The Place of Silence: Architecture / Media / Philosophy 9781350076594, 9781350076624, 9781350076600

Citation preview

The Place of Silence

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The Place of Silence Architecture / Media / Philosophy

EDITED BY MARK DORRIAN AND CHRISTOS KAKALIS

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Selection and editorial matter © Mark Dorrian and Christos Kakalis, 2020 Individual chapters © their authors, 2020 Mark Dorrian and Christos Kakalis have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

HB: 978-1-3500-7659-4 ePDF: 978-1-3500-7660-0 eBook: 978-1-3500-7661-7

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Contents List of illustrations List of contributors

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An introduction to silence

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Mark Dorrian and Christos Kakalis

PART ONE 1

Mediating silence

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‘Then there was war’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as nuclear criticism 7 Mark Dorrian

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Textures of silence in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999)

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Hannah Paveck 3

Listening to Visaginas: On the rescaling of silences and sounds in a former Soviet nuclear town 33 Benjamin Cope

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Urban silence and informational noise: A study of Athens’s invisible structures 47 Aikaterini Antonopoulou

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The silent present: The contemporary atmosphere of architectural historiography 59 Amy Kulper

PART TWO 6

Material silences

Between the lines

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Manuela Antoniu v

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CONTENTS

The silence of Michelangelo’s hammer

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Jonathan Foote 8

Making silence: Modes of emptiness in Iberian art and architecture 99 Ross Jenner

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On becoming petrified: The erotic gaze in architectural conception 113 Carolina Dayer

PART THREE

Practising silence

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10 Silence, paradox and religious topography

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Christos Kakalis 11 Silences generating space

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A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul and Carl Mika 12 Silence in the middle ground: Aesthetic immersion in the

geologic

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Tiago Torres-Campos 13 John Hejduk and Samuel Beckett: Going on, in silence and

lateness

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Jason O’Shaughnessy

PART FOUR

Silence and the senses

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14 Quiet places – silent space: Towards a phenomenology

of silence

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Gernot Böhme 15 Silence please! A brief history of silence at the theatre Louise Pelletier 16 Vessels of place: Auditory landscapes, cross-cultural

echoes in south-west Victoria Paul Carter

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CONTENTS

17 Attunement and silence Alberto Pérez-Gómez Notes Index

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Illustrations 1.1

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1.3

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1.6 2.1

2.2

3.1 3.2

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One of four slide sheets given by John Hejduk to editor Brian Healy, which formed the basis of the 1982 ‘Silent Witnesses’ publication in Perspecta, vol. 19. Courtesy of Brian Healy. John Hejduk, Sketch for The Silent Witnesses, 1976. Ink with coloured pencils on cardboard, 21.7 x 36 cm, DR1998:0092:001:009, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. John Hejduk, Plans and elevations for The Silent Witnesses, 1974–1979. Graphite on paper, 76.3 x 101.7 cm, DR1998:0092:002:006, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. John Hejduk, Sketch for The Silent Witnesses, 1974–1979. Felt-tip pen and watercolour on cardboard, 38 x 50.7 cm, DR1998:0092:002:003, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture. Hieronymus Bosch, The Third Day of the Creation of the World, outer faces of the side panels of the triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490–1500. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado. Harold E. Edgerton, Atomic Bomb Explosion, 1952. © 2010 MIT. Courtesy of MIT Museum. Legionnaires ironing their uniforms at the French Foreign Legion camp in Djibouti. Film still. ‘Beau Travail’ directed by Claire Denis © Courtesy Curzon Artificial Eye 1999. All rights reserved. Sentain in the salt flats of Lake Assal. Film still. ‘Beau Travail’ directed by Claire Denis © Courtesy Curzon Artificial Eye 1999. All rights reserved. The former dance floor, Visaginas, 2017. Photo Daryna Kapatsila, courtesy of the photographer. Truck driver in front of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, c. 1980. Photo Vasilij Chupachenko, courtesy Marija Šcˇerbakova.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Detail of the Banga (Wave) Concert Hall, Visginas 2017. Photo Daryna Kapatsila, courtesy of the photographer. 4.1 ‘For Sale’: Abandoned neoclassical building, Athens city centre. Photo by author. 4.2 ‘Douglas, asylum seeker from Ghana beaten by ten men and their dogs.’ Image credit: Crisis Maps, http://map.crisis-scape. net/reports/view/67?l=pt_BR (accessed 10 July 2018). 4.3 Representation from downtown Athens, screenshot from Banoptikon. Image credit: Banoptikon, http://banoptikon. mignetproject.eu (accessed 10 July 2018). 5.1 Albrecht Altdorfer, Alexanderschlacht (1528). Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Albrecht_Altdorfer_-_Schlacht_bei_Issus_(Alte_ Pinakothek,_M%C3%BCnchen).jpg. 7.1 Michelangelo’s hammer, detail from Sigismondo Fanti, Triompho di Fortuna, card 38, 1527. Image in public domain. 7.2 Giorgio Vasari, Vulcan’s Forge, 1567–68, Oil on copper, 38 x 28 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image credit: bpk/Alfredo Dagli Orti. 7.3 Michelangelo, detail of Moses’s knee from the Tomb of Julius II. Photo by author. 7.4 Michelangelo, Pietà, detail of damage inflicted on the face of Mary by László Tóth on 21 May 1972. Vatican, St Peter’s Basilica. © Photo SCALA, Florence. 8.1 Aires Mateus, Casa en Brejos de Azeitão, 1999–2000. Photo by author. 8.2 Alejandro de la Sota, El Gobierno Civil de Tarragona. Competition 1956, built 1959–1963. Photo by Carme Ribes Moreno, 2013. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Govern_Civil.jpg 8.3 Jorge Oteiza, El Mirador Mirando, 1958 [from the series ‘Cajas Metafísicas or Cajas Vacías’], Artium Museum Square, Vitoria. Photo by Zarateman, 2010. Wikimedia Commons: https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitoria_-_Artium_13.JPG 9.1 Bronze ornament from a chariot pole, c. 1st–2nd century AD (Rogers Fund, 1918). 9.2a Chapel elevation (9.2a) and enlarged detail (9.2b), Carlo and Scarpa, NR #2573 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del 9.2b XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa.

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3.3

45 48

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63 91

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9.3 9.4 9.5

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12.1

12.2

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13.1 13.2 13.3

14.1 14.2 14.3

14.4 14.5 14.6 15.1 15.2

ILLUSTRATIONS

Diagram by author over fragment of chapel elevation drawing emphasizing eyes and projected lines that the architect drew. Chapel exterior concrete wall. Photo by author. Chapel elevation (detail), Carlo Scarpa, NR #2573 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa. Carlo Scarpa, NR #3455 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa. Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Plan View, 1974–77, MoMA Archives_0136115D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence. Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Longitudinal Section, 1974–77, MoMA Archives_0137517D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence. Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Transversal Section, 1974–77, MoMA Archives_0137516D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence. Stage production of Endgame in the Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow in 2016. © Tim Morozzo Photography. Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Getty Images/Heritage Images. John Hejduk, ‘Partial site plan, Victims I’, Victims, 1984. Reference number: DR1998:0109:003:019. Part of: DR1998:0109:003:017-019, Site plans and plans. John Hejduk fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture. © CCA. The Old Cemetery of Darmstadt. Photo by author. The Old Cemetery of Darmstadt. Photo by author. Aussegnungshalle Treptow by Axel Schultes at Treptow, Berlin. Photo by Sebastian F. Wikimedia Commons https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krematorium_interiör.jpg. The cathedral at Worms. Photo by author. Elisabethen Stift, Darmstadt. Photo by author. The toilet at Café Richard opposite Cologne cathedral, Germany. Photo by author. Offending the Audience by Peter Handke (2013), director Christian Lapointe. Source: Recto-Verso Productions. Plan of the Comédie française in Paris, showing benches on the stage. Source: J.-F. Blondel, Architecture Françoise, 1752.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

15.3 Section through the auditorium of the theatre in Besançon. Source: C.-N. Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation, 1804. 15.4 ‘A glance at the Besançon theatre.’ Source: C.-N. Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation, 1804.

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List of contributors Manuela Antoniu obtained her professional (BArch) and post-professional (MArch) degrees in Canada, and her doctorate at the Architectural Association in London. Her work has been exhibited in Europe and North America. She has published with, among others, Princeton Architectural Press, McGillQueen’s University Press, Ashgate and Routledge (for Architectural Theory Review). Having most recently taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, in history and theory, she is currently teaching architecture students in Japan how to present their projects in English. She lives and trains in a Zen temple in Kyoto. Aikaterini Antonopoulou is a lecturer in the School of Architecture of the University of Liverpool, UK. Her research examines the role and agency of digital mediation and representation in the way urban space is perceived, used and produced. From 2016 to 2018 she was the Simpson Postdoctoral Fellow in Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art. Under the theme ‘Digital Cultures and Crisis Athens’, her work has focused on the interaction of the digital with the phenomena of the crisis in Athens, Greece: how the homeless, the unemployed and the immigrant, whose active presences in public are minimal, seek to create new grounds for social interaction and a new sense of belonging; how far-right propaganda videos on YouTube reveal unknown Athenian landscapes; and how violence, austerity and poverty become aestheticized via internet images and mass-consumed through the social media. Gernot Böhme studied physics, mathematics and philosophy, receiving his PhD from Hamburg University, Germany. He was a Professor of Philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt and Chair of the Graduate School of Technification and Society. Since 2005 he has been the director of the Institut für Praxis der Philosophie. His publications in English include: The Knowledge Society (edited with N. Stehr, 1986), Coping with Science (1992), Ethics in Context: The Art of Dealing with Serious Questions (2001), Dark Medicine: Rationalizing Unethical Medical Research (with William R. LaFleur and Susumu Shimazono, 2007), Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of xii

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Technology (2012), The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (2016) and Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (2017). His main fields of research are classical philosophy (Kant, Plato), social studies of science, philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of nature, aesthetics, ethics, Goethe, and the theory of time. Paul Carter is a public artist, writer and historian. His most recent books are Decolonising Governance: Archipelagic Thinking (2018) and Amplifications: Poetic Migration, Auditory Memory (2019). Through his design studio, Material Thinking, he recently produced ‘Passenger,’ a distributed artwork at Yagan Square, Perth, Australia, interpreting an early act of Aboriginal urban resistance. The place-making philosophy and practice informing this and other public place interventions are documented in Places Made After Their Stories: Design and the Art of Choreotopography (2015). He is Professor of Design (Urbanism), School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University, Melbourne. Benjamin Cope lectures in visual and cultural studies at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, where he is a member of the Laboratory of Critical Urbanism. He is co-editor of two recent journal volumes: ‘P.S. Soundscapes’, Topos, 1 (2018, with Pavel Niakhayeu), and ‘Post-Socialist Trouble: Gender Studies in Eastern Europe in the Context of the Conservative Backlash‘, Perekrestki, 1–2 (2017, with Alena Minchenia and Olga Sasunkevich). In 2016, he co-edited two volumes of applied critical cartography: Mapping Vilnius: Transformations in Post-Socialist Spaces (with Felix Ackermann and Miodrag Kuc) and Mapping Visaginas: Sources of Urbanity in a Former Mono-Functional Town (with Felix Ackermann and Siarhei Liubimau) (Vilnius: Vilniaus daile˙s akademijos leidykla). He lives in Warsaw where he is a member of the association ‘My’ that engages in a variety of cross-cultural projects. He is also a sometime member of Belarusian band, Nagual, and conductor of the vegetable orchestra Paprykalaba. Carolina Dayer PhD is an assistant professor in architecture at Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark. She is a licensed architect in her native country, Argentina. Her research, teaching and creative work centres on theoretical architectural demonstrations that relate to the fields of representation, material culture and habitation. Her PhD research focused on questions of reality and everyday life through the literary practice of magic realism and Carlo Scarpa’s drawings. She has published, lectured internationally, and organized symposia on matters of the imagination and drawing practices. Her co-edited books Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Routledge, 2016) and Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design (Routledge, 2018) expose the wide range of her research. Her personal design

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work has been exhibited in Argentina, United States and Denmark. Carolina is the Associate Editor, Design, of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). Mark Dorrian holds the Forbes Chair in Architecture at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, UK, and is co-director of Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. His research spans topics in architecture and urbanism, cultural history, landscape studies, media theory and visual culture, and his writing has appeared in key international journals in these fields. His books include Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (2015) and Seeing From Above: The Aerial View in Visual Culture (co-edited with Frédéric Pousin, 2013). In 2018 he was awarded the first Monument Trust Visiting Fellowship at the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul PhD is Professor in Spatial Design and Postgraduate Studies at AUT University – Te Wa¯nanga Aronui o Ta¯maki Makau Rau, in Auckland, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her publications include ‘ “A warm grey fabric lined on the inside with the most lustrous and colourful of silks”: Dreams of Airships and Tropical islands’, Journal of Architecture, 12(5) (2007), ‘Restless Containers: Thinking Interior Space – Across Cultures’, Interstices, 12 (2011), ‘Globalised Desk-top Skirmishes? Reporting from the Colonies’, in U. Brandes and M. Erloff (eds), My Desk is My Castle (2012) and ‘The Ignorant Supervisor: About Common Worlds, Epistemological Modesty and Distributed Knowledge’, ACCESS: Critical Perspectives on Communication, Cultural and Policy Studies 33(1) (2015). Her books include Of Other Thoughts: Nontraditional Ways to the Doctorate: A Guidebook for Candidates and Supervisors (co-edited with M. A. Peters, 2013) and Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (2017), a collection of essays by Gernot Böhme, which she edited and translated. Jonathan Foote PhD is a researcher and associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. Previously, he taught at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and Virginia Tech’s Alexandria Campus (WAAC), USA. His research concerns the architectural translation between ideas and materials and the significance of the workshop as a site for imagination. He acted as director of workshops at Virginia Tech, where he fostered an integrated curriculum between thinking and making. Parallel to this, he published research on the drawings and workshop practices of various architects, including Michelangelo Buonarroti, Francesco Borromini and Sigurd Lewerentz. In addition to his academic work, Jonathan runs a design research studio, Atelier U:W, which partners locally and internationally on special projects in design and fabrication.

