Derrida for Architects

Richard Coyne

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136723452
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architektur
• Categoría: Architektur Allgemein

Looking afresh at the implications of Jacques Derrida's thinking for architecture, this book simplifies his ideas in a clear, concise way. Derrida's treatment of key philosophical texts has been labelled as "deconstruction, " a term that resonates with architecture. Although his main focus is language, his thinking has been applied by architectural theorists widely.

As well as a review of Derrida's interaction with architecture, this book is also a careful consideration of the implications of his thinking, particularly on the way architecture is practiced.

CHAPTER 1

Thinking about Architecture

For an architect the test of any philosophy is what difference it makes to the way architecture is practised, talked about, assessed and taught. In their professional lives architects need be concerned less with the question ‘is it true?’ than ‘what practical difference does it make?’ At least this is how I start to think about the philosophies and theories of thinkers such as Jacques Derrida for architects. In so doing I am advocating a mode of interrogation that is practical, that fits within a context of the practices of architecture: designing, documenting, building, reflecting, evaluating, interpreting, critiquing and defending, as well as formulating architectural histories and learning about architecture. I maintain that if we take Derrida's thinking seriously, then it makes a difference to the various practices of making architecture.

The Pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty makes a pertinent observation in relating disciplines such as mathematics and philosophy to the practical sphere: ‘Although some mathematics is obviously very useful to engineers, there's a lot of mathematics that isn't. Mathematics outruns engineering pretty quickly, and starts playing with itself’ (Rorty, 1996b, p. 71). He says the same applies to philosophy in relation to politics: ‘philosophy, we might say, outruns politics’ (Rorty, 1996b, p. 71). I would add the same for philosophy and architecture. It is easy to get carried away with philosophy, that is, to be distracted from what we want to accomplish as architects by many fine philosophical distinctions and intricate disputes. We need sometimes to wrest Derrida's thought back to practice, though the practice of architecture is broader in its scope and conceits than engineering, if less theorised than politics.

How does Derrida's influence operate? Reading Derrida does not necessarily cause architects to change their practices. Think of paradigms or fields of practice, into which philosophical writings such as those of Derrida might intervene, as nodes within networks of influences, or gravitational fields within constellations. In an interview Derrida alludes to the way texts and other modes of creative production can interact, in this case in his relationship with the architect Peter Eisenman, an encounter to which I will return in Chapter 4.

So I gave this text to Peter Eisenman and in his own way he started a project that was correlated with but at the same time independent of my text. That was true collaboration – not ‘using’ the other's work, not just illustrating or selecting from it . . . and so there is a kind of transparency or, I would say, a productive dialogue between the concerns, the styles, the person too.

(Derrida, 1989b, p. 72)

Occasional correlations, independence, interdependence between transparent layers, dialogues, the merging of styles, interactions between personalities: these are the mechanisms by which philosophical texts and architecture exert their influences on one another.

Juxtapositions and oppositions

Aspects of architecture are already primed to receive Derrida's ways of thinking, particularly in so far as design ideas are stimulated by unusual juxtapositions. Studio-based architecture shares with much art and design a propensity to value the sideways look, the interpretation and practice that is off- the-wall, and for this legacy we can thank various movements, not least Dada, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism and Situationism. Unusual juxtaposition is simply the placement of one entity against another with which it does not necessarily belong. An umbrella against an umbrella stand would excite little interest, nor would the sight of a patient on an operating table, but place an umbrella on an operating table and you have something else. So the surrealist artist Max Ernst wrote that when the ‘ready-made reality’ of an umbrella is placed with that of a sewing machine on an operating table, the occasion provides the possibility for ‘a new absolute that is true and poetic: the umbrella and the sewing machine will make love’ (Breton, 1969, p. 275). The combination of disparate elements in this way has been likened to alchemy. Collages and montages of words, pictures and sounds function in much the same way, involving ‘irrational’ juxtapositions of ready-made elements. In architecture, Bernard Tschumi's conjectural studio project involving the building of a nightclub in a graveyard provides design stimulus that operates in a way similar to collage (Tschumi, 1994), or a designer could think of a swimming pool in a library, a train station that is also a television studio, a skyscraper as a grandfather clock.

The effectiveness of such juxtapositions is not a case simply of placing objects or ideas together in random fashion and thereby claiming an innovation. The context is crucial. In fact such juxtapositions can reveal much about context. The appreciation and reception of such juxtapositions requires that the artist-architect and the observer tunes in to what suits the moment, spatially, culturally and intellectually. Here the role of imagination, interpretation and judgement come into play, which return us to the practical: knowing what works in this situation and what doesn't. For example, it is usual, mundane and probably highly necessary to juxtapose a door with a wall, i.e. to position a door in a wall. Putting a door into the treads of a stair is less usual, but in the right context might be challenging or interesting, or even highly functional. To contemplate the insertion of a door in a wash basin would have little utility in an everyday housing project. Though thinking about a door in a bath might be appropriate where disability access is a concern.

