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83RD ACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORY/THEORYICRITIClSM 1995 177

The and Modern : U nmasking (an Aesthetic of) Abstraction

KATE NESBITT University of Virginia

INTRODUCTION as an architectural issue. Similarly, the subjectivity of beauty's reciprocal, the sublime, led to its demise. This paper proposes that an aesthetic capable of accounting By arguing that the sublime exists incognito in the work for has begun to coalesce in the of the avant-garde, one can begin to re-situate postmodern period. Its fundamental category is the sub- lime.' The significance of the sublime as a subject of and the architectural discourse, and to displace formalism. (I will review the received formal preoccupations of theory architecture lies in its conceptual reach or its spiritual during only as they affect the ~ublime.~)The dimension. The sublime refers to immense ideas like space, potency of the sublime as a transgressor of periods and time, death, and the divine. disciplines is obvious in recent writing on this rehabilitated The 18th century saw the development of based subject. In , the sublime presents itself on a dialectic of the sublime and the beautiful, orginating in today in several guises, including the uncanny and the literature and crossing disciplinary boundaries to consider grotesque. These psychoanalytic and aesthetic categories, as the visual . Kant's and Burke's treatises2 form the basis used by Anthony Vidler and , will be read of my discussion of these aesthetic concerns. Their catego- against Lyotard's postrnodern model in a project of revision. ries of the beautiful and the sublime were applied to the study The latter's notion of the sublime as questioning the founda- of nature, to the character of men, and to their artistic output, tions of representational will be examined as part of in particular, , painting, and architecture. Roughly a definition of the contemporary sublime. These recent contemporary with these philosophical treatises, the archi- theoretical positions are fundamental in constituting a mod- tects E.L. Boullee and C.N. Ledoux advocated an architec- ernist aesthetic. They remove the mask of avant-garde ture of the sublime, expressed in a reductive architectural repression which has limited our ability to see modem language (albeit neoclassical) which led to their designation architecture in terms of a continuous dialectic of the sublime as the "first modern^."^ and the beautiful. Around the turn of this century, avant-garde challenges to I am suggesting that the sublime offers an alternate, the pictorial traditions of painting were mirrored by aesthetic route to understanding . The recupera- architecture's rejection of the classical language and of tion of the sublime (and therefore of the beautiful7) as historical eclecticism in favor of a new expression. The outlined herein will allow a significant opening up of the abstraction of form adopted by both avant-gardes did not architectural discourse. signal an absence of content, but rather, a less accessible content. Jean-Francois Lyotard has characterized this con- PHENOMENOLOGY tent in painting as "presenting the unpresentable," the inde- terminate, or the n~ndemonstrable.~ Contemporary architectural theory is heavily influenced by In 20th century architecture, any mention of the sublime the philosophical domain of phenomenology, especially the and the beautiful seems to have been deliberately repressed work of and Gaston Ba~helard,~which by theorists and designers anxious to distance themselves laid the groundwork for the emerging aesthetic of the from the recent past.' To assert a radical break with the contemporary sublime. Phenomenological approaches have history of the discipline, the terms of aesthetic theory had to foregrounded human sensory and spiritual apprehension of be changed. A modernist polemic calling for an aesthetic phenomena, via a process described as the "renovation of the tabula (of abstraction) and the application of scientific body".9 Visual, tactile, olfactory, and aural sensations are principles to design supplanted the preceding . Posi- the visceral part of the aesthetic reception of architecture, a tivist emphasis on rationality and function marginalized medium distinguished by its three-dimensional presence. 178 83RDACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORYTTHEORY/CRITIClSM 1995