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Ross Jenner teaches at the University of Auckland. He has practised in New Zealand, the UK, Finland and Switzerland and has taught at universities in Australia and the US. He has a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania under Joseph Rykwert on the issue of lightness in modern Italian architecture. He was a leader of Auckland’s winning Venice Prize at the Biennale di Venezia, 1991, commissioner for the New Zealand Section of the XIX Triennale di Milano, 1996 and is an executive editor of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts. He has exhibited and published in the US, UK, Italy, Australia and New Zealand and is currently researching on both Italian Architecture (1909–59) and modes of materiality in contemporary continental architecture. Christos Kakalis is an architect (University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece). He obtained the interdisciplinary MSc in Design, Space, Culture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. He holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Edinburgh and he is currently a lecturer in architecture at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape of Newcastle University, UK. His work focuses on the conditions of embodied experience of architecture and the natural landscape with special emphasis on the role of atmosphere. His publications include Mountains, Mobilities and Movement (co-edited with Emily Goetsch, 2017) and the monograph Architecture and Silence (forthcoming 2019). Amy Catania Kulper is an architectural educator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory and criticism with design. She has taught in the UK at Cambridge University and UCLA, and in the USA at the University of Pennsylvania, SCI-Arc, the University of Michigan, and Rhode Island School of Design, where she is currently an associate professor and head of the Department of Architecture. While at the University of Michigan, she was a four-time recipient of the Donna M. Salzer Award for teaching excellence. Her writings have been published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education and numerous edited volumes. She has served on the editorial board of The Journal of Architectural Education, where she has acted as the design editor for six years, receiving a Distinguished Service Award from the ACSA in 2017. She holds Master’s degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Cambridge University and a PhD in the history and philosophy of architecture from Cambridge University. Carl Mika comes from a background in law, indigenous and Ma¯ori studies, and has developed a knowledge based on Western philosophy (especially metaphysics, existentialism and phenomenology). He completed his PhD thesis in German studies in 2013, under the title Reclaiming Mystery: A Ma¯ori

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Notion of Being, in Light of Novalis’s Ontology. In 2017 he won a Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia Book Award for his book Indigenous Education and the Metaphysics of Presence: A Worlded Philosophy. He is a co-convener of the Indigenous Philosophy Group (Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia) and co-editor of the journals Knowledge Cultures and Contemporary Readings in Law and Social Justice and an associate editor of the Journal of World Philosophies. Jason O’Shaughnessy graduated in architecture from the University of Edinburgh, UK, where he is currently undertaking PhD research on the theme of lateness in the works of John Hejduk and Samuel Beckett. He is director of the Master of Architecture programme at Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE), founder of Architecture 53Seven (2000), and co-founder of DATUM Architecture Studio (2012). He has lectured widely on his work in practice and academia. He was a finalist in Building Design’s Young Architect of the Year Awards in 2016, was nominated for the Mies van der Rohe European Award in 2009, and received a Special Commendation at the inaugural World Architecture Festival in 2008 and an AAI Special Award in 2008. Hannah Paveck is a PhD student in film studies at King’s College London. Her doctoral research explores the role of sound and listening in contemporary global art cinema, drawing on the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy. She received her MA in cultural studies from the University of Leeds, UK and holds a BA in English (Cultural Studies) from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Louise Pelletier received her PhD in the history and theory of architecture from McGill University, Montreal, Canada in 2000. She currently teaches at the School of Design at UQAM, Montreal, where she was director from 2014 to 2017. She is currently director of the UQAM Design Centre, a design and architecture gallery. She has taught at the School of Architecture at McGill University and has been a visiting professor at the University of Oslo, Norway. She is the author of Architecture in Words; Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (2006), and co-author of Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997). Her work has also been published in collections of essays and international journals. She participated as a curator and designer in several exhibitions in Montreal, Japan, Brazil and Norway. Her most recent book, Downfall, The Architecture of Excess (2014), is a novel that proposes a reflection on contemporary practice. Alberto Pérez-Gómez was born in Mexico City in 1949, where he studied architecture and practised. In 1983 he became director of Carleton University’s

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School of Architecture, Ottawa, Canada. Since January 1987 he has occupied the Bronfman Chair of Architectural History at McGill University, Montreal, where he founded the History and Theory Master’s and doctoral programmes. He has lectured extensively around the world and is the author of numerous articles. His book Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Hitchcock Award in 1984. Subsequent books include Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (1992), Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (1997) and Built Upon Love: Architectural Longing after Ethics and Aesthetics (2006). He is also co-editor of the well-known series CHORA : Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture. His most recent book Attunement (2016) examines connections between phenomenology, recent cognitive science and emerging language. Tiago Torres-Campos is a Portuguese landscape architect and Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture, Rhode Island School of Design. He is studying for a PhD in architecture by design, investigating possibilities for contemporary cities and landscapes in the context of the Anthropocene. His research focuses on the geologic conditions of scale, frame and ground in Manhattan, NYC, while unsettling issues and questioning limits involved in thick geopolitical representations of the island-city. He cochaired the international symposium ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ in June 2017, and is currently co-editing a book on the same topic. He has published internationally and is the founder of CNTXT Studio, a research-bydesign platform focusing on the study of landscape and its intersections with architecture, art, design and digital media.

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An introduction to silence Mark Dorrian and Christos Kakalis

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t seems appropriate that this introduction is being written in the reading room of a library. Introductions to books are characteristically last written, even though they are intended to be first read, and so they themselves are, in their own way, on the threshold of silence. The present room is large – a single volume, long and thin, with tables arranged in rows along it. Its silence strikes you as soon as you enter, and it is experienced as not just something you ‘hear’ but as something you participate in, maintain, and even produce – for it affects the way you move, the way you place your books upon the tabletop, and perhaps even the way you breathe. One becomes conscious of everything that is restive – the sound of a paper page tearing can seem so extreme as to appear a tearing of the atmosphere of the place itself. The institutional silence of libraries, which is a prohibition against the sounding of external noises that threaten to interrupt the internal vocalization of reading, aims at a kind of isolation or detachment of readers. But, of course, the interiors of libraries – and it is certainly the case with this one – are never simply silent, if we mean by that a complete absence of noise. Instead, we become aware of a complex and shifting pattern of sounds: the creak of weight shifting on chairs, the flutter of book pages turning, the cushioned closure of a door, the coughs of readers, occasional flurries of tapping on laptop keyboards. Even with these, the scratch of the pencil with which these words are being written upon the paper can still be heard, together with the incessant and almost hallucinatory bass hum of the building’s air-conditioning system. As an institution, the library might be one of those buildings that act as great reservoirs of silence – a beautiful phrase of Max Picard’s, which he used to characterize cathedrals1 – but despite this, or rather because of it, readers who listen within its silence-sensitized space can encounter what seems like an almost overwhelming aural intensity. At the same time, this confers a sense of spatiality and limit that is quite different from the radical 1

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openness experienced by John Cage when he entered an anechoic chamber, an environment experienced as stripped of sounds save for those that emanated from his own physiology.2 Listening to the emergence and decay of sounds within the silence of a space like a library, to the minimal conditions of hearing, moreover, tends to direct attention to the limits of our sensorium and give rise to thoughts of ‘sounds’ that are present but that escape it by virtue of frequency or amplitude. Toward the end of his life, the radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi apparently imagined that the sound of ancient voices might still be present as faint perturbations of the air, able to be detected if only one had an instrument of sufficient sensitivity.3 We open in this way because it usefully begins to indicate some of the complexities attendant upon thinking about silence that this book sets out to explore. Its title, The Place of Silence, carries a double sense – on one hand, it gestures to spaces, locations, institutions and media while, on the other, it indicates a concern with the concept and experience of silence and what might be at stake in addressing it. Developed from papers presented at a symposium hosted by the Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in June 2016, the volume, although centred on architecture, ranges across related areas of concern and interest to present a variegated and diverse assemblage of materials addressing the topic. Moving through the chapters, the reader will find marked shifts in emphasis and approach but also strong and sometimes surprising resonances between the texts. As editors we have valued the diversity of perspectives on the topic that the contributions open up and have not tried to ameliorate tensions between them where they exist. Our concern rather has been to try to sequence the chapters so that, on reading, they come to work upon one another in a productive way. The book is organized in four parts. The first, ‘Mediating silence’, opens with Mark Dorrian’s study of the Silent Witnesses project (1976) by the architect John Hejduk. Reading this in relation to Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘neutral’ and to Hejduk’s own commentaries, he proposes that it ultimately addresses a radical post-catastrophic silence that extends on the other side of any possibility of audition. Focused on Claire Denis’s film Beau Travail (1999), the following chapter by Hannah Paveck considers Denis’s work in relation to the concept of ‘listening’ as it is developed by Jean-Luc Nancy, arguing that her characteristic silencing of speech carries an ethical import by opening onto an expanded condition of listening that registers the co-constitution of self and other. Ben Cope then takes us to Visaginas, Lithuania – a former soviet nuclear settlement, its reactor now decommissioned – in order to explore questions both of multi-scalarity in relation to nuclear modernity and of the complex interplay of present and remembered silence and sound that patterns this postsocialist environment. Next we move to Athens, where Aikaterini Antonopoulou

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writes on the exclusions experienced by specific social and ethnic groups – ‘silences . . . within the tumultuous cityscape’, as she puts it – and of the capacities of digital augmentation of the public realm to expose and address these. Concluding the first part, Amy Kulper – with reference in particular to Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man – examines what she describes as the critical silence of architectural historiography in the wake of the 9/11 attack in relation to discourses of ‘presentism’ in contemporary architectural theory. Part Two, ‘Material silences’, addresses the entanglements of silence with physical objects. It opens with Manuela Antoniu’s reflections on the transposition of sound into material things. Beginning with Japanese kintsugi – fractured ceramics whose exquisite repair, she argues, silently memorializes the sound of breakage – she moves from a discussion of silence in Zen Buddhism to consider the materialization of sound, and indeed sound as material, in artworks by Robert Morris and others. This is followed by Jonathan Foote’s discussion of the aural agency of Michelangelo’s hammer, its capacity to coax stone to the point of speech but also to fashion silence. The chapter finds its coda in the curious case of the mutilation of the Vatican Pietà in 1972 by the Hungarian-born geologist, László Tóth. The attention to sculpture is maintained in Ross Jenner’s chapter, which explores stereotomic ‘extraction’ in the work of Iberian sculptors and architects – Eduardo Chillida and others – as a means of evoking a primordial silence prior to any determination. Finally, Carolina Dayer writes on Carlo Scarpa’s drawing through the trope of the stupefying rendering-silent of Medusa’s gaze. Her study characterizes Scarpa’s practice as a search for moments of erotic stupor whose petrified trace is sedimented in his drawings and then, through these, realized in architectural construction. Part Three, concerned with ‘Practising silence’, opens with Christos Kakalis’s account of silence and hesychasm, which focuses on the monastic community and topography of Mount Athos, Greece. First comparing hesychasm with other religious practices of silence, he goes on to show the ways in which it complexly engages the body, the monastic architecture, and the broader Athonite environment. Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul and Carl Mika then explore the practice of silence in European and Aotearoa New Zealand contexts in its relation to a subduing of the sense of self that opens a space of receptivity to the other. In this way, the ritual greeting event of the po¯whiri in Ma¯ori culture is understood as patterned by a rhythmic oscillation of call and silence that spatially transports and interweaves the participants. Shifting context, Tiago Torres-Campos’s contribution presents us with a retrospective reading – through the optic of the Anthropocene – of the architect Gaetano Pesce’s subterranean projects from the 1970s as a withdrawal into the ‘silence’ of the geologic that both harbours thanatological dimensions and anticipates our contemporary environmental crisis. Jason O’Shaughnessy

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then concludes the section by returning us to John Hejduk, whose later work he considers alongside that of Samuel Beckett. Although Beckett and Hejduk have not been discussed together before, both understood their work in terms of lateness, negotiations on the cusp of silence within a condition of near-exhaustion. The final part, ‘Silence and the senses’, begins with the philosopher Gernot Böhme’s exploration of the relations between silence and space and the kind of listening fostered by quiet places. Working through German and English terms related to silence, he proposes the German Lauchsen as designating a kind of listening that attends to silence. While silence comes to awareness in its relation to sound, it itself is not simply heard but rather forms a transcendent condition disclosed through what is limited and perceptible and, as such, he writes, exists as ‘the feeling of infinite space’. This is followed by Louise Pelletier’s survey of silence and theatre audiences. Tracking shifts in the vocality and character of the audience in relation to developments in theatre layout, lighting and stagecraft, she indicates how silence can work ambivalently to discipline the audience but also to intensify its engagement with the represented events onstage. In his chapter Paul Carter explores another kind of space of audition, this time an auditorium for echoes. Posing the possibility of an echoic listening that goes beyond narcissistic self-affirmation, he considers Australian Aboriginal thinking on hollowed places where, as he puts it, ‘eternal whisperings might be sensed not as an after-effect of human presence but as the pre-articulate flow out of which the world is lifted’. And finally, here in this section and in the book, Alberto Pérez-Gómez discusses silence in relation to atmosphere and architecture. Arguing for an ‘understanding of architecture, through atmosphere, as a . . . setting for human life’, he traces changes in the communicative modalities of architecture from its musicalharmonic conception to the emergence of post-Enlightenment philosophy’s concept of Stimmung or ‘attunement’, upon which he reflects in conclusion. Collections of essays like this that address a topic, particularly one as capacious as silence, can hardly be exhaustive and inevitably this book itself remains silent on much – some of which we are aware but even more, no doubt, of which we are not. Our hope is that, beyond the inherent interest of the chapters themselves, the volume as a whole will offer a diverse and inspiring array of cases and questions that can be brought to bear on other materials and that will nourish new approaches to the cultural study of silence. We are grateful to the contributors and, indeed, to all those, speakers and audience alike, who participated in The Place of Silence symposium – and we extend thanks to James Thompson and his colleagues at Bloomsbury, who have supported this project from the start and have patiently guided it through to publication.

