. 1997, pp. 336–349. Stanford University Press, 101–129, and Karen Burns, 2001. ‘‘A House for Josephine 30. Daniel Libeskind, ‘‘Notes Baker’’, in Nalbantoglu and For A Lecture: ‘Nouvelles 38. He´le`ne Cixous and Cathe- Wong, postcolonial space(s), Impressions D’Architec- rine Cle´ment, The Newly pp. 53–72, originally deliv- ture’’’, AA Files, 6 (May Born Woman, Manchester: ered as conference papers 1984): 3–13. Manchester University in 1993 and published in Press, 1986, and Catherine postcolonial space(s). 31. Charles Jencks and Karl Kropf Cle´ment, Opera or the Un- (eds), Theories and Manifes- doing of Women, London: 44. Demetri Porphyrios, ‘‘Notes toes of Contemporary Architec- Virago Press, 1989. on a Method’’, AD 51, 6/7 ture, Chichester: Wiley- (1981): 98. Academy, 2006, p. 281. 39. Hays, ‘‘Jennifer Bloomer’’, p. 759. 45. The editors of this founding 32. Elizabeth Guild, ‘‘Ecriture issue were Jacqui Alexan- Feminine’’, in Elizabeth 40. Spivak, ‘‘Displacement’’, pp. der, Connie Burgos, Kate Wright (ed.), Feminism and 169–195. Milligan, Tom Morgan and Psychoanalysis A Critical Dic- Daniel Salmon. Jacqui Alex- tionary, Oxford: Basil Black- 41. Cixous and Cle´ment, Newly ander, Connie Burgos, Kate well, 1992, p. 74. Born Woman,p.ix. Milligan, Tom Morgan and Daniel Salmon, POST maga- 33. K. Michael Hays, ‘‘Introduc- 42. Jane Rendell, Barbara Pen- zine, 1, 1 (2007). tion to Jennifer Bloomer, ner and Iain Borden (eds), ‘Abodes of Theory and Gender Space Architecture: 46. Interview with Jacqui Alex- Flesh: Tabbles of Bower’ An Interdisciplinary Introduc- ander August 2009. In this Assemblage 17 (April tion, London: Routledge, course that I ran at RMIT 1992)’’, in Hays (ed.), Archi- 2000. buildings were visited every tecture Theory since 1968, week, tutorials were held Cambridge, MA: The MIT 43. Other Sydney architectural on site and students were Press, 1998, 2000 rpt, p. writers to be added to this asked to write in the genres 759. list would include Sue Best of tour guides and new and Bronwyn Hanna. These building reviews. 34. Jacques Derrida, Glas, Lin- formal notations of course coln: University of Nebras- do not give a sense of the 47. See Anne Freadman, ‘‘Un- ka Press, 1986. events and conversations, titled (On Genre)’’, Cultural the participation of archi- Studies, 2, 4 (1988), 67–99. 35. Ann Bergren, ‘‘Mouseion tectural people in Grosz’s (Muse I Am)’’, Fetish: The seminars, Morris lectures Princeton Architectural Jour- and the milieu of interest.

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