A traditional logician or rationalist might want an explanation of how these processes of juxtaposition are generated and received, and how judgements are made. Perhaps there are rules about what goes with what, doors fit within walls, stairs connect storeys, roofs are at the tops of buildings. Perhaps there are rules pertaining to convention, by which the designer decides what is outside of convention. Deciding on what is inside and what is outside brings us to the role of oppositions. Juxtapositions of any interest play on the opposition, between what is and what is not, appropriate and inappropriate, true and false. Some linguists and cultural theorists would say that any explanation is oppositional through and through. You can't really reduce thought to something deeper, more rational or precise than the notion of the opposition. For the pragmatist the only thing that might precede the opposition is the primacy of human practice, the explanation of which requires appeal to yet further oppositions.

You can't really reduce thought to something deeper, more
rational or precise than the notion of the opposition.

Totalising strategies

It is tempting to assume that sometimes there are oppositions, sometimes rules, sometimes imagination, sometimes continuities; all come into the rich play of meaning and interpretation. But there's a bolder and more interesting philosophical tactic at play here. It is more revealing to assert that rationality is completely oppositional, an assertion more satisfying to some philosophers than saying that rationality is sometimes oppositional and sometimes pertains to continua, or unities, or logical rules. Of course, there are many candidates for such totalising assertions: rationality could be rule-based, logical, mathematical, metaphorical, literal, interpretational, imaginary, in language, or playful. Can all such understandings be correct?

The theorist of play, Johan Huizinga, provides an interesting illustration of the human propensity to operate with totalities, i.e. to exaggerate. A small child rushes into the house and tells his mother he's just found a huge carrot. ‘How big is it?’ asks the mother. ‘As big as God’, comes the breathless reply. For Huizinga, ‘The desire to make an idea as enormous and stupefying as possible is . . . a typical play-function and is common both in child-life and in certain mental diseases’ (Huizinga, 1955, p. 143). In other words, humans at their most basic like to go with the big idea and push it to extremes, a tendency Huizinga thinks we ought to restore. This totalising strategy reveals obvious contradictions, as if contrary to our experience everything must be made of carrots. To endorse a totalising view is perhaps a rhetorical strategy to force some issue, as if by advocating revolution as the only solution to the domination of capitalism, the social reformer Karl Marx (Marx, 1977) was overstating the cause of social justice to bring about some kind of more moderate social transformation.

The totalising view activates again the idea of the oppositional nature of thought. Rationality is all free play, or rationality is all rules. Surely, if it is not both in some measure then it is either one or the other. As an alternative the reflective critic could assert that you do not always have to decide between two views with totalising claims, but both can be held in parallel. The reflective architect can let them play against each other. The totalising view sets issues into intellectual conflict, the outcome of which is after all undecidable, including the verdict on their undecidability. I have already introduced such intellectual strategies in drawing attention to Derrida's oppositions of the absolute versus the relative, certainty versus contingency, order versus anarchy, the need for a centre versus assigning authority to the margins.

Agonistics

If all-encompassing views are a function of play then they are also a function of combat, heated argument and conflict in general. Oppositions can be conflictual and agonistic, a state we may want sometimes to conserve rather than resolve (Rendell, 2006, p. 9; Rawes, 2007). Not all oppositions in architecture seem immediately to entertain totalising claims: inside versus outside, structure versus ornament, service areas versus the areas served. But some positions are genuinely antagonistic, with adherents to one position refusing to consider the converse position. So professions tend to sign up to codes of ethics and would rarely entertain their converse (graft, self-interest, theft) as legitimate modes of professional practice. We only seek to do what is right and never knowingly what is wrong. As expounded by Le Corbusier, the early modernist conception of architecture as ‘forms in light’ did not entertain the priority of the converse of glowering shapes in the dark. Similarly, an architecture of simple purity does not entertain an architecture predicated on junk. Here, moving from one pole of an opposition to the other is only effected with an element of shock, painful effort, turmoil or anxiety, at least initially, as in Rem Koolhaas's celebration of ‘junk spaces’ (Koolhaas, 2004).

Forms in light. Solar motif on plinth at the entrance to Le Corbusier's Unite d'Habitation, Marseilles.