PART ONE

Mediating silence

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1 ‘Then there was war’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as nuclear criticism Mark Dorrian

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s my title indicates, this chapter will focus on John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses project from the mid-1970s, but I want to approach it in the first instance by way of Roland Barthes’s reflections on the ‘Neutral’. This is the topic of the lectures that Barthes delivered at the Collège de France in the spring of 1978, just two years before his death. The course was organized through a series of considerations of terms that, Barthes observed, came together to form less a dictionary of definitions than what he called ‘scintillations’.1 For him the Neutral was, he explained, a passionate question and a passionate condition. His interest in it was propelled by a desire for the ‘suspension of orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, the will-to-possess’; in short, the ‘refusal of [a] pure discourse of opposition’.2 He recalled playing a version of ‘tag’ as a boy, in which those caught were immobilized but could be released when touched by a free child. His greatest pleasure was found, he said, not in catching but in this act of freeing that re-set the game to its point of origin or degree zero or neutral condition – ‘neutral’ because it returned it to a point prior to the establishment of the paradigm of opposition between the catcher and the imprisoned, which is to say the freedom, or better, the openness, of the ‘not yet’. In the second lecture, one of the ‘scintillations’ that Barthes elaborates concerns ‘silence’, which he suggests in its fully neutral state draws close to mystical visions such as the conception of God of the late-sixteenth/early-seventeenth-century German theologian, Jakob Böhme – an a-symbolic ‘ “calm and voiceless eternity”, homogenous, without oppositions, etc’.3 Yet although he notes at 7

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one point that ‘silence is not a sign, properly speaking; it doesn’t refer to a signified’, Barthes quickly goes on to warn: ‘As we know . . . what is produced against signs, outside of signs, what is expressly produced not to be a sign is very quickly recuperated as a sign. This is what happens to silence . . . silence itself takes on the form of an image, of a “wise”, heroic, or Sibylline, more or less Stoic posture.’4 Now Barthes here gives us a very specific kind of entry into ‘silence’ and I have begun with it because the Neutral is something to which I want to return in due course – but also because he alerts us to the inevitability of the differentiations of what we call silence. And this opens onto the question of the experience, conditions and meanings of particular silences, and the related issues of what counts as silence, for whom, and in what situations – these in turn no doubt being related to what we attend to, what we find meaningful, and our expectations and anticipations. This is simply to say that there are many silences. There are those that mark the passing of some kind of limit condition, such as the limits of representation as associated with the sublime, where the magnitude of that striving to be expressed is beyond symbolization and so can only be indicated by language’s inadequacy; or those that aim at a heightened or renovated attentiveness, whether that is directed outward or inward or is anticipatory (silences observed as reflectiveness in acts of memorialization and mourning are of this kind); or those experienced when expectations are confounded or alterities encountered; or those exercised as rights or observed as ethical principles. But then there are also silences that signal the denial of an act of recognition or acknowledgement, or that are produced out of relations of violence and subjection, whether it is the silence that arises from the interdiction of speech or that by which acts of torture authorize themselves. One of the things that is striking when we list an array of silences like this is that we usually – and perhaps we have to – silently assume the presence or at least the possibility of a listener, of someone or something that ‘witnesses’ the silence. But this then raises the question of how we might think about the silence that falls with the disappearance of any condition of reception – that is to say, a catastrophic silence, the event of which would eliminate the conditions of possibility for its own recognition and registration. Would it indeed then make any sense to consider this as silence at all? Wouldn’t it rather be the case that silence, as marker of a limit condition, with this loss of witness passes beyond its own limit? It is this that I want to think about and, in doing so, bring into contact with Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses, usually dated from 1976, in the hope that it will lead us to a new kind of reading of the work. A celebrated architect and educator, Hejduk was first chair and latterly dean of the School of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York from 1964 until his death in 2000. During the period of his directorship, the Cooper

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Union developed a reputation as one of the most important international schools of architecture, the other obvious candidate being the Architectural Association in London. Where the AA’s chairman Alvin Boyarsky operated in the mode of an architectural impresario, selecting and appointing tutors who then took up positions within the school’s studio unit system, Hejduk was more like a permanent artist-in-residence whose presence – both through his person and his projects – infused the school, becoming, in a way, materialized in his own renovation of the Cooper Union building. Where the AA became known for the ‘lateral’ unit system of its diploma school, under which each unit followed a different line of exploration, the Cooper Union became renowned for its cross-year curriculum, which was celebrated in the exhibition (and accompanying book), Education of an Architect: A Point of View, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between November 1971 and January 1972. Something very evident in Hejduk’s thought, but I think not much remarked upon, is his concern with ambience or atmosphere. Indeed, it seems to me there is a case to be made that ‘atmosphere’ becomes a kind of mastercategory that is implicit everywhere in the way Hejduk talked about what he did. Not only was his work atmospherically sensitive, born out of atmospheric conditions, but equally the condensation of a particular atmosphere was what the work aimed to achieve. Characteristically, in the dedication of his 1985 collected works, Mask of Medusa, he acknowledged ‘certain places and specific friends’ who ‘created an atmosphere in which my work could move forward in exploration’.5 And he later went on to explain how the elements in his 1979–83 Berlin Masque were affected by the specific atmospherics of the day on which they were drawn – in the words of his interlocutor Don Wall, ‘overcast days having an analogous affect, humid days affecting the quality of the lead, hence the density of the architecture; and with Chicago, the coldsickness, heightened sensuality of the body – derelict, impending doom’.6 This preoccupation with atmosphere carries, it seems to me, implications for how we understand Hejduk’s work and, in particular, its representational conditions. Here he is, for example, speaking of architectural drawing: What is important is that there is an ambience or an atmosphere that can be extracted in drawing that will give the same sensory aspect as being there, like going into the church and being overwhelmed by the Stations of the Cross (a set of plaques which exude the sense of a profound situation). You can exude a sense of a situation by drawing, by model or by good form.7 What strikes me here is the way this view tends to dissolve any sense of modes of architectural representation as being secondary to what they depict,

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as thought atmospherically the drawing or model does the same thing as the building. Likewise architecture is now the ‘same’, in this sense, as painting. Like the young Roland Barthes releasing his immobilized friends, the sensibility of atmosphere allows Hejduk to neutralize categorical distinctions that isolate and partition things, which now enter a free relationship with one another. We see this very directly in his identification of the uncanny atmosphere of Le Corbusier’s Maison La Roche with Ingres’s portrait of the Comtesse d’Haussonville. Here is Hejduk again, from one of the interviews with Wall: Remember our discussion of the Madame d’Haussonville and the widow’s walk? I discussed then, the whole ambience, the whole mood, the whole sensibility that was captured by Madame d’Haussonville and by the Villa La Roche. There was something in there that I thought was authentic; there was a mood, a tone . . .8 Notably, both of these are represented in the compendium of images without words that Hejduk published in 1982 under the title ‘Silent Witnesses’, which, it appears to me, was aiming to work as a kind of Warburg-like mnemosyne atlas, although one of atmosphere instead of gesture.9 Let’s turn at this point to look in detail at the Silent Witnesses project in the various manifestations that it takes. It is a distinctive and unusual work when viewed within Hejduk’s production. Often viewed as transitional, in Mask of Medusa it is spoken of as one of a trilogy of projects – which include the Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought and the Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio10 – that come between the preceding house projects and the subsequent ‘Masques’. Certainly, when compared to, say, the Wall Houses or the Masques, it seems to have received very little attention and commentary, yet if it is a marginal project it is at the same time one that clearly held a certain kind of centrality for Hejduk. ‘To me,’ he declared, ‘the Silent Witnesses is my most important statement.’11 The period of its development was one of a new intensity of engagement with Europe for Hejduk, one refracted through his own self-narration as an architect caught between Europe and America. (I think there is an argument that for Hejduk the American condition itself was about being caught between Europe and America). Crucial to this was his meeting with the Italian architect Aldo Rossi and the example of his work, in which Hejduk discerned a combination of ‘sensuousness’ and ‘dread’.12 During these years his work moved, he would comment, towards an ‘Architecture of Pessimism’.13 The Silent Witnesses installation takes the form of five plinth-like constructions – maybe we would call them models, as Hejduk himself sometimes did – that sit alongside one another, each below a corresponding plaque on which appears an author’s name, together with a date range: Proust

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FIGURE 1.1 One of four slide sheets given by John Hejduk to editor Brian Healy, which formed the basis of the 1982 ‘Silent Witnesses’ publication in Perspecta, vol. 19. Courtesy of Brian Healy.

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1878–1908; Gide 1908–1938; Camus 1938–1968; Robbe-Grillet 1968–1998; Hawkes 1998–.14 Through these five constructions runs a common datum line upon which one or more architectural elements are located, save for the last, which is empty. When seen from above we realize that, as the sequence develops, these elements step incrementally toward the viewer. Another level or rather a series of levels are established by grey-blue volumes at the front of the constructions upon which, in the first three, float three different kinds of boats. On the fourth, the boat has sunk below the surface to become a submarine. The fifth, again, is blank. Each of the constructions, moreover, has a panel at the rear. The first three are painted with parts of what looks like a possibly continuous landscape that seems to disappear on the fourth, although Hejduk’s drawings confirm the continuity. The middle panels have objects in flight standing out in half-relief – a biplane, a Spitfire fighter, and what appears to be an Apollo landing capsule, and hence something descending, although Hejduk spoke of it as a ‘spacecraft going out to infinity’.15 The fifth is once more mute, silent, and empty. With its uncompromising frontality (the work was exhibited against a wall) and its combination of threedimensional models and painted backdrop, the Silent Witnesses recalls the form of the diorama – perhaps one like the natural-historical dioramas and habitat groups that were pioneered at the American Museum of Natural History, which Hejduk recalled visiting in the 1930s as a child.16 He wrote:

FIGURE 1.2 John Hejduk, Sketch for The Silent Witnesses, 1976. Ink with coloured pencils on cardboard, 21.7 x 36 cm, DR1998:0092:001:009, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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I was drawn to the exhibits where animals natural to Africa were shown in three-dimensional panoramas. The scenes were remarkable, for in a very contained and compressed space, great distances in perspective were depicted. I remember always searching for the demarcation line, that is, where the actual three-dimensional object left off and the illusionistic perspective began. I never found that line. Returning after many years, he found to his dismay that these magical windows of his childhood had been replaced with new installations and that the line for which he had vainly searched in the past was now clearly visible. ‘[The] old realists had passed on’, Hejduk comments. ‘So I picked up a one-inch deep cardboard box, made a crude wood frame around it, and put within the box a small house and a cross section of a tower. I painted these with watercolors.’17 I wonder how we might think about what’s going on in this allegory-like story, within which world history and personal experience seem so intertwined? Certainly it is a generational lament for the passing of the ‘old realists’, but at the same time it is a lament for the loss of enchantment and illusion – and maybe also of childhood. It is a story of a historical dividing line that turns on a story of a dividing line – Hejduk’s demarcation line – whose

FIGURE 1.3 John Hejduk, Plans and elevations for The Silent Witnesses, 1974– 1979. Graphite on paper, 76.3 x 101.7 cm, DR1998:0092:002:006, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

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FIGURE 1.4 John Hejduk, Sketch for The Silent Witnesses, 1974–1979. Felt-tip pen and watercolour on cardboard, 38 x 50.7 cm, DR1998:0092:002:003, John Hejduk fonds, Canadian Centre for Architecture.

emergence into visibility registers a shift in conditions of representation that must be acknowledged and that cannot be reversed or reset. It is surely important here that this is also a generational lament issued across the historical fracture of the war and, more particularly, the abyss opened up by the development and use of atomic weapons and the unending foreshadowing of the future that that presaged. If ‘our time’, as Hejduk would write, ‘has been deeply influenced by schizoid/frenetic forces let loose after World War II’, then this inevitably finds an inscription in the Silent Witnesses, which he in fact would characterize as ‘a physical panoramic landscape of 120 years of history’ – a description that makes it sound very much like a transposition into time of the spatial dioramas of his childhood.18 This returns us to our chapter title, ‘Then there was war’. The phrase is drawn from Hejduk’s telling of another early experience, that of playing with toy soldiers. Here he talks of how: I spent eons of hours and days with those British lead soldiers. They don’t make them anymore. But they were made in the 30s . . . At that miniature

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scale one develops a tactile sense. And of course there was the organization . . . one constantly organized them in lines of marching soldiers, in all sorts of geometric battle patterns. Then there was war. Everything would disperse in chaos. A lot of them would drop dead. Then you would put them all back up, but maybe this time in a different pattern.19 Now, it seems to me that something rather like this is being played out across the toy-like tableaux of the Silent Witnesses, although with a significant difference. Key to Hejduk’s self-understanding was the sense of belonging to a specific generation – a late generation, a third one, coming two after the modern masters of architecture, Le Corbusier, Mies and Wright. Hejduk articulated this lateness in a militarized way. It was almost as if the third generation found themselves in the aftermath upon the field of battle. ‘The original new ground had already been decisively broken’, he writes. ‘What remained was a job of filling in . . . to “fill in”. We had witnessed the result of a bombardment.’20 Silent Witnesses is a project about generations. Hejduk says this explicitly via a reference to Ortega y Gasset, and it structures the thirty-year intervals that give the five boxes their temporal rhythm – or at least four of them, for the fifth is again both inside and outside the series. And it is a project that begins – and, it seems to me, ends – with war. Of its development Hejduk writes: ‘I started with 1938, the year war began in Europe, and I worked my way backwards and forwards.’21 (Presumably 1938 because it was the year of the Nazi annexation of Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia – Hejduk himself was of Czech descent). Thus we have the 1938–68 span described as ‘war time’; the 1968–98 range, ‘ice time’; and the 1998– forward, if it is forward, ‘grey matter’.22 In some ways Hejduk’s date plaques, under whose sign the models are placed, are redolent of certain art practices of the period, such as the date paintings of the New York-based Japanese artist On Kawara, which he produced from 4 January 1966 until his death in 2014. In a recent essay, Susan Stewart has linked these – following testimony by Kawara himself – to the detonation of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here the compulsive re-registration of the day signalled a continuing, if provisional, presence against the backdrop of a technology that, as Stewart writes, is ‘world-destroying, and hence time-destroying’.23 To his associates, Kawara sent occasional telegrams that announced ‘I am still alive’, and rendered his age in days lived (29,771, by the time of his death).24 In Kawara’s work, the repetitive inscription of ascending dates seems like a kind of counting up – and at first sight Silent Witnesses looks like this too, with its rising dates and datum, the sea level freezing in the fourth box which holds that most emblematic of Cold War vessels, the nuclear submarine. But at second glance, we recognize that this is shadowed by a more pervasive sense of counting down, marked by the number of the houses in the tableaux – four,