Recently, the bodily and unconscious connection to ar- Beautiful and the Sublime. Their of the chitecture has again become an object of study. Juhani sublime operated to "restrict the type and forms of experi- Pallasmaa addresses the psychic apprehension of architec- ence that are held to be generative of sublime sensation"" ture by "opening up a view into a second of percep- and became the foundation for later definitions. tion, dreams, forgotten memories and imagination."1° This Typical of the formulations of both Burke and Kant is the is accomplished in his work through an abstract "architecture pairing of the term sublime with that of the beautiful. of silence."" Pallasmaa's investigation of the unconscious Sometimes presented as opposites, and other times as poten- parallels Freud's idea of the uncanny, while his architecture tially co-existent qualities, the sublime is always considered of silence resonates with the sublime. to be a higher order emotion by romanticists. As Kant said: Along similar lines, phenomenologist Alberto Perez- "The sublime moves, the beautiful charms."18 For him, the Gomez claims that the apprehension of architecture as beautiful is the result of the mind working harmoniously meaningful requires a "metaphysical dimension" which while attending an object.I9 It is easily distinguished from the "reveals the presence of Being, [or] the presence of the experience of the sublime which is an irrational, violent invisible within the world of the everyday."12 (There is a reaction. strong correspondence between his definition of the meta- Burke's definition of the beautiful is as measured as his physical in architecture and the contemporary sublime, sublime is visceral: "beauty is some in bodies, acting including Lyotard's claims about modernist, abstract paint- mechanically upon the human mind by the intervention of ing.) But for Perez-Gomez, the invisible is to be signified the senses."20 On the other hand, his sublime is a curious with a symbolic, figurative architecture.I3Following Boullee, mingling of pain and pleasure provoked by terror and awe in I would argue that the abstraction of the sublime, "deprived the face of ovenvhelrmng greatness. One fears deprivation of all " as Boullee said,14offers a more promising of life, company, light, or freedom. The pleasure comes in existential foothold than a representational architecture. the suspension of the threat of deprivation. Burke and Kant thus explain the impact of the sublime in MAN AND NATURE terms of the primary motivation of men: self-preservation, which can be manifested as fear. Beauty, on the other hand, A long-standing philosophical problem which has been inspires only a secondary motivation: love. In addition to the highlighted by phenomenologists is the question of the fury of nature, representing the effects of ravaging time and relationship between man and nature. Nature as "the other" the depiction of mythological sites are common ways to in relation to culture has been a stabilizing theme for invoke the romantic sublime. English garden follies and the centuries. In fact prior to industrialization, the production of Romantic painting tradition epitomize the fascination with meaning in architecture relied upon structured references to the ruin and with sacred places. More generally, Burke cites or associations with nature. Even today, architects' work the following absolutes as sources of the sublime: infinity, literally and symbolically overcomes the forces of nature to vastness, magnificence, and obscurity. One might extend to provide shelter. The human struggle with a threatening the political arena Burke's statement: "I know of nothing Nature also characterizes Enlightenment ideas of the terrify- which is sublime which is not connected to the sense of ing sublime. Thus, aesthetics also provides a philosophical power."21 framework to handle such issues. It is clear that in architecture, manipulation of scale, monumentality, and light are important to evoke the sub- AESTHETICS lime. Etienne-Louis Boullee's unbuilt work, comprising an Aesthetics analyzes a or architecture "in regard "architecture of shadows," is one of the first deliberate to form and sensory qualities, its processes of production," investigations of the application of Burke's sublime to and its reception, and proposes a theory of with stan- ar~hitecture.~~The Reign of Terror clearly influenced the dards for j~dgement.'