If the element of struggle is evident in the major oppositions then it may also pervade smaller, more localised polarities. Think of the difference between asserting that architecture is made of forms in light and declaring that architecture involves a contest between light and dark, or occupies the troubled place between noise and silence, saturation of the sensual field and total absence. Even the most prosaic oppositions of architecture can be cast in terms that indicate something is really at stake. This is Derrida for architects. There is always something at issue, and the stakes are high. Major as well as apparently minor oppositions are commonly treated as agonistic and problematic. One of Derrida's terms for the problematic condition is the aporia, a word in Ancient Greek relating to perplexity. For commentators on Derrida, such as John Caputo (Caputo, 1987; Derrida, 1993), this is the key to Derrida's thinking. The task is to keep perplexity and ambiguity alive rather than to resolve it. It is to show that any putative resolution is itself fraught with further ambiguity and complexity.

This is Derrida for architects. There is always something at
issue, and the stakes are high.

Confounding oppositions

By most accounts Derrida is a master of careful and precise, though difficult, argumentation. There are many others who have sought to overturn convention, to upset certainties and to keep ambiguity in play. Whereas other intellectuals may resort to strident assertions, manifestos and slogans, Derrida focuses on close readings of texts and a critique of the verbal strategies of his opponents, often picking on those subtle and marginal strategies of which the targeted author may be unaware. Among his many accomplishments, Derrida had an enviable grasp of the whole philosophical tradition, as well as those of literature and art. His writing is steeped in references and allusions to the work of others, including those with whom he is in dispute. He unsettles his intellectual quarry by showing that the position an author is trying to assert or defend is already dependent on the very position the author is seeking to dispute. Derrida writes with self-confidence and alacrity, and at times seems also to be provoking and deliberately confounding his reader.

In summary, there is always something serious at stake in Derrida's arguments. He focuses on texts, worthy adversaries from philosophy and literature. His arguments involve oppositions and the priorities between them. As we shall see in the next chapter, he seeks to indicate how the privileged proposition in an opposition is in fact dependent on the lesser term, and he argues for a rehabilitation of the lesser term through its redefinition and reinstatement, generally involving a revision in terminology. In some respects there is a kind of formula to Derrida. Richard Rorty, pragmatic defender of Derrida's strategies, parodies this formulaic approach thus: ‘Find something that can be made to look self-contradictory, claim that that contradiction is the central message of the text, and ring some changes on it’ (Rorty, 1996a, p. 15). It concerned Derrida that the scholar can look to his work for such a formula. I contend that the extent to which architecture engages with oppositions and unusual juxtapositions it is primed to receive the thinking of Jacques Derrida.

CHAPTER 2

Language and Architecture

Derrida's early work dealt with the philosophical movement known as Phenomenology and the philosophy of its prime mover Edmund Husserl (Derrida, 1989a), who was in turn the teacher of Martin Heidegger (Heidegger, 1962; Sharr, 2006, 2007). It is reasonable therefore to think of Derrida as a student and critic of Phenomenology. However, his greatest impact pertains to theories of language, in particular Structuralism, the main subject of his seminal work Of Grammatology (Derrida, 1976). There are several very helpful texts that introduce language theories and Derrida's relationship to them, such as Terrence Hawkes’ book Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), that explain Structuralism very clearly for a readership not already primed in language theory and philosophy. This helpful book also develops an account of Poststructuralism as the successor to Structuralism and introduces Derrida's thinking. A further key explanatory text is Christopher Norris's Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (1982), which deals explicitly with the background to Derrida's thinking. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (1985) was apparently an influence on the architect Peter Eisenman, providing an introduction to Derrida's thinking. The Prison House of Language, by the prominent cultural theorist Fredric Jameson (1972), helps to situate Structuralism within wider cultural contexts. I draw substantially on these texts here. A further important text on language and architecture was published in 1969, entitled Meaning in Architecture, edited by Charles Jencks and George Baird. It predates the influence of Derrida and consists of a series of articles by architectural theorists. The main theories advanced there pertained to Structuralism, though the term ‘semiotics’ was also in vogue. Elsewhere I rehearse an explanation of language and Structuralism as they pertain to digital media and information technology (Coyne, 1995, 1999, pp. 120–134). Here I direct the arguments towards architecture.

Is architecture a language? There are prominent detractors from a linguistic view of architecture (Seligmann and Seligmann, 1977; Scruton, 1979; Donougho, 1987), but that there is even controversy on the issue provides evidence that language is a prominent architectural concern. So I start with an understanding of architecture as language. In so far as architects might appeal to the correct form, shape and configuration of a classical façade (Summerson, 1963) they are appealin...