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three, two, one – until we arrive at the grey box, at which point counting ends. And now the horizontal dash that follows 1998 seems less an indicator of unending futurity than of the collapse of time, its horizontality perhaps reiterated in the celebrated construction of that name realized outside the Architectural Association in London’s Bedford Square in October 1986. In what way did Hejduk describe the five constructions from the Silent Witnesses? ‘The models’, he wrote, ‘remind me somehow of being medieval and they tell a story, even if only a literal one.’ They can also, he continued, be seen as ‘caskets’, and specifically ‘the caskets of children’.25 This seems obscure, although our earlier remarks suggest that the sequence might be read as a series of toys. For its part, the term ‘medieval’ carries a particular value in Hejduk’s discourse insofar as it stands for the pre-modern and against the rationality of the modern period. It is very clear that Hejduk understood his architecture of ‘pessimism’ as a kind of return of the ‘medieval’. Hejduk’s use of the word ‘casket’ remains odd, however, not least because only the fourth model – the one that harbours the submarine – has any directly legible condition of interiority. But the fact that the caskets form a series and that they are chromatically – or, better, tonally – differentiated is suggestive, not least because it recalls the story of the three caskets found in the late-thirteenth/early-fourteenth-century compilation of tales, the Gesta Romanorum. This story formed the template for the act in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice in which the suitors compete for the hand of Portia through a choice of caskets, these being respectively made of gold, silver, and grey lead. And, of course, it is the last of these, the one whose outward appearance makes it seem least valuable, which turns out to be the correct choice. Now, the way in which this is developed in an inverted form in Freud’s 1913 essay ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ is interesting for us. Although there is not space to explore it in detail here, it is important that we note the movement of Freud’s argument. He identifies the choice between three caskets with that of the choice between three women – specifically that made by the elderly King Lear between his daughters. Lear, of course, makes the wrong choice, one that forsakes the undemonstrative and silent Cordelia. Freud writes: ‘Cordelia makes herself unrecognizable, inconspicuous like lead, she remains dumb, she “loves and is silent” . . . We may perhaps be allowed to equate concealment and dumbness . . . Gold and silver are “loud”; lead is “dumb”.’26 However, for Freud, the development of the theme, whereby the third choice is the ‘correct’ – enlivening, vivifying – one, is the result of a consoling ‘reaction formation’, in which something has been substituted by its opposite. And it is the underlying deathliness, he suggests, that the leaden silence of the third continues to point to, a meaning that he relates to the third figure in mythic female triads (the Fates, the Norns, etc.) Certainly, in the Silent Witnesses the final casket is – as in the tale – grey, leaden and silent. As Hejduk says: ‘And then there’s the last one. There’s

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nothing. Just the grey all the way through – the density of butter. All the pictures, all the artifacts, all the elements have disappeared. There’s nothing left but the grey, solid casket.’27 Let’s think at this point about what grey is for Hejduk. His earlier work is, it seems to me, characterized by a very particular attention to colour, in which the primaries of De Stijl met with a self-conscious use of the kind of naive colour associations familiar from toys. Listen, for example, to this exchange from the interviews with Don Wall: Wall How do you make specific decisions as to the choice of color, shape arrangements . . . That Wall House over there – why the blue, the green and so forth? Hejduk (Laughs) The reasoning is that blue is simply for bath, the red was for warmth, for fireplace, the yellow was for kitchen, the grey was for library, the black was for sleeping . . . it all was banal reasoning, you see, really banal . . . (Keeps laughing).28 But on Hejduk’s encounter with the Maison La Roche in 1972, his approach to colour altered: After visiting La Roche my sense of color changed. The colors there were muted and saturated at the same time, and they changed constantly. I saw how primary colors could be greyed down, and yet made more saturated, more dense. So the Bye House is a color wheel of muted primaries, and muted complements, with a grey wall. The wall is like a filter – a neutralizer. The grey of the wall is in all of the other colors, which are thereby neutralized . . . muted, yet more intense.29 What seems to be happening here is that Hejduk’s work is moving toward – at least conceptually – a condition of grisaille, a kind of tonal painting in neutrals that is often associated with the representation of sculpture. But note too how this is referred back to the grey of the wall – to the wall as greyness – for it is specifically this that starts to emanate through the project. Greyness is for Hejduk a spatial condition, that of the wall as a non-identical third term with respect to the exterior/interior opposition, but as such it is also the temporal idea of the instantaneity of the present – ‘a membrane between two worlds so to speak’, Hejduk says. ‘That’s why the façade is a plane, thin and colored grey.’30 Hejduk’s reading of Jay Fellows’s book on Ruskin, The Failing Distance, seems to have been key to the way he formulated these relations. Perspective, he explained, is a diamond configuration flattened out with the point in the distance. So that at the moment of madness, the diamond configuration turns in upon

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the person internally. Well, that moment is the hypotenuse, which is the point of entry-exit, the threshold. The hypotenuse of the diamond perspective is what I call the moment of the present which I suspect might also be considered the moment of death . . . [The] hypotenuse of the perspective is constantly in motion and flattening as you approach any building from the exterior. It flattens out right on top of you at the moment of entry – the moment of the present. It is the quickest condition timewise; also, it’s at once the most extended, the most heightened, and at the same time the most neutral and repulsive.31 It is very hard not to read this and connect it with the Lacanian diagram of the optical construction of the Subject. In Lacan, however, the Subject’s loss of self-possession is linked to the presence of the gaze of the Other in the visual field, which is directed back toward it. For Hejduk the concern is, in a sense, the same: the death of the subject, the ‘moment of death’ as he writes. But now this occurs by, in effect, having the Subject walk into the screen – and hence, I suppose, the grey blindedness, which Hejduk seems to have equated with a pure condition of opacity: ‘There’s nothing. Just the grey all the way through – the density of butter.’32 At one point in the interviews published in Mask of Medusa, Hejduk says that if any of his late works would be built . . . I would move to another level of detailing. I would go to lead. I would go to . . . Wall Why lead? Does lead suggest a particular content? I know that many of the recent writings refer to metallics. Hejduk Non-reflective metals. Pewter. Wall

Inert? Deadly in associative value?

Hejduk No. Thick. Weight. Weight. It’s the weight (long pause). That’s an interesting question. Let me think . . .33 When Hejduk says of the last grey, deathly, leaden casket in the Silent Witnesses that ‘All the pictures, all the artifacts, all the elements have disappeared’, I think we have to understand him as gesturing to a notion of total nuclear war as catastrophe without remainder, as apocalypse without revelation and, as such, as something that can only be proleptically mourned in advance, for no symbolic possibility – no pictures, artefacts, elements – outlasts it. Here perhaps is the final meaning of the casket as ark, archive, and archival destruction. This is a concern that animated Jacques Derrida’s important essay on nuclear criticism, in which he pointed out the necessarily

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FIGURE 1.5 Hieronymus Bosch, The Third Day of the Creation of the World, outer faces of the side panels of the triptych, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490– 1500. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado.

FIGURE 1.6 Harold E. Edgerton, Atomic Bomb Explosion, 1952. © 2010 MIT. Courtesy of MIT Museum.

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fabulous nature of such a conception – that is, of total, remainderless war – which can by definition have no referent. This is not to say that it cannot be actualized and made real, only that its condition in the living present is always inevitably one of being a story. He writes: One has to distinguish between this ‘reality’ of the nuclear age and the fiction of war. But, and this would perhaps be the imperative of nuclear criticism, one must also be careful to interpret critically this critical or diacritical distinction. For the ‘reality’ of the nuclear age and the fable of nuclear war are perhaps distinct, but they are not two separate things. It is the war (in other words the fable) that triggers this fabulous war effort, this senseless capitalization of sophisticated weaponry, this speed race in search of speed.34 But, of course, this entails that the only resource to press against this, to push against what could be, is also inevitably the fable. And here we find that the Silent Witnesses, which perhaps seemed eccentric before, becomes reincorporated with the allegorical core of Hejduk’s work. Let’s conclude with two images, which I suppose are – in their different ways – images concerning both the neutral and silence. The first will take us back to Roland Barthes, who has something interesting to tell us about grisaille (of which we spoke earlier). He develops this in a beautiful way in relation to the painting on the exterior panels of Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights. Where colour oppositions are, as Barthes argues, the very model of the paradigm, ‘the opposition par excellence’ (blue = water vs red = fire, etc.), the monochrome (the Neutral) substitutes for the idea of opposition that of slight difference, of the onset, of the effort toward difference, in other words, of nuance: nuance becomes a principle of allover organization (which covers the totality of the surface, as in the landscape of the triptych) that in a way skips the paradigm: this integrally and almost exhaustively nuanced space is the shimmer . . . the Neutral is the shimmer.35 The second image is one of Harold Edgerton’s ultra-high-speed photographs of the atom bomb tests in Nevada taken for the US Atomic Energy Commission circa 1952. While the first is an image of an awakening world, shimmering with immanent liveliness on the edge of differentiation, the second is of a movement in the other direction. And I feel it is the latter that the Silent Witnesses, in its own way and on its own terms, addresses. The Silent Witnesses turn out to be witnesses of silence, but it is a silence to which we are no longer sure that we can attach the name.

2 Textures of silence in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999) Hannah Paveck

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he cinematic medium has a unique capacity to make us feel silence – to amplify its material dimensions. As film sound theorist Michel Chion writes: ‘Any silence makes us feel exposed, as if we were laying bare our own listening, but also as if we were in the presence of a giant ear, tuned to our own slightest noises. We are no longer merely listening to the film, we are as it were being listened to by it as well.’1 We experience cinematic silence not as an absence, but as a heightened condition of listening – a listening that is both directed towards the film and resounds in the spectator. This chapter considers the relationship between formal strategies of silence in film and the aural response of the spectator. What is at stake when we listen to silence, and how might it enable us to rethink the relation between ethics and contemporary narrative cinema? Traditionally, we think of silence through a metaphysical model that aligns sound and voice with presence and silence with absence. In her essay ‘Critique of Silence’ Eugenie Brinkema stresses the way in which silence is often ‘condemned to [this] fundamental metaphysical orientation around presence and absence’,2 and its attendant position as the ‘zero point of sound and meaning’.3 For Brinkema, this conception of silence as and through negation limits a discussion of its aesthetic and formal possibilities.4 In addition, I argue, it limits our understanding of its ethical dimensions. To interrogate these, we must shift the terms of inquiry from a consideration of silence-as-absence to one in which silence is approached through listening and understood as sonorous. In framing silence through listening, my approach draws primarily on French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s text Listening, published in 2002 and translated into English in 2007. By staging an encounter 21

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between Nancy’s Listening and French filmmaker Claire Denis’s 1999 film Beau Travail, this chapter underscores the mutually informing relation between philosophy and cinema as a way to rethink the ethical dimensions of silence through listening. Beau Travail marks the beginning of a collaborative dialogue between Nancy and Denis.5 Nancy has written essays on Beau Travail, Trouble Every Day (2000) and L’Intrus (2004); Denis has made two films directly inspired by Nancy’s work, Vers Nancy (2002) and L’Intrus; and the two have collaborated on a publication and documentary with choreographer Mathilde Monnier and have appeared in public conversation at the European Graduate School.6 A shared consideration of sound, silence and listening forms a central, yet largely unexplored connection between Nancy’s philosophy and Denis’s cinema. Scholarship surrounding this dialogue has either neglected sound altogether or has framed it through Laura U. Marks’s haptic theory, which presents a synaesthetic model of embodied film spectatorship rooted in visual perception that stresses touch and proximity.7 It is my contention, however, that the relationship between silence and listening brings an important perspective to the conversation between philosopher and filmmaker – one that refigures existing approaches to film sound and embodied spectatorship and contributes to a re-evaluation of the place of ethics in their work. In what follows, I will examine how Denis’s use of tonal silence in Beau Travail orients the spectator towards Nancean listening and fleshes out its focus on materiality, before going on to argue that the film’s engagement with the question of foreignness exposes ethical stakes which are implicit yet occluded within Nancy’s philosophical text.

Framing silence through Nancean listening In Listening, Nancy figures silence as neither absence nor privation, but rather as a call to listen, ‘an arrangement of resonance: a little – or even exactly . . . – as when in a perfect condition of silence you hear your own body resonate, your heart and all its resounding cave’.8 For Nancy, silence not only leads us to listen attentively for the arrival of sound but also forces us to listen to the body as resonance chamber – to listen-to-ourselves listen. By invoking listening in its most heightened state, silence becomes a privileged access point for Nancy’s philosophical inquiry into listening and resonance. Nancy’s distinction between ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’ informs and structures his philosophical conception of listening. The distinction between the two can best be understood as two different modes of perception and reception that can and do coexist. Listening refers to the active or attentive state within the sensory register of hearing; it is a heightened attunement towards sound. The

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nuances of Nancy’s distinction between listening (écouter) and hearing (entendre) lie in the double meaning of entendre, which means both ‘to hear’ and ‘to understand’.9 Hearing aims towards intelligibility or signification – a closure of meaning. Listening, on the other hand, orients towards sense beyond signification, attuning itself to ‘accent, tone, timbre, resonance, and sound’.10 Sense (sens) is a recurring preoccupation in Nancy’s philosophy, from his diagnosis of a ‘crisis of sense’ in our time11 to his reflections on art and aesthetics. For Nancy, sense is simply our ‘shared worldly and material existence’;12 it is co-substantive with being-in-the-world. Moreover, as the qualifier ‘material’ suggests, Nancy situates this ontology of sense within the realm of the body, writing ‘this doesn’t mean that the body comes before sense, as its obscure prehistory or preontological attestation. No, it [the body] gives it [sense] its place, absolutely. Neither before, nor after, the body’s place is the taking-place of sense.’13 In other words, sense within Nancy’s philosophy is not simply cognitive but embodied. It is through and in the body that we sense and make sense of the world. Moreover, unlike approaches to affect and materiality that reinforce a binary opposition between affect and signification and between the sensible and the intelligible,14 this notion of sense as bodily event does not preclude a connection to signification. For Nancy, sense is neither straightforwardly prior to signification nor limited to it, but instead encompasses the movement between the intelligible and the sensible. How we sense and make sense can only be approached by considering this movement – what, in Listening, Nancy terms resonance. While a mode of hearing-as-understanding is limited to sound’s intelligible dimension, listening-as-sensing attunes us to this resonance between the intelligible and the sensible –the interplay between meaning (semantic sense), perception (perceptual sense), and direction or movement (orientational sense). In other words, Nancean listening enables us to register that the intelligible and the sensible are not opposed, but rather always exist together and in relation. We understand through feeling and feel through understanding. In filmic terms, I argue, this mode of Nancean listening attunes the spectator to a different way of sensing cinema. Rather than privileging the semantic sense of film sound, Nancean listening is twofold. On one level, it refers to a heightened attention to materiality – both the sensorial materiality of sound (the aural texture of film sound) and the corporeal materiality of listening. On another level, Nancean listening foregrounds the orientation (and disorientation) of the ear in relation to sound. In magnifying how listening always resounds in and through the listener, the corporeal materiality of listening produces access to the reflected structure of sense – perception as a ‘feeling-oneself-feel [sesentir-sentir]’, a listening to-oneself-listen.15 Though Nancy prioritizes listening, he is interested in how this structure of sense (resonance) operates within all sensory modes. Similarly, my analysis of Beau Travail through Nancean

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listening does not discount other modes of sensory engagement. Rather, Nancean listening forms a point of departure and a different model for thinking through the ethical dimensions of the spectator’s sensory and embodied engagement with the audiovisual medium of film.