~According to Kant, the nature of imprisoned Boullee in his designs for institutions of the state. aesthetic response is disinterested appreciation: a direct, Projected such as the National Library relied on a active, and unmediated experience.16 Let us now focus minimalist palette and endless repetition of similar elements for their power. briefly on the mid 18th century consideration of the relation- Similarly, Ledoux's many unbuilt works relied upon an ship between the sublime and the beautiful. This discussion austere language of facade and rigorously pure geometry in will be followed by sections on the recent postulations of plan and section. He investigated the sublime power of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Anthony Vidler, and Peter Eisenman. composition with platonic solids in projects like the cannon forge. Ledoux's architecture parlante developed to an BURKE AND KANT: extreme the 18th century notion of ~haracter2~,the idea of an THE 18TH CENTURY SUBLIME appropriate expression for each type. A number of The origins of the Romantic sublime can be found in Burke's his projects consciously pursued a sublime expression. Pris- A Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and ons, for instance, should inspire fear of crime and imprison- the Beautiful, and Kant's Observations on the Feeling of the ment. The Royal Saltworks were designed to inspire respect 83RDACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORYTTHEORYICRITICISM 1995 179 and fear of the director in the king's laborers. the unpresentable. Thus modem painting should avoid In the modem, industrial world the power of the machine figuration but not allusion, "a form ofexpression indispensible and limitless technology came to be perceived as sublime. to works which belong to an aesthetic of the sublime."34 G.B. Piranesi's shadowy etchings ofthe Carceri illustrate the There is one other aspect of the sublime which Lyotard potential menace of technology. touches on: the importance of time. Visual representations As in Piranesi's chiaroscuro, clarity for Burke is antitheti- of the passage of time were an important motif of the cal to the passions.24He explains that it is through obscurity romantic sublime. For modernists, he says, "The avant- of language that poetry incites the imaginati~n.~~Burke's garde task is to undo spiritual assumptions regarding time. obscurity becomes important for the avant-garde because it The sense of the sublime is the name of this di~mantling."~~ creates distance from the subject and defamiliarizes the Lyotard advocates a critical position, resisting the corrup- artistic object and medium. tion of the marketplace, workmg from within the discipline to focus on the most essential questions of contemporary LYOTARD artistic practice. The historical program of art, creating images of order and identity for a unified cultural commu- Lyotard has read this emphasis on poetic obscurity as a nity, is no longer possible or relevant. Instead, a self- critique of the limitations of figurative representation in referential focus will allow a different role for avant-garde mimetic painting.26The rejection of figuration indicates that art: "a metaphysical program of making the world transpar- abstraction will be hndamental to Lyotard's modernist ent through reason."3h aesthetic of the sublime. Since the late 1970's Lyotard has been writing , based on Burke and Kant, in APPLICATION TO MODERN ARCHITECTURE relation to avant-garde art.27We shall examine his claim that the sublime is the one artistic sensibility characteristic of the The application of Lyotard's ideas to architecture would result in a critical attitude toward the architectural canon, In the context of his discussion, which I will extend to examplars of which might never manifest themselves di- architecture, Lyotard's sublime derives from facing the rectly in the work. The content of the work instead, would essential question for the discipline: What is painting? He be the asking of fundamental questions and eventually, argues that these difficultphilosophical investigations should definitions of a new societal role for architecture. be the subject of twentieth century painting, instead of In order to extend Lyotard's concepts hrther, architec- mimetic representation or narrative. This type of inquiry tural theory will need to determine what problems architec- implicitly acknowledges the history of the discipline, with- ture faces today and what would constitute the equivalents to out resulting in resemblance to precedents. The modern pictorial rules in this discipline. What is absence of form, or aesthetic question is not "What is beautihl?' but "What can negative representation, in architecture? What is the inde- be said to be art?"29 These statements suggest that the terminate? Not building? Structure, or the limits of space? question of beauty is somehow outmoded. Does this kind of questioning constitute a deconstructionist Lyotard notes that modern artists were forced into reflect- undermining of the foundations of the discipline? ing on their discipline by the challenge of photography and the