Karen Burns Ex Libris

KAREN BURNS EX LIBRIS: Archaeologies of Feminism, Architecture and Deconstruction This paper explores the force of writing in architectural 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 architectural 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 feminist theory 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 Fianceé (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 Fianceé 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 243 BURNS 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. 244 ATR 15:3-10 EX LIBRIS 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 Melbourne, 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.

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