Tonal silence: Aural texture within film sound Nancy’s distinction between hearing-as-understanding and listening-assensing intersects with the shift towards embodied spectatorship in contemporary film theory, which foregrounds our corporeal and (multi)sensory engagement with film.16 In a brief addendum to her theory of haptic visuality, for instance, Marks introduces a similar distinction between aural signs (film sound as signification) and aural textures.17 She maps aural signs/aural textures onto her distinction between optical visuality, which she describes as our traditional (ocularcentric) understanding of vision, and haptic visuality, which posits ‘close and bodily contact’ with the image18 – ‘the eyes themselves function[ing] like organs of touch’.19 As with haptic visuality, Marks suggests, the aural textures of ‘quiet environments’ can blur the ‘aural boundaries between body and world’, inviting a form of haptic hearing.20 In other words, Marks intimates that quietude – what we may otherwise call silence – encourages a different, more embodied engagement with film sound. Yet, in reducing aural textures to a model of haptic visuality that privileges touch and proximity, Marks’s consideration of the spectator’s aural engagement fails to account for the specificity of sound and listening. This framing of sound through touch also characterizes pioneering work on Nancy’s Listening within film theory: Lisa Coulthard introduces the term ‘haptic aurality’ in her study of sound in Michael Haneke’s cinema;21 Douglas Morrey considers sound through the prism of Nancy’s concept of touch, noting that in Denis’s film Vendredi soir (2002), ‘sound seems to have the effect of touch’ and ‘touch becomes noised’;22 and Kristin Lené Hole explores the ethical import of Nancean listening in relation to Denis’s cinema, only to then argue for ‘a form of haptic spectatorship’.23 This framing can limit an understanding of Nancy’s unique philosophical intervention, and its implications for the analysis of film sound and responding aural engagement of the spectator. In Texture in Film, Lucy Fife Donaldson presents a concept of aural texture rooted in film sound. She identifies aural texture as that which communicates the feel, mood and environment of the world depicted onscreen, and contributes to our embodied engagement with film.24 Moreover, for Donaldson, aural texture refers not only to fine detail (the materiality of film sound) but also to its structure or composition – the way different components of film sound, dialogue, music and sound effects thread together and relate to

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the image.25 With its emphasis on the relational structure of film sound, Donaldson’s concept of aural texture presents a useful analytical tool, illuminating how formal strategies within film sound always exist across, and in relation to, these three components. Cinematic silence is thus always relational – it is both produced and perceived in relation to other components of film sound. Yet, as Chion reminds us, these components do not exist on an equal plane. Mimicking human listening, narrative cinema typically organizes film sound according to a hierarchy of auditory perception: dialogue, music, then sound effects. In an argument that recalls Jacques Derrida’s critique of phonocentrism,26 Chion terms this privileging of the human voice, and specifically the intelligibility of dialogue, ‘vococentrism’.27 Following Chion’s analysis of the vococentric (and phonocentric) composition of film sound, we can understand the silencing of dialogue as the most significant form of cinematic silence – it both undermines the dominance of dialogue within film sound, and deprives the spectator of their primary anchor of auditory perception. Minimal dialogue and its amplification of cinematic silences is a defining feature across Denis’s cinema.28 It has been primarily discussed in relation to the filmmaker’s privileging of ellipses and opacity over explanation and legibility, as a component of what Martine Beugnet terms Denis’s ‘aesthetics of the unsaid’.29 In other words, as the term ‘unsaid’ makes explicit, cinematic silences in Denis’s films are typically framed as a negation, not only of dialogue, but also of the conventions of plot line and narration in the way that they challenge the psychological legibility of characters and often leave narrative events unexplained.30 Moreover, Denis’s silences are frequently characterized as positioned in opposition to the dominant status of the image within her films,31 a counterpoint to their ‘complex visual grammar’.32 However, these silences cannot be reduced to structuring absences, nor are they simply backdrops to the image. Analysing them through the concept of aural texture exposes their relation to other components of film sound. In Beau Travail, there is ‘even less reliance on dialogue than in [Denis’s] previous films’.33 While silences within dialogue are evident in previous films, particularly in Chocolat (1988) and Nénette and Boni (1996), Beau Travail marks a progression in Denis’s approach to film sound. In pairing the silencing of dialogue with a magnification of sound effects, the film presents a formal strategy of tonal silence previously nascent in Denis’s work. I propose the term ‘tonal silence’ to refer to an aural texture or composition of film sound that limits dialogue to shift emphasis towards film sound’s materiality. Specifically, it upends the traditional hierarchy of auditory perception to direct focus towards the film’s sound effects – a component of film sound traditionally relegated to the background, yet fundamental to a film’s aural texture from the perspective of both fine detail (sonic materialities) and

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composition (the relationship between sounds and images). The aural texture of Beau Travail enables us to apprehend silence not as an absence, but as an opening that allows other sounds to come to attention. Moreover, its attention to sonic materialities – the materiality of sound effects – draws out the material aspects of Nancean listening, which links sound’s sensorial materiality with the corporeal materiality of listening as bodily event. Examining tonal silence in Beau Travail thus contributes to, and intervenes within, a rethinking of embodied spectatorship in Nancean terms, as Laura McMahon and Kristin Lené Hole have discussed from the perspective of touch and interruptive contact.34 Yet, by attuning the spectator to the ethical dimensions of Nancean listening, Denis’s film also shapes our understanding of Nancy’s philosophical intervention.

Listening to tonal silence in Beau Travail In her 2004 monograph Claire Denis, Martine Beugnet highlights that Denis’s films do not simply depict foreignness but allow it to guide film form, creating a ‘fertile cinematic experience of de-familiarisation – one that challenges the gaze, the perception and the imagination of the viewer’.35 Denis’s films offer us encounters with foreignness in ways that do not fix or categorize, but instead render strange our relation to otherness and difference. Film sound is an integral component of this formal defamiliarization and its shaping of spectatorial experience. In Beau Travail, the use of tonal silence challenges the spectator’s traditional patterns of orientation. A commission by the Franco-German television channel ARTE on the theme of foreignness, the film tells the story of an internal conflict within the French Foreign Legion. Reimagining Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd, the film centres on the rivalry and power struggle between Chief Master-Sergeant Galoup and his subordinate Gilles Sentain over the attention of their commander Forestier. Narrated through a series of flashbacks, it recounts the arrival of Sentain, and the subsequent unfolding of events that led to Galoup’s discharge from the Legion. Set in the former French colony of Djibouti, a country in North-East Africa where France continues to have a military presence, Beau Travail explores the dissonant relation between the postcolonial landscape and the bodies of the legionnaires. However, foreignness in the film is neither mapped onto the other nor fixed onto the colonizer/colonized relation. Instead, it is a foreignness turned inward, toward the otherness within the Legion itself. Denis stages this foreignness through and in form. In altering, yet never entirely eschewing, conventional modes of cinematic representation, Beau Travail provokes a process of defamiliarization for the spectator, necessitating other ways of seeing and listening. The film’s protagonist, Galoup, rarely

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speaks within the diegesis, uttering only six short lines of dialogue the entire film. Furthermore, these lines of dialogue are platitudes and legionnaire commands – words deprived of semantic significance. The film not only withholds Galoup’s dialogue, but also undermines its semantic function as vehicle of meaning. For film scholar Susan Hayward, Galoup’s silence signals the postcolonial body’s lack of control; Galoup is unable to reinscribe himself into the dislocated landscape of present-day Djibouti, to bring the location under new frameworks of intelligibility.36 Yet, Galoup’s semantic impotence is framed by his own voice-over narration: his reading of passages from his diary, written after his discharge from the Legion, guides the film’s elliptical narrative. Hayward argues that Galoup’s shift from silence in Djibouti to the written word in France is a failed attempt to reassert control upon his return to the site of former colonial power. However, in its interaction with other elements of film style, Galoup’s voice-over narration does not affirm semantic sense, but rather exceeds and disrupts it. Traditionally, the first-person voice-over occupies an authoritative status in relation to the narrative. In Hollywood cinema, it is often deployed to convey ‘expositional information, and [aid] in the presentation of complex chronologies’.37 Beau Travail evades this explanatory mode. Galoup’s voice-over does not elucidate the meaning behind narrative events; instead, his voice-over narration exposes the limits of understanding, inviting other ways of making sense. Formally, the juxtaposition between his silence and voice-over narration intensifies Galoup’s ambiguous position in relation to the diegesis. In one scene – a conversation between Galoup and Forestier over a game of chess – the spectator hears Galoup’s voice from outside the diegesis (as voice-over), while Forestier’s response comes from within. Through this interlocking of diegetic and extra-diegetic sound, Beau Travail creates a spatio-temporal disjunction in the dialogue, reasserting Galoup’s position as being at a remove from the diegesis. This scene reminds us of Galoup’s distance from the time and space of the events depicted on-screen; Galoup’s voice-over recounts his experience in Djibouti only retrospectively, while he is in exile in Marseille. This formal dislocation of Galoup’s voice, intensified by the retrospective voice-over, reinforces the narrative position of Galoup as outsider. He is estranged not only from the time of the events or what Hayward terms the ‘dislocated space’ of Djibouti38 but, moreover, from the body of the Legion. He is a foreigner within. However, silence and dislocation extend beyond the figure of Galoup, imbuing the film with aural texture. Through its aural texture of tonal silence, Beau Travail further disrupts a reliance on dialogue as vehicle for semantic sense, shifting the spectator from their traditional patterns of orientation (hearing-as-understanding) and towards a more expansive mode of Nancean listening (as-sensing). Specifically, tonal silence amplifies sonic materialities

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of friction between bodies and landscapes across the film, attuning the spectator to the dissonance and dislocation surrounding the French Foreign Legion in present-day Djibouti. The way aural texture can connect disparate sequences is particularly significant in this film. A pattern emerges through the film’s counterposition of a quotidian scene of military routine with the final sequence, in which Sentain wanders lost in the salt flats of Lake Assal, Galoup having left him for dead. This first scene of military routine opens with a close-up on Galoup as he irons his uniform. We hear the breath-like hiss of the iron, hot steam making contact. Cut to outside. One after the other, the legionnaires traverse taut aerial ropes; their bodies are suspended, dislocated from the landscape below. The camera is angled upwards, framing them against the interminable blue sky. With no dialogue to guide or orientate, we listen attentively for the arrival of sound, focusing on the tension within the densely textured soundscape: the squeak of bodies against rope, the cries of birds, a reverberating bass line. The camera returns to the landscape, tracking slowly along the clotheslines. The stretched lines recall the earlier movement of legionnaires across aerial ropes. Bodies now absented from the frame, the film orientates us towards their traces. We listen to the sounds of military fabric flapping in the wind, a solitary legionnaire shaking sand off the garments. The camera continues to track, stopping on the image of four legionnaires, bodies-in-formation, ironing. In depriving the spectator of the primary anchor of auditory perception (dialogue)

FIGURE 2.1 Legionnaires ironing their uniforms at the French Foreign Legion camp in Djibouti. Film still. ‘Beau Travail’ directed by Claire Denis © Courtesy Curzon Artificial Eye 1999. All rights reserved.

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and magnifying the friction between bodies and landscapes (sound effects), tonal silence in this sequence directs the spectator to listen, rather than hear. Beyond mere understanding and beyond simply affect,39 its aural texture instead shifts us towards Nancean listening – a mode of sensing cinema that attends to the interplay between the semantic, perceptual and orientational dimensions of sense. As we listen, we are attuned to the sensorial materiality of sound effects depicted on-screen. We sense friction, in other words, through this amplification of sonic materialities. Feeling this friction on a material level contributes to an understanding of the friction of the French Foreign Legion within the postcolonial landscape of Djibouti, which remains unspoken within the film. Furthermore, this initial invocation of Nancean listening alerts us to the echoic return of these sonic materialities later in the film. In the film’s final sequence, the camera slowly tracks towards the shore, a form of visual withholding that heightens uncertainty over Sentain’s fate. Through a static frame we see Sentain, fixed at a distance. We listen in silence as the salty water of Lake Assal laps against the shoreline. Textures of white halite crystals fill the frame. The faint sound of breathing guides the transition to the next image: Sentain, lying against the hot salt crystals. A sensory echo of the iron’s breath-like hiss, his breathing is amplified. We listen to the crunch of his stiffened, salt-covered jacket as he drags it toward himself, its rough texture recalling sandpaper against skin. The shallow sound of Sentain struggling to swallow makes the aridity of the landscape all the more palpable. Across these two sequences, tonal silence reveals a recurring

FIGURE 2.2 Sentain in the salt flats of Lake Assal. Film still. ‘Beau Travail’ directed by Claire Denis © Courtesy Curzon Artificial Eye 1999. All rights reserved.

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pattern of sonic materialities – the exhalation of the iron, the chafe of a taut rope, shallow breathing, the drag of stiff fabric – that evoke friction between the bodies of the French Foreign Legion and the harsh Djibouti landscape. Counterposing the sequences illuminates how friction underlies both quotidian military routine and the eruption of violence within the Legion. In other words, here the film explicitly draws a connection between the dissonance that characterizes the current role of the Legion within present-day Djibouti and the dissonance – emblematized by the internal conflict between Galoup and Sentain – that exists within the Legion itself. Foreignness, in other words, is not limited to the Legion’s relation with Djibouti but is internal to it.