technological of its beauty. If the camera THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS could master all the pictorial rules, then painters would IN ARCHITECTURE subvert them. Thus came subversions of the traditions of Technology linear perspective, tonality, the frame, surface, and medium Advanced technology has changed the relationship between of painting.30 The sublime arises from the frustration of man and nature by reducing the urgency of our survival attempting to present the unpresentable, the indeterminate, struggle. It has even been suggested by deconstructionists or the invisible within the visible realm of art. The indeter- that the ancient naturelculture opposition has been dis- minate might be color for painting, silence for music, or placed, rendered irrelevant. If this is true, what stands in its stillness for dancers. The commitment to critical work place as the other in relation to architecture? Having evident in the twentieth century avant-garde produced what conquered nature, the challenge now comes from the oppo- Lyotard calls a "heroic" century of Western ~ainting.~'He site end of the spectrum, from man's knowledge and its continues: "The spirit of the times is surely ... that of the instrumentalized form, technology. immanent sublime, that of alluding to the n~ndemonstrable."~~ Technology in the form of a hyperreal, televisual culture Abstraction, or negative representation in Kant's terms, is comprises one of two threats to architecture's provision of a the vehicle to demonstrate the presence of absolutes such as physical center of culture. The dematerialization of commu- infinity, the divine, or the end of history. (Even though nication of the electronic global village challenges the Lyotard recognizes that "the inadequacy of images, as solidity and permanence symbolized by architectural pro- negative signs, [will only] attest to the immense power of duction. As Peter Eisenman says, "The electronic Ideas."33) He defends the use of abstraction on the basis of directs a powerhl challenge to architecture because it de- Kant's notion that "absence of form" is a possible index to fines reality in terms of media and simulation, it values 180 83RD ACSA ANNUAL MEETING HISTORYTTHEORY/CRlTIClSM 1995 appearance over e~istence.")~So making or marking a ARCHITECTURAL THEORISTS: physical place, expressive of an ordered public realm, may VIDLER AND EISENMAN be redundant or rhetorical in the future. Following psychoanalytic and deconstructionist models, several theoreticians argue that the route to a revitalized Social Issues: Diversity and Community architecture requires uncovering its repressed aspects.42 The second current challenge is to the notion of community Within the concealed material, vulnerable assumptions are and the attainability of a cultural consensus which might be often found about the foundations of the discipline. For meaningfully represented in architectural language. What Anthony Vidler and Peter Eisenman, the uncanny and gro- will be represented and will the language be understood by tesque are buried. Vidler says, "the uncanny in this context all? Thus the possibility of communicating the significance would be ... the return ofthe body into an architecture that had of place or any other meaning, fundamental concerns of our repressed its conscious presence."43 Clearly related to the discipline for centuries, are endangered by societal changes uncanny is Eisenrnan's notion of the grotesque as "the and the collapse of the so-called grand narratives. condition of the always present or the already within that the beautiful in architecture attempts to repress."44 Their ideas THE LANGUAGE OF MODERN ARCHITECTURE start to define the contemporary sublime. Throughout the twentieth century, an aesthetic of the beau- tiful and the sublime in architecture has been suppressed by VIDLER AND THE UNCANNY several alternative formal issues. First, the development of An astute scholar of architecture from the 18th century to the a new architectural language was problematized by the present, Vidler has completed a study of the architectural avant-garde in the categories of representation versus ab- uncanny.45 The uncanny as described by Freud is the straction. For the most part, the content to be communicated rediscovery of something familiar which has been previ- by architecture was a limited expression of function. Mi- ously repressed; it is the uneasy feeling of the presence of an metic representation was rejected in favor of the autonomy absence. The mix of the known and familiar and of the of form and an internal, self-referential discourse. strange surfaces in the German word for the uncanny, which Next, architecture was preoccupied with the translation of literally translated is "unhomely." One common theme is the spatial constructs from avant-garde painting like transpar- idea of the human body in fragment~.