The ethics of listening: Towards a postcolonial critique For Hayward, the Legion’s relationship with the landscape in Beau Travail acts as a metaphor for the dislocation of the Western postcolonial body.40 As Hayward writes, the final sequence of the film reveals Sentain to be ‘literally dislocated’, reminding us: [T]he colonial is not after all dead, but lives on in its after-effects. The effect of post-colonialism can be such that when there is no ‘other’ to fight, containment and displacement can occur and you attack your own having first identified him/her as not belonging – which is what Galoup does to Sentain.41 In the breakdown of colonialism’s fixed terms of relation between self and other, the otherness within can no longer be kept at bay. Hayward posits this turn to the Legion’s internal otherness as an ‘effect’ and a ‘displacement’. However, I contend that Beau Travail articulates a postcolonial critique by exposing this otherness not as a consequence, but rather as constitutive of (relational) existence. Through the use of tonal silence and its invocation of Nancean listening, Beau Travail registers the dislocation between the postcolonial landscape of Djibouti and the legionnaires’ bodies in the experience of the embodied spectator. The relationship between tonal silence and Nancean listening thus diverges from what Thomas Elsaesser describes as the ‘preferred reading’ of Beau Travail as a mere ‘celebration of touch and tactility, of haptic vision and skin, of sensory plenitude’, which he argues ‘sometimes veers dangerously close to a post-postcolonial version of the Orientalist seductions of Africa, with its colors, sounds, textures, tastes, and smells’.42 Rather than confirming sensory

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plenitude, listening to Beau Travail dislocates the spectator from a secure spectatorial position. Listening to the sonic materialities in these sequences, particularly as they magnify bodily contact, produces a heightened awareness of our own embodied condition. These sonic materialities redirect our listening back to us, attuning us to the orientational dimension of Nancean listening. Yet, this reflexive listening does not return us to a coherent body or stable sovereign subject. By inviting us to listen to the film and to ourselves listening, tonal silence in Beau Travail draws attention not simply to our embodied position but to the body as resonance chamber. As Nancy argues, to listen is first and foremost to be in resonance. Internal bodily sounds and otoacoustic emissions (low-level cochlear sounds produced by the body in the act of listening) resonate elsewhere, separating from the listening self, only to return as other, transformed and refracted through external contact. Due to this fundamental resonance of listening, the reflexivity of the listening self is always interrupted (and constituted) through its relation to the outside. This looping structure of resonance – rendered palpable in silence – thus simultaneously underscores the constitutive otherness within the self and the relationality of existence. As Nancy writes, the listening self ‘always feels himself feeling a “self” that escapes [s’échappe] or hides [se retranche] as long as it resounds elsewhere as it does in itself, in a world and in the other’.43 Resonance, in other words, never stabilizes, refusing to secure or ground the listening self. In listening, we become aware of our own body and self as a space of receptivity where inside and outside are enfolded, where internal and external sounds intermingle. The resonance of Nancean listening thus refigures our relation not only to others, but moreover, to our own bodies and selves. This awareness of the foreignness within ourselves, and its attendant recognition that otherness cannot be simply ascribed to the other, unsettles the notion of bodily coherence and a stable, self-contained subject. In doing so, it articulates a spectatorial position that forecloses relations of mastery, projection or assimilation. This destabilization of the fixed terms of relation between self and other forms the basis for the dismantling of colonial discourses and their after-effects. For Nancy, listening allows us to recognize that difference can never be a fixed relation between self and other, for these terms are continually shared and altered in the movement of resonance. By invoking Nancean listening, tonal silence in Beau Travail orientates us towards ways of relating to others, ourselves and the world around us that neither map foreignness onto the other nor posit an unbridgeable alterity. In enabling recognition of one’s own constitutive otherness, and a reconsideration of the relationship between the self and other, Beau Travail highlights the ethical dimensions of silence.

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3 Listening to Visaginas: On the rescaling of silences and sounds in a former Soviet nuclear town Benjamin Cope

I

n a circular clearing among trees just beyond the tip of Visaginas’s butterflyshaped town plan stands a largely unused area of tarmac.1 This quiet place is remembered fondly by elder residents as the site of dances held in the 1970s during the building of Visaginas and the nearby Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP). Arriving from towns across the Soviet Union’s nuclear network, these first inhabitants lived in barracks in a part of the settlement known to this day as the Festivalio gatve˙ (Festival Street) area, while they worked to build the power station and the dwellings for its employees.2 Today inhabitants invest the dance floor with warm memories of youth and a feeling of community generated through overcoming hardships to build the town and power plant from scratch. The recollections associated with the spot are amplified through the ideological foundations of the project; the nuclear town of Visaginas – or Sniecˇkus, as it was then known, after the First Secretary of the Lithuanian communist party – would be a settlement in which the ‘peaceful atom’ enabled a new step towards communist utopia.3 Visaginas is situated in a picturesque, sparsely populated lake area in northeast Lithuania, adjacent to the border with Belarus and Latvia. Founded in 1975, the town was built to serve the INPP, one of the nuclear power stations of the USSR’s North West United Power System. The rationale for the location was both geopolitical, drawing the nations on the western side of the USSR into the Soviet power infrastructure, and geophysical, for here were 33

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FIGURE 3.1 The former dance floor, Visaginas, 2017. Photo Daryna Kapatsila, courtesy of the photographer.

lakes to provide water for cooling and a natural landscape into which the town could be embedded.4 This town’s tight integration with nature was symbolized by the butterfly form of its plan and materialized in two major pedestrian axes: Sedulino gatve˙, which runs right across the town’s three micro-districts; and Visagino gatve˙, which crosses Sedulino to lead down through a tunnel under a decorative suspension bridge to a lakeside beach. While one would have to be fit to get anywhere on foot in twenty minutes – as is reputedly possible – the town is undoubtedly pedestrian-friendly, criss-crossed by paths which often weave around the trees among which the settlement and its rich infrastructure of welfare institutions are nestled. Only one wing of Visaginas’s butterfly plan was ever completed. The 1986 explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, equipped with the same type of RBMK reactor as the INPP, interrupted the plans for the town.5 Indeed, many residents of Visaginas went to Chernobyl to help in the process of cleaning after the accident, leading to health problems and high mortality. The accident in Chernobyl delayed the opening of Reactor 2 of the INPP, while Reactors 3 and 4 were never completed. Despite a variety of technical and procedural security improvements, a condition for Lithuania joining the EU in 2004 was that the INPP be shut down. Thus the silence of the dance floor in Visaginas now also echoes in that of the resonant maintenance hall above the

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second reactor. The floor of the reactor is patterned with the circular ends of fuel and cooling rods within grey and coloured squares; these are arranged as a grid within the overall circular form, beneath which the nuclear reactions took place. While many nuclear power plants are nearing the end of their working cycles, the INPP represents the first occasion in which an RBMK reactor has been decommissioned in a non-emergency situation. Although it is safe to stand on the surface, the precise state of radioactivity in the rods that reach down underneath is not currently known. The challenge for Visaginas today is therefore how the town encounters a future when stripped of its raison d’être. Although the second reactor was stopped in 2009, the power plant remains the town’s principal employer, with its former builders now engaged in its dismantling. By 2038 the site will be returned to a brownfield, with no trace of the plant left other than the nuclear waste stored in a secure underground site. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the population of the town has declined by over a quarter, generating a sense of emptiness that is intensified by buildings and urban furniture imbued with Soviet gigantomania and designed for a town twice as large.6 This feeling of vacancy combines with the town’s pedestrian-oriented and nature-integrated plan to make the experience of silence (or an unusual range of possibilities to hear) a notable aspect of being in Visaginas. This silence also has a political dimension. Locals see the closing of the INPP as primarily politically motivated, rather than a safety issue.7 The project of completely removing the plant, which is the objective of decommissioning, will efface a marker of Soviet technological advancement from the landscape of Lithuania. This awkward silence resonates in that afflicting the memorialization of the role of Visaginas’s inhabitants in the clean-up after Chernobyl and the development of a town museum.8 Between the Scylla of the need to put the INPP centre stage and the Charybdis of a caesura with the ideology implied by this history as a necessary condition for the town to move on, the museum’s collection is marked as much by traditional craft objects as those of nuclear modernity. On showing us around the town gymnastics hall, one resident put this dilemma to us in the following terms: What about the big sign announcing that the roof was repaired with funds from the European Union? It’s the only thing that’s been repaired here in the last 25 years. It was the Soviet Union that built the facilities, that built the whole town, but I do not see any signs about that!9 The new head of the project to develop a museum is currently attempting to obviate these obstacles to giving voice to the town’s history through participative experiments that seek to diversify and critically explore connections between town and museum.

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The systemic transformations generating silences in Visaginas have also made noise. The impressive bibliography of research on the town accumulated in the local library, the decision of fashion photographer Neringa Rekašiu¯te˙ to relocate and create amid the town’s socialist modernist architecture, a recent film Butterfly City, and a multilingual documentary theatre production A Green Meadow performed at the National Theatre in Vilnius – all of these testify to a vibrant concern with the processes through which the town and its population were constructed and are now being transposed into a new socio-technical and geopolitical system.10 This transition is also linguistic – today this former all-Soviet elite town constitutes the only majority Russian-speaking settlement in Lithuania. This new context is marked by a dissonance between visual and aural markers of language, since Lithuanian law requires signs to be bigger in Lithuanian than their counterparts in other languages, while Russian is the language more often heard and spoken. As a result of the town’s roots in the Soviet nuclear network and current position on the European periphery, Visaginians of different generations migrate in a variety of temporal cycles for work, studies, travel, to visit family, etc., both within and outside the EU, frequently also returning to the town for more or less extended stays.11 This chapter responds to the silences of the dance and reactor floors as a stimulus to explore what it means to listen in Visaginas, and what possibilities a reflection on listening might offer for reimagining the future of the town. One way of reading the fate of Visaginas would be as the failure of the mode of top-down vision that James C. Scott refers to as ‘seeing like a state’.12 Sniecˇkus was planned in Moscow at MinSredMash, aka the Ministerstvo Srednogo Mashinostroenia (Ministry of Middle Machine Engineering) – the euphemism for the ministry of the nuclear industry – and the Director of the INPP also acted as the head of the town. This top-down approach to urban planning, which involved repeating ideas earlier implemented at Sosnovy Bor, near St Petersburg, is incarnated in the butterfly form of the town’s plan – a metaphor of nature visible only from above. For Scott, the dominance of the aerial view in modernist urban planning needs to be read in the historical context of the development of projects of simplification whose primary aim was to make natural and social life unified, measurable and locatable from the top-down perspective of power. The Le Corbusier-inspired bird-form urban plan for Brasilia is, for Scott, exemplary of a plan that looks seductive from the air (and from the perspective of Brazilian state building), but in fact embodies the domination of ‘visual order’ over ‘experiential order’. According to Scott, the plan fails to take into account the improvised reality of everyday life, as evidenced by the workers building Brasilia who largely inhabited spaces outside the plan. As noted above, it is a space outside the town’s plan – that of the former dance floor in the Festival Street area – that is also the focus of nostalgia expressed by inhabitants of Visaginas. Thus, in a Scottian reading,

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the plan for Sniecˇkus – as the author argues such plans are wont to do – met the limits of its vision and crashed. In his article, ‘Adventures on the Vertical’, Mark Dorrian suggests that modernity was characterized by not one, but two vertical images: the micro and the macro.13 Both the view through the microscope and that from an aeroplane made visible new data for scientific diagnosis, but concomitantly they also opened up new horizons, destabilizing the sense of the human as the centre of visions of the world. Dorrian proceeds from a characterization of pre-war modernity as an epistemological drama to suggest, through a reading of Ray and Charles Eames’s 1977 film Powers of Ten, that the multi-scalar drama of post-war modernity is a geopolitical one. For Dorrian, the vertical filmic journey of Powers of Ten – from a couple at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago out to the furthest reaches of outer space and back into the atomic structure of the man’s hand – is remarkable both for the ways in which it interweaves science with a vertiginous sense of the unthinkable and for the insertion of this multi-scalar bonanza within a subtly political framework. Noting the Eames’s on-going collaboration with IBM, and IBM’s dominant position within an emergent post-war information environment, Dorrian accentuates, in a move relevant for the arguments to be made in this paper, the role of the soundtrack in suturing the film’s message. The opening frames of the film present the objects on the picnic rug in a blurred view accompanied by a pulsing (vascular) percussive noise, whose phrases end with a clock-like ticking that is then joined by a hiss of steam and a quizzical phrase played on a synthesizer. Thereafter, the synthesizer warps into a more insistent cartoon-type melody before, as the voice-over begins to guide us on the journey, moving into the background, where it continues with disconcerting cosmic refrains familiar from science fiction, which proceed throughout the film. Dorrian also draws attention to the change in the exegetical voice-over from the 1968 test for the film, the so-called Rough Sketch. While in the earlier trial this was delivered in a relatively affectless female voice: The recognisably accented male commentator in the 1977 version irresistibly connotes the voice of ‘mission control’, and hence a geographical, national and political place or source, toward which everything that is familiar in the voice points back. Yet this is a placeful voice that has become ubiquitous, an accompaniment that retains its even measure despite the ever-changing visual acceleration. At once both located and seemingly everywhere, this equivocality then permits the voice to exert a powerful domesticating effect over the vast dimensional range of the film, which it acousmatically encompasses.14

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The various components of the film’s opening sounds, its vascular, hissing, ticking, psychedelic, cartoon and sci-fi noises, and the American accent of the ground control commentary, achieve a double effect that Dorrian, after Michel Chion, sees as acousmatic – they both draw us into the image as a specific located reality and assert a magical mastery over the vertiginous multi-scalar voyage that it depicts.15 The film accentuates multi-scalarity in order to subtly re-anchor the human at the centre of a frame that is recognisably American. Reading sounds and images together leads Dorrian to interpret Powers of Ten as a political metaphor: it is a Cold War display of America’s ability to rebind micro and macro through the increasingly global dissemination and domination of electronic media. Following Dorrian in seeing Powers of Ten as revealing play with – and dominance across – scales as a key field of American Cold War hegemony opens intriguing questions about the politics of post-Cold War multi-scalarity. Dorrian’s analysis of a modernity stretched between micro and macro that is representationally subsumed under the political aegis of the voice-over in Powers of Ten opens a helpful perspective from which to address the silences of Visaginas. Concomitant with Powers of Ten, Visaginas was also a geopolitical leap between scales – of how the micro of nuclear energy might embody a new quality of the macro of top-down Soviet government. In this case, however, the political narrative that provided the frame for this nuclear town’s scalar leap forward towards a better world has been exposed as a utopian ideology, but it was nonetheless the one in relation to which inhabitants built the city and experienced the good life of their youth. Today, when talking to inhabitants, this narrative still often frames stories or attitudes or, on the contrary, the Soviet era is passed over in silence. In this context, the silences of the dance and reactor floors might be interpreted as expressing the difficulty of drawing the history of the town, and the labour and leisure of its inhabitants, within a sense-making narrative, be it academic or political. They might thus be seen as privileged sites in which to explore other ‘polyphonic’ modes of listening that Anna Tsing calls for as an antidote to the compromised beat of progress.16 The question of how to listen in the silence left after the Soviet narrative finds emblematic echo in the number of amphitheatres dotted around the town. These hemispheric architectural forms, often located near schools, focus attention on stages that, lacking propagandistic pageants, now stand largely empty. In the absence of performed sound, the ear-like shapes of the amphitheatres irresistibly suggest that it is the town itself that needs to be listened to. The turn to sound as a tool for analysing urban life was proposed by Henri Lefebvre through a foregrounding and exploration of rhythm.17 Playing with a double meaning of the French mesure, as measure and beat, Lefebvre suggested that a rhythm is both a repetition of distinct elements – whether