~"idler sees a ency and layering. Third, the 19th century legacy of "deliberate attempt to address the status of the body in post- typology repressed aesthetics with arguments about design modem theory"47which is necessitated by the fact that, as he method in terms of imitation versus inventi~n.'~ says, "The body in disintegration is in a very real sense the image of the notion of humanist in disarray."48 His THE SUBLIME AND MODERN ARCHITECTURE uncanny is the terrifying side of the sublime, with the fear The significance of the sublime for twentieth century archi- being privation of the integrated body. tecture is finally emerging in critical writing from recent The uncanny can also be considered at the social scale. years. The sudden rebirth of interest in the sublime is Freud described it as a product of the anxiety of life in the explicable on a number of levels. First is the emphasis on the turn-of-the-century urban milieu. Vidler hails the uncanny knowledge of architecture through phenomenology, which "as a dominant constituent of modem estrangement and foregrounds a fundamental issue in aesthetics: the effect on alienati~n,"~~in the same way that Lyotard sees the sublime the viewer of a work of architecture. In the case of the as the essential modernist sensibility. In the "attempt to sublime, the experience is visceral and spiritual. The destabilize the conventions oftraditional architecture," Vidler immanent sublime is the path through which architecture notes that "critical theories of estrangement, linguistic inde- achieves metaphysical import. Furthermore, it allows the terminacy, and representation have served as vehicles for recuperation of the other term in the pair: beauty. In recent avant-garde architectural experi~nent."~~ theory, beauty is reemerging in the context of the sublime. For instance, Bob McAnulty cites the recent theoretical One might expect that given its privileged position in investigations of architects Diller and Scofidio, which delve Enlightenment theory, the sublime would repress beauty. into the spatial structures and social practices that order our But for the provocative theorist Peter Eisenman, the beauti- bodies, such as habits of dome~ticity.~'The results, exhibited ful has instead been a repressor, dominating the grotesque.39 as museum installations, are decidedly uncanny, suggesting Perhaps Diana Agrest's dialectical stance offers a model for a haunted house, or one which operates in a different life- reconfigunng the relationship between these two aesthetic world. Dining chairs and a table hover above the floor, a categories: if the beautiful is the "normative" discourse of double bed is cleaved along its length and hinged into two aesthetics, the sublime can be seen as an "analytical and parts. In choosing the house as the site of their work, the exploratory discourse"40 in opposition to it. This notion architects defamiliarize the homeliest of spaces with would coincide with another description of the sublime as a unhomely effect. "self-transforming discourse" which influenced the con- Vidler makes a number of important connections between struction of the modern ~ubject.~' the uncanny and the sublime. First, his "spatial uncanny" is dependent on and an outgrowth of Burke's articulation of the the sublime indeterminacy of avant-garde painting, the sublime.52Second, he identifies an "aesthetic dimension,"of urbanlspatial uncanny, or the grotesque in architecture. the uncanny, which consists of "a representation of a mental Whether presented as a modern phenomenon capable of state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the social critique, or as an aspect of psychological encounter, real and the unreal to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a the profile of the contemporary sublime is emerging. It slippage between walung and dreaming."53 encompasses Lyotard's and Eisenman's advocating disci- By focusing his phenomenological study on the uncanny, plinary deconstruction and the indeterminacy of abstraction. Vidler hopes to discover the "power to interpret the relations Under the rubric of the architectural uncanny, it includes between the psyche and the dwelling, the body and the house, Vidler's phenomenological articulation. All of these recent the individual and the metr~polis."