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similar or different – and the relation (the measure) through which they are connected. The measure of a rhythm is therefore both quantitative and qualitative; it is the relation through which a beat becomes a rhythm. For Lefebvre, cities can be understood as a coming together of a vast array of different rhythms, and the urbanist of the future will need to be a rhythmanalyst who will ‘measure’ the rhythms which produce city life. Can rhythmanalysis help as a tool to explore Visaginas, and what can Visaginas tell us about the limits and potential of rhythmanalysis? Posing the questions in this way allows us to take up the idea of Susan Buck-Morss that it is imperative to use the collapse of the opposition of the two mass utopias that dominated the twentieth century, one of consumption and one of production, as a basis to diagnose the delusional nature of both.18 While Buck-Morss does not conceptualize rhythm per se, her analysis of the Soviet Union is grounded in a discord between rhythms of work and the project of building communist society.19 In particular, she describes the path by which the Soviet attempt to de-fetishize consumption led instead to the fetishization of the frenetic rhythm of mechanical labour in and for itself. The state of shock that Walter Benjamin transposed from Freud’s traumatized patients after the First World War to the general mood of the modern urban city dweller was metamorphosed into the ‘shock workers’ eulogized in the Soviet Union. This motif transformed the deadened body of the worker in capitalist industry, subdued into mimetic repetitions of the movements demanded by machines, into the exhausted but heroic body of the Soviet worker who was called upon to perform extraordinary physical feats, often with outdated technology, in order to construct the symbols of industrial production that had become the system’s universal metaphor for building communism. This trope is evident in the way that photographic records of Sniecˇkus/ Visaginas privilege construction – the active engagement of builders and building – over the representation of nuclear science. For example, the handdrawn sign proclaiming ‘500 THOUS. CUBES OF CONCRETE!. .’ on the front of a waving driver’s truck – one of the extensive and impressive series taken by resident photographer Vasilij Chupachenko documenting the construction of town and plant in the late 1970s and early 1980s – is a testimony to the scale of the undertaking of building a power plant and the fact that the driver had also played his part. But in the context of nuclear science the emphasis on the building material appears mundane. Moreover, there seems to be a fundamental dissonance between the science of nuclear technology, concrete and the hand-written form and odd punctuation ‘!..’ with which the banner ends its exclamation. Michael Taussig, in his anthropology of Latin America, acclaims concrete as a material that is key to the magical power of the modern state.20 Itself fluid when prepared for pouring, it sets to

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FIGURE 3.2 Truck driver in front of the Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant, c. 1980. Photo Vasilij Chupachenko, courtesy Marija Šcˇerbakova.

enable vast quantities of motorized transport to flow daily through highways, allowing the state to enact the role of conjurer of the great forces of mobility that lie beyond it. However, Buck-Morss argues that the Soviet preoccupation with concrete did not serve to summon up flows, but was fetishized in itself as a celebration of the state’s power to reify human labour in abstract quantitative terms: ‘500 THOUS. CUBES’. The exclamation mark and dots at the end of the banner, through which a large amount of concrete is transformed into a proclamation, are key; they are perhaps, to use Lefebvre’s term, the mesure. Concrete and the work of the driver are not just two sides of the prosaic everyday, they are mediated through the trope of heroism into the building of the Soviet utopia. In the USSR, there was always something miraculous in the victory of labour over the limits dictated by reason. This trope is endemic in Soviet propaganda, amplifying everyday work with the rhetoric of celebrations of the Second World War Victory Day. But it is especially striking how, in the reports published by Visaginas’s local newspapers such as Energetik or Mirny Atom, by the late 1970s and early 1980s the heroism of labour in the construction of the communist utopia and the building of the atomic power plant strongly converge. The newspapers are replete with heroic portrayals of labourers

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whose endeavour has exceeded the requirements of the plan for building the power station – figures who, through their astonishing personal initiative, had overcome the difficulties previously hampering the work. Yet this exaltation of labour is utterly at odds with the role of work in the nuclear industry, as analysed in the book In the Course of Flows by Gwenaële Rot and François Vatin.21 Rot and Vatin argue that the nuclear and other chemical-based industries are paradigm changers when it comes to how work should be understood. They illustrate this point through a comparison between two iconic screen figures they see as representing a shift between industrial labour and labour today – that is, between Charlot, the comic hero of Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times (1936), physically unable to keep up with an ever-accelerating production line, and Homer Simpson, the lazy and incompetent worker in a nuclear plant. In Rot and Vatin’s argument, Homer’s fecklessness is a counterpart to the fact that the productivity of a nuclear plant is significantly independent of active human agency. The work of supervising flows in a nuclear plant is a process involving many activities that do not look much like work as traditionally understood. Gazing at screens, transferring information to colleagues, caring for the atmosphere within a shift team, and even having dinner together as part of the night shift (Rot and Vatin were researching French nuclear plants) are significant elements of the work, whereas moments of physical labour, of checks, maintenance and repair are those when production is interrupted. Their argument is that the nuclear industry is a telling case demonstrating that labour is a ‘creative activity inscribed in a set of social relations, the productive value of which is always in question’.22 Despite official ideology, tensions between the production of nuclear power and human labour also made themselves felt in Visaginas. For example, in her research on changing attitudes in Visaginas in the light of decommissioning, Lithuanian sociologist Kristina Šliavaite˙ records a cleavage between builders and atomic workers, with the former accusing the latter of just stepping into the plant and money falling into their pockets.23 Likewise, memoires recalling the rush to get the first reactor commissioned before the end of 1983 describe the triumph in having it start on time even though the building process was incomplete.24 The euphoric tone of this work strikes a note of discord with the carefully calculated, security-oriented procedures that one might expect of the nuclear industry. Heroic tales of the triumphs of labour in local newspapers are accompanied by another staple of Soviet propaganda: cautionary tales of layabouts who indulged in drink or in other ways failed to complete work as expected. While the moral force of such stories was more significant than factual accuracy, they nonetheless open an uncertainty about deviant behaviour in this secret, heavily controlled elite Soviet town.

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These examples suggest that it is not just contemporary Visaginas, deprived of its Soviet discursive framework, that is marked by complex silences. Rather, the work of the nuclear brought about a new socio-technical configuration in which silence has an ambiguous role. On the one hand, the nuclear enables an urban space separated from its energy production site, where car traffic is limited, and where sounds of wind in trees, waves on the lake and birdsong are prominent features. But equally this silence is that of labour pushed beyond recognizable forms. Transformed into a tracking of processes happening around us that we are not able to see, work now involves an anxious predicting of when intervention might be needed, while attempting to keep this to a minimum. The loudspeakers hanging on the walls of the buildings in Visaginas not only functioned as a sign of the authorities’ power to use sound as a means to call the community to order or to give warning, but also as a reminder that danger could be unseen and unheard. Writers such as Jean-Luc Nancy and David Toop describe listening in terms of collusion, contagion and anxiety. Nancy stresses the distinction between hearing (l’entente) and listening (l’écoute) when he asks: ‘What secret is at stake when one truly listens, that is when one tries to capture or surprise the sonority rather than the message.’25 For Toop, the experience of listening, being tuned into the perpetual emerging and expiry of energy through which sound is produced, can be likened to an act of mediumship, of being open to what he refers to as sinister resonances.26 Through such examples as becoming aware of the sounds of wriggling insects on a still morning walk, sensing a change of atmosphere caused by a door being opened by an invisible burglar, or the perked ears of those overhearing in Nicolaes Maes’s series of seventeenth-century paintings The Eavesdropper, Toop explores listening as an openness that draws us out of a stable sense of context. Like Nancy, Toop interprets the repetition of a sound source in a listener’s head in a mode of secrecy, collusion or contagion; the heroines of Maes’s paintings gesture to the viewer imploring silence, drawing us into a conspiratorial proximity that for Toop is emblematic not just of the hypocritical mores of seventeenth-century Dutch households but of a disruption of appropriate distance implicit in listening per se. In the terms described by Nancy and Toop, listening emerges as an everyday sensual experience of the multiscalar, in which we are called to respond to stimulations that give sense, go beyond sense and engage us in a dynamic evanescent flux. A similar approach to sound is also developed by the most determinedly multi-scalar thinkers, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. While Deleuze and Guattari do not make direct reference to the nuclear, their oeuvre can be read as an attempt to rescale philosophy to the atomic and the cosmic.27 They take up this motif in relation to sound in the most sustained way in the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus titled ‘De la Ritournelle’. Translated as ‘Of the Refrain’,

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ritournelle is a term which is difficult to pin down but suggests both the popular element of street or children’s singing, recurring phrases in various genres of classical music, or the phrases out of which birds build song.28 While ostensibly dealing with sound and music in order to develop a theory of an anthropological function or potential of music, ‘De la Ritournelle’ spends a lot of time discussing the courting habits of insects. Through this exploration via ethology, Deleuze and Guattari extend reflections on the role of sound and music beyond the conceptual framework in which they are habitually discussed, opening up a shifting multi-scalar environment in which, they assert, the refrain (or sounds/listening more generally) exercises three principle functions that can be summarized as follows: 1

sounding – as a child in the darkness, seized with fear, reassures himself and explores with singing. He walks and stops in time with his song. The sounds themselves function as jumps within chaos.

2

territorializing – the song becomes a lullaby, the expressive territorymarking of birdsong, the sounds of a neighbour’s sound-system, etc.

3

deterritorializing – the sound opens the circle it has formed in point 2, through an intensification of certain qualities inherent in the processes, mechanisms, structures through which sound was transformed into a territorializing force.

Deleuze and Guattari are at pains to stress that these are not different successive moments in the evolution of musical forms, but are all part of the qualities of the ritournelle. At first sight, this triumvirate seems not to get us very far – sound/music/ refrains are championed as performing diverse and mutually contradictory functions. Indeed, this spatializing of thinking on sound has something of Deleuze and Guattari’s exhilarating and frustrating conceptual expansiveness about it, in a chapter that swoops easily from the migratory marches of lobsters, the territorial functions of nursery rhymes and the synthesizer as the future of philosophy to discussing the sounds of Proust or Schumann. Yet, in the multi-scalar mix, the refrain emerges as an instrument of attempting to feel one’s way through chaos, of establishing a territory and using the understanding of the processes through which the territory was formed as a way to something new. The concept is fruitful for considering why the silent dance floor might be important for inhabitants: as the space in the woods where they penetrated the unknown forests of Lithuania; the place where they met repeatedly under the soundtracks of the building of the town; and the site of romance and adventure that itself lay outside the frame of the butterfly town plan of Visaginas.

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Deleuze and Guattari developed their trajectories of thought as a response to the perceived crisis of existing structures in a post-May 1968 climate that was significantly different from the tonality of today. The 1922 Paul Klee painting, The Twittering Machine, which they use as the introductory image to their chapter ‘Of the Refrain’, is striking for the diversity and strangeness of this acoustic hybrid of nature and machine but lacks the overtones of provocation as political strategy that tweeting has taken on today. However, Deleuze and Guattari’s thought is not simply an attack on structure in the name of the effervescent, ephemeral and energetic that structure represses. Their conceptualization of the refrain is an example of how they seek to provide tools for navigation in a world in which the scales have shifted. If rhythmanalysis calls for an analytical focus on how multi-scalar movements become urban patterns and forms, then the ritournelle reorients attention to thinking through sound as a means of forging a temporary sense of place in relation to a hostile external environment. To take up the comparison with Dorrian’s reading of Powers of Ten, the refrain can offer an apposite tool for theorizing place-making in our epoch when the voice-over assuring American hegemony has metamorphosed into the twittering machine through which the current US President makes social media posts that defy narrative coherence. In Visaginas, the Banga (Wave) concert hall built by the lakeside to house late Soviet variety (estrada) shows is today too large to function as a sustainable part of the entertainment economy of the town. Like the state-of-the-art concert hall and cinema adjacent to the town hall, newly furnished with European Union funds, a range of more or less formalized stages and auditoria in the House of Culture, the House of Creativity and the Music School, as well as the plethora of amphitheatres and other stage-like architectural forms in the town, the Banga forms part of an overabundance of places for performing or listening. The Soviet nuclear programme sought to harness multi-scalarity as a leap for its political narrative; in the aftermath of this narrative, the scenography of the town encourages the listener to tune into the range of waves that have taken its place. In a discussion in 2017, a former worker at the INPP said that after the decision to decommission, those who had been able to sell their skills elsewhere left, while the skill of those who remained was their intimate knowledge of the idiosyncrasies of this particular power plant, as it was they who had built it. This comment seemed surprising for the way in which it asserted local knowledge (what Scott might call ‘metis’) within a nuclear industry where one would assume the precedence of the universality of science.29 The comment can be reinterpreted as a challenge to critical urban studies in a time of multi-scalarity: how can those practices which created the specificity of territory be transformed into something which is neither simply exchange value nor is of value only in the location itself?

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FIGURE 3.3 Detail of the Banga (Wave) Concert Hall, Visginas 2017. Photo Daryna Kapatsila, courtesy of the photographer. The rhythms of Visaginas involve the half-lives of waste, a summer visit to a relative’s summer house (dacha) in Uzbekistan, a promising local rapper working in Northampton, the mayor dancing at the head of a conga at the town’s summer Country Music Festival, a local drummer now resident in the Lithuanian capital Vilnius who regrets the wasted potential of a 2008 Nuclear Kadaver Festival, and a recently arrived inhabitant who came because the place is quiet.30 It is not easy to find the measure of such rhythms, but exploring the mechanics of listening does seem relevant for considering the anxieties, praxes and adventures of a town where multi-scalarity speaks loudly. In the overall context of the vulnerability of Lithuanian provincial towns, Visaginas is uniquely situated at the interstices of narratives. In the silence and noise that thus emerges, the town itself represents a strong source of identity for inhabitants.31 It functions as a node of orbits of migration of very different rhythms, both within the ex-USSR and the EU, and as site of lively activity and conflicting opinions about how the town might be retuned. It is therefore a challenging and promising site for an on-going testing of the roles academic work can play in this process.