~Theorizingthe uncanny theoretical positions lift the mask of avant-garde repression is the start of "rewriting modem aesthetic theory as applied which concealed a continuous dialectic of the beautifid and to categories such as imitation, repetition, the symbolic and the sublime in architecture. The interdependency of these the sublime."s5 In an aesthetic agenda for modern architec- terms means that if one is suspect, both are rejected. This ture, the uncanny's role is to identify and critique these occurred during the high modem period ofthis century, when significant contemporary issues via the link forged with aesthetic discussion was stifled in favor of other issues. phenomenology. Contemporary representations of these conditions are essential in resituating modernist aesthetic discourse. Sepa- EISENMAN AND THE GROTESQUE rated more by nomenclature than by substance, the sublime, Vidler recognizes the use of defarniliarizing "reversals of the uncanny, and the grotesque also engage the major aesthetic norms, [and] substitutions of the grotesque for the philosophical framework of phenomenology. A phenom- sublime,"shas avant-garde formal strategies addressing alien- enological consideration of architecture has started to dis- ation. Perhaps this explains Peter Eisenman's exploration of place formalism, a shift which has also been effected from the grotesque as "the manifestation of the uncertain in the feminist and post-structuralist ideological stances. The physical."" His interest in the grotesque clearly parallels recuperation of the sublime (and therefore of the beautifid) avant-garde painters' use of the sublime to invoke "the has been part of a process of opening up the discourse. indeterminate or nondemonstrable." In the article "En Terror Firma: In Trails of Grotextes," NOTES Eisenman critiques the traditional contrast between the Historically, the sublime can be traced to the writings of the qualities of the beautiful (which is the good, rational, and classical rhetorician Longinus in the first centuries A.D. Trans- true) and of the terrifying sublime (which is the unnatural, lated into French by Boileau in 1674, On the Sublime deals with uncertain, and unpresent). He follows Kant in envisioning issues of form and in oratory, the equivalent of literature "a containing within,"58 as an alternate to the exclusionary in general for this time period. The republication of this ancient rigidity of dialectical aesthetic categories. Present within the treatise had unexpectedly major effects on aesthetics. , An Inquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime and the beautiful is the grotesque, which encompasses "the idea of Beautiful (Oxford, 1987) and Irnrnanuel Kant, Observations on the ugly, the deformed, and the supposedly unnatural."59 the Feelingofthe BeautifulandtheSublime,trans. J. Goldthwait, Eiseman's concern about oppositional categories stems (Berkeley, 198 1). from the "notion... [that] any form of the occupation of space Joseph Rykwert, The First Moderns: the Architects of the 18th [such as architecture] requires a more complex form of the Century (Cambridge, 1980). Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The beautiful, one which contains the ugly, or a rationality that Sublime," ArtForum, 22.8, (Apr 1984), p.64. contains the irrati~nal."~~ See Theodor Adorno on the corruption and exhaustion of the The utility of this expanded aesthetic category lies in sublime in Vidler, "Notes on the Sublime: From advancing Eisenman's usual agenda: he sees the possibility to ," Canon: The Princeton Journal, 3 (1 988), of displacing architecture, and its 500-year dependence on p. 180. normative beauty, through the grotesque. He claims the See longer version of this paper in New Literary History, Feb 1995. Thanks to the editor, Ralph Cohen, for his reading of the grotesque will "provoke an uncertainty in the object, by original. removing both the architect and the user from any necessary The link between these co-dependent terms cannot be easily control of the object... it is now the distance between object severed. and subject-- the impossibility of possession --which pro- , 7'he Poetics ofspace,(Toronto, 1964 transl.) vokes this anxiety."h' But there is a caveat: as with painters' and Martin Heidegger, "Building Dwelling Thinking," from Poetry, Language, Thought, (New York, 1971 transl.), p.145- attempts to present the unpresentable, we are warned that the 229. grotesque "can be conceptualized, but not designed."h2 Alberto Perez-Gomez, "Architectural Representation in the Eisenman thus hints at the difficulty of realizing this theo- Age of Simulacra," Skala 20, (1990), p.42. retical agenda. Juhani Pallasmaa, "The Social Commission and the Autono- mous Architect," Harvard Architecture Review 6, (1987), p.119. CONCLUSION Juhani Pallasmaa, Lecture at the University of Virginia, 1993. So once more anxiety is encountered, whether the source is Perez-Gomez, p.42. ACSA ANNUAL MEETING HlSTORYflHEORYiCRlTlClSM 1995

l3 Ibid. tically aesthetic epistemological problem," Frances Ferguson, l4 Anthony Vidler, TheArchitecturalUncanny (Cambridge, 1992), The Solitude of the Sublime: and the Aesthetics of p. 170. Individuation, (New York, 1992), p.31. l5 Dagobert D. Runes, ed., Dictionary of Revised and 39 Peter Eisenman, "En Terror Firma ..." in Form; Being; Absence: Enlarged (Savage, 1982), p.20. Architecture and Philosophy, Pratt Journal of Architecture, 2, '"ohn Goldthwait's introduction in Kant, Observations, p.35. (New York, 1988), p. 1 11 -2 1. l7 Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in 40 Diana Agrest, Architecture from Without: Theoretical Framings Histoiy, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford, 1989), p.20. for a Critical Practice, (MIT Press, 1993), p. I. 'Want, Observations, p.26. 41 Peter de Bolla, The Discourse of the Sublime: Readings in l9 Goldthwait in Kant, Observations, p.2 1. History, Aesthetics, and the Subject (Oxford, l989), p. 12. 20 Burke, An Inquiry, p.xx. 42 For example, Agrest the "system" of architecture (i.e., 21 , The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes the Western architectural tradition) is defined both by what it and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970's (Cambridge, includes and what it excludes, or represses. "Architecture from 1990), p.30. Without: Body, Logic, and Sex," Assemblage 7, (1988), p.29. 22 Vidler, Architectural Uncanny, p. 169. 43 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p.79. 23 Alan Colquhoun, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Ar- 44 Eisenman, "En Terror Firma," p.114. chitectural Essays 1980-1987 (Cambridge, 1989), pp.57-87. 45 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny and "Theorizing the 24 Jean-Francois Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-garde," Unhomely" in Newsline, vo1.3, no.3 (1990), p.3. ArtForum, 20.8 (Apr 1982), p.40. 46 Lacanian developmental psychology has revealed that children 25 Burke, An Inquity, pp. 157-61. do not immediately understand themselves as integrated beings. 26 Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-garde," p.40. But once having perceived themselves as bodily unities, (via the 27 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report stage), the idea of the fragmented or "morselated" body on Knowledge, transl. Bennington and Massumi, (Minneapolis, is banished to the unconscious. This hidden knowledge, when 1984), p.71-82. reencountered, explains the impact of horror films and dismem- 2X Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-garde," p.38. berment fantasies. Vidler, "6eorizing the Unhomely," ibid. 25 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.75. 47 Ibid. 30 Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable," p.67. Marcel 4"bid. Duchamp's readymades raised other radical questions for art- 49 Ibid. ists. For instance, about the alchemical validation of the artist's 50 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p.xi. signature, the role of the hand in manufacture, ideas of the 5' Robert McAnulty, "Body Troubles," in John Whiteman, ed, original and authenticity, and the privileged status of places of Strategies in Architectural Thinking, (Cambridge, 1992), p. 191- exhibition. See my article "/Demolition, Object1 6. Process" in Proceedings of the 1991 ACSA Southeast Regional 52 Vidler, "Theorizing the Unhomely," p.3.

Conference (Charlotte, 1992), p.42-7. 53 Ibid-- - 31 Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable," p.69. 54 Ibid. The writing here echoes the chapter on "The House" in 32 Ibid. Bachelard's classic Poetics of Space. 33 Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-garde," p.40. 55 Ibid. 34 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p.80. 56 Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, p. 13. 35 Lyotard, "The Sublime and the Avant-garde," p.43. 57 Eisenman, "En Terror Firma," p. 114. All subsequent quotations " Lyotard, "Presenting the Unpresentable," p.64. are from this same article. [pp. 1 15, 114, 1 15, 121, 1 16.1 j7 Peter Eisenman, "Visions' Unfolding: Architecture in the Age 58 Ibid, p.115. of Electronic Media," Domus, 734 (Jan 1992), pp.21. 55 Ibid, p.114. 38 "The aesthetic discussion that emerged in the 18th century 60 Ibid, p.115. located an anxiety about the relationship between the individual 6' Ibid, p.121 and the type, the particular and the general ... as the characteris- 62 Ibid, p.116.