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4 Urban silence and informational noise: A study of Athens’s invisible structures Aikaterini Antonopoulou

Media noise

A

quick image search using the words ‘Athens’, ‘crisis’, ‘austerity’ and ‘streets’ in various combinations on an internet search engine reveals a very busy and loud landscape: gatherings in public squares, mass demonstrations in front of the Greek Parliament, crowds confronting the police, occupations of public space, street riots and tear gas. Videos on YouTube record people addressing large crowds using megaphones, musical events and pop-up performances in support of protesters, people debating at public assemblies in the form of ‘open democracy’ – but also Molotov cocktails being thrown, sirens wailing, and riot police violently dissolving mass gatherings. Both international and local media present Athens, depending on their orientation, as a battlefield, a terrain of conflict, a field of action, or an opportunity to ‘take to the streets’ and reclaim the ‘right to the city’. Athens comes across today as a topos of anxiety, depression and loss. Since 2008 the city has become a stage on which agony and trauma, rage and disappointment – but also hopes and desires through solidarity and collective action – are publicly performed. In considering the conditions of ‘crisis’ here, we must go beyond the financial situation to the social and political context – and this includes, importantly, a crisis of the values and beliefs that have 47

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FIGURE 4.1 ‘For Sale’: Abandoned neoclassical building, Athens city centre. Photo by author.

been in development in Greece since the 1970s. In Greek, krísis refers to an ‘opinion’, a ‘judgement’, and entails ‘one’s ability to examine thoroughly and come to logical conclusions’,1 implying the practice of self-reflection and the self-evaluation of things. Indeed, the December 2008 youth uprising and the Syntagma Square occupation (2011), as well as smaller-scale collective experiments and actions, have called for a reconsideration of the relations between the political, the public and the commons. Moreover, in the context of the crisis, Athens has become a transit point for some, a place of refuge for many and, for many more, an international stage for the enactment of protests, gatherings and events – as well as the urban terrain upon which all these different movements and actions play out and are registered. It is also a place where, under the conditions of crisis, xenophobic, nationalist and far-right attitudes and resentments take root and strengthen. And it is, at the same time, along with other countries of the European South, a testing ground – for Europe and perhaps for the rest of the world – of the effects of discipline, austerity and ever-tighter surveillance measures. With visual communication underpinning the production of knowledge in the digital age, however, it is only mass demonstrations, public debates and

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street riots that are projected by the global media and become the image of ‘crisis Athens’. Aside from its physical properties, the crowd here becomes an iconic feature and a symbol for mass-participation and mass-expression. But when we talk about the ‘re-emergence of street politics’2 and the return of the ‘street’ and the ‘square’ into the realm of politics3 in a new way in this context, is this for all and on equal terms? In the city’s everyday life, those most affected by poverty, deprivation, and the attitudes that accompany them – such as racism and sexism, xenophobia and, more specifically, islamophobia – are often excluded from public space.4 The aim of this chapter is to explore how online platforms and simulation projects can help vocalize such subjects of the crisis, whose presence in public space becomes increasingly difficult and ambiguous.5 It will examine how applications of new technologies come to saturate public space or even to fill in the void of such public absences, calling for new manifestations of the common, the political and the other. It will therefore juxtapose such silences that endure within the tumultuous cityscape with the capability of informational space to accommodate different voices, experiences and individual perspectives towards the development of new forms of polyphonic environments.

Urban silence In recent years a new form of mass protest has emerged worldwide. As is evident from the so-called ‘Arab spring’ in 2011, this – while still taking the form of mass public assembly – is digitally mediated and networked and is very different from the mass mobilizations (via trade union organization, etc.) characteristic of previous decades. In the European South, the anti-austerity ‘indignants’ (named after the Spanish indignados) and later the Occupy movement in the United States have been animated by their opposition to austerity policies, to racial inequality, to the ways in which the governments have dealt with the financial crisis and, most generally, to the political elites of the time. Through the way that such movements have been generated, using social media to exchange information and ideas and to communicate their purposes and their images of the world, they have claimed to be beyond politics and ‘for all’, aiming to initiate the formation of a new participatory open democracy and thus bring the inequalities of social reality to public attention and discussion. This ‘for all’ is, however, open to question. Sociologists Anders Hylmö and Magnus Wennerhag argue that the ‘new social movements’ – in which digital technologies provide the connecting thread among the crowd – typically have a middle-class base, unlike the older working-class protests associated with trade unions and May Day demonstrations.6 But the ambition – as is clear in the case of Athens – to have

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a demonstration ‘for all’ those who want things to change is simultaneously undermined by other emergent initiatives. In parallel with the social dynamics that made their appearance during the ‘Occupy Syntagma’ movement and the experiments with direct democracy, not very far away on the upper level of the square, the far-right found the ground to promote fascist ideals and to recruit supporters who seemed to have lost faith in established party politics.7 Kindled by the crisis, traits of xenophobic nationalism have increasingly appeared in popular culture and have influenced the political narratives of mainstream conservative parties.8 These tendencies have been mirrored by the ever-increasing visibility of aggressive, xenophobic and nationalist behaviours in and around the city centre, which are expelling the most vulnerable groups of the population from the public space of Athens. Since 2009 the situation in Greece has become increasingly troubling. The three economic adjustment programmes voted on by the Greek Parliament in order to meet the demands set by the European Union and the International Monetary Fund have led the country into a deep recession that has affected the state’s institutions, from pensions systems and public health to public education and services. Much of the building stock connected with these services is empty and is deteriorating, with hospitals and medical centres merging and schools closing down.9 Private properties follow the same route: extended families move under the same roof, leaving behind empty

FIGURE 4.2 ‘Douglas, asylum seeker from Ghana beaten by ten men and their dogs.’ Image credit: Crisis Maps, http://map.crisis-scape.net/reports/view/67?l=pt_ BR (accessed 10 July 2018).

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apartments, while shops and offices close down and become a silent public spectacle as they fall into decay. The financial crisis has become a major force of exclusion, an exclusion that takes many different expressions10 – from the labour market to public services, public goods and housing. Women are particularly affected by this situation. Urban planner Dina Vaiou argues that ‘the uncertainties that the crisis creates seem to lead to more conservative behaviours and gender divisions of labour, to a hardening of gender hierarchies and to an increasing acceptance and “normalisation” of downgrading women’.11 Groups such as those who live on benefits, the unemployed, single parents and migrants face increasingly restricted and isolated lives. Golden Dawn, a neo-Nazi group which has enjoyed significant representation in Parliament during the years of the financial crisis (6.99 per cent of votes and sixteen parliamentary seats during the national elections of September 2015), has been an active and visible presence in the streets of the city centre, often claiming territorial control over space in specific neighbourhoods.12 As noted above, the racist and aggressive narratives promoted by the far-right are often adopted by individuals and groups who feel let down by the austerity programme and uncritically associate extensive job losses and income reduction with the presence of immigrants. According to Vaiou, ‘real or imagined threats settle in and affect everyday practices and ways of being in public space and in the neighbourhoods of the city, now shaped by insecurity and fear’.13 These anxieties take various spatial expressions in the cityscape and have a direct impact on the public life of the city. In January 2009, a so-called ‘residents’ committee’ in Agios Panteleimon, a much-contested neighbourhood in the Athenian city centre, decreed that a playground in the central square should close so that migrant children – and consequently every child in the area – would be unable to use it. The large blue slogan on the pavement of the square that was painted at that time read ‘foreigners leave Greece’ and this led to the space becoming a centre of conflict between anti-fascist groups, who often broke in to make the playground accessible, and Golden Dawn supporters, who re-made the playground’s fencing even stronger. Actions such as this, together with many other oppressions that are less visible, have shaped the life of the city’s public spaces in recent years. Contrary to the impression projected by the popular media, public space is not always loud and vibrant but can often be empty and silent. In such places it is mostly the indexical marks upon the urban surfaces that tell the stories of the city. Sprayed slogans, tags and graffiti can have much more to say than the people on the streets. The city’s surfaces become the material upon which social conditions are registered. Graffiti takes over, so that abandoned houses and empty storefronts take part in a complex, continuous and ever-changing script written by multiple authors, which animates the city’s streets.

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And perhaps emptiness and silence demonstrate new understandings of public space too. In his essay ‘Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation’, W. J. T. Mitchell asks himself what would be the most iconic figure of the Occupy movement? Against the rapidity and the great archival capabilities of digital media, which overwhelm us with huge amounts information in real time – and drawing from Jules Michelet’s analysis of the French Revolution – Mitchell argues that only empty space can convey the true meaning of revolution and stand as a monument to it. The empty space here is not merely an opening in the city to create a place of gathering and to allow for the possibility of the ‘space of appearance’.14 Alongside the possibility of bodily contact and intimate proximity, empty space not only denotes an extensive social space opened up by digital media and online platforms, but also the ‘amplification and reproduction of both the immediate and socially mediated spaces by mass broadcast media’.15 Then, due to digitization, empty space becomes a ‘global commons’,16 in other words a new form of shared space, which allows the networked, the virtual, and the imaginary to play out in relation to the actual and the bodily. This sort of commons is not simply a place free from any occupation, but rather a constant battlefield, in which ideas coming from opposing backgrounds are tested and contested by various means. In his talk ‘Writing the White Voice’, the literary scholar Steven Connor discusses the shift from voiced to silent reading that took place in the fourth century and argues that this transition opened up a new complex form of space. According to Connor, the passage from noise to quietness may at first suggest a detachment from the spoken and resounding world of collectivity in favour of a world of interiority, privacy and solitude. However, he argues that this belies the complexity of the situation: The one who reads aloud is silent inside, for his outer voice will tend to drown out or shout down his inner. The one who reads silently, by contrast, is suffused by his inner sonority, if inside is exactly where it is, if sonorous is exactly what it is. The one who reads aloud makes himself deaf, abolishing his ear into the sound that actuates his tongue. The one who reads silently stills his tongue the better to sound out what he reads.17 What is interesting about this inner voice Connor describes is that it is not clear where it comes from or even if it is capable of producing any sound, and therefore it always mediates between being a matter of hearing and a matter of non-hearing. But since we are always able to ‘hear’/perceive/gather that inner voice, then, according to Connor, this must take place in a complex space in which two places exist at once and yet are differentiated: the place

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where I, the subject, am and the place where I understand the voice to come from. Connor writes: I want to propose that this voice is not vestigial but virtual, not diminished but disseminated. What matters is not the channelling or vocal acting out of the text in the reader’s own voice, but the creation of an auditorium or arena of internal articulations. The inner space of the inward voice is a production, a staging, a topographic projection. In reality, this space is not really inside anything or anywhere inside. It is just not outside. Innerness is an approximation to the particular kind of pantopicality, or atopicality, of the voice that has absconded from space.18 Then a new kind of space opens up in which whatever the inner voice articulates is staged and performed – a space of inner resounding – which does not really abolish the collective in favour of the private or sound in favour of space, but instead mediates between the private and the public and brings sound and space together in a complex new formation. This ‘sound-space’ is pan-topical or a-topical; it can be everywhere or nowhere, a virtual soundspace for which there is no sonorous or visual analogue. The sound-space that Connor proposes opens up a new way of framing and understanding the urban experience. If the city is no longer in its entirety directly voiced and articulated, but instead it insinuates many more subjects and situations, then perhaps its experience becomes realized through a much more complex procedure of ‘silent reading’, which could involve decoding (the surfaces of the city), seeing (those who are not always available to see) and listening (to all that exists between the media noise and the urban silence). The ‘staging’ suggested here breaks down the ostensible immediacy of the city – as if it were a tangible object – in favour of the demonstration of a wider field of voices, relations and events that compose it, which may come from different places and which lead towards what Connor calls a pan-topical or a-topical experience.

Informational noise Background noise is the ground of our perception, absolutely uninterrupted, it is our perennial sustenance, the element of the software of all our logic. It is the residue and the cesspool of our messages. No life without heat, no matter, neither; no warmth without air, no logos without noise either. Noise . . . is to the logos what matter used to be to form. Noise is the background of information, the material of that form.19

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Noise is often perceived as destruction, disorganization, contamination, the loss of communication, and the disruption of message transmission. For Michel Serres, however, background noise is the ‘ground of our being’,20 the background of things and the beginning of our perception. Having no background itself, noise is not a phenomenon, but the element from which every phenomenon emerges in order to be understood and communicated. According to Serres, when a phenomenon makes its appearance it leaves and conceals noise; in this way, noise carries within itself not only disorder, but also order and the world as we perceive it. In Jacques Attali’s book Noise: An Essay on the Political Economy of Music, order is also contained within disorder in the conceptualization of noise.21 Noise may suggest a rupture and a violent disturbance, but at the same time it carries new information in itself and therefore proposes a reordering of things: an entity may be destroyed by noise, but it may also be restructured into something new.22 This ‘order by noise’, according to Attali, cannot exist without crisis: ‘noise only produces order if it can concentrate a new sacrificial crisis at a singular point, in a catastrophe, in order to transcend the old violence and recreate a system of differences on another level of organization.’23 It is important to ask what ‘order by noise’ could signify in the context of so-called informational and media noise – the vast volume of information that is generated and circulated via digital platforms. Attali’s formulation calls for a violent break, and perhaps this might take the form of new digital applications that diverge from the typical preoccupations of mainstream media in order to allow meaningful and evidence-based readings of the urban to emerge from indistinct multiplicity and clamour. In Athens, digital cultures are deeply entwined with the various urban phenomena of the crisis, of which they become key facilitators and instruments. Leaving aside the innumerable ‘likes’, ‘retweets’ and comments – as well as the photographs that ‘go viral’ on social media and are caught in endless circles of reproduction – new technologies provide the tools to confront many different problematic situations. These range from citizen-led initiatives and civil actions that often address local, national and transnational institutions, to solidarity networks and information platforms that register actions and events, even to videogames that simulate specific experiences. Here I will examine in detail two different examples that have been very active in the past few years. Map.crisis-scape.net is an online platform launched in the spring of 2013 that aimed to map racist attacks in Athens and beyond in order to provide an instrument for solidarity and action in the city. Individual stories were recorded and made public in order to give voice to experiences and individual perspectives that would otherwise remain silent. The platform allowed anyone to submit information on a racist assault by giving the location, time

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and type of the incident, as well as any additional details. Incidents could be added anonymously, with the proviso that there had to be some form of communication in place in case details needed to be clarified. According to the research team, the point of departure for this mapping project was the attempt to create a new ‘type of representation of a situation that is at the same time over-represented and yet invisible’.24 The aim was to make understandable the contradiction between visibility and invisibility for the migrant. It is their visibility in public space that makes them the target of attacks or even mass arrests by the police but, on the other hand, their falling into invisibility is their absolute marginalization. Moreover, by treating and presenting each incident as an individual and specific situation (one person, one location, a specific time and a particular story), the platform placed emphasis on the singularity of the event, so that migrants as a group are neither criminalized nor victimized. Therefore, the platform became a record that gathered all the reported incidents on a map that could be easily read and understood, accompanied by relevant source links and occasionally images and additional information. Against the xenophobic generalities that are promoted by far-right groups and are often uncritically reproduced by the mass media, individual perspectives stand out and tell different and highly specific stories. The additional website links and descriptions of each incident interweave local media and blog posts, link to similar situations and even refer to reports prepared by human rights organizations.25 Put together in the form of a familiar cartographic representation, new stories, modes of life and worlds are revealed, and site-specific narratives and constellations of incidents throw a different light on public spaces and animate them in a new way. The space of the city is not merely represented by digital means here, but instead it becomes discursively augmented by otherwise invisible realities and unexperienced situations. An example that suggests a more immersive representation, the Banoptikon Videogame Project is an EU-funded virtual reality ‘game’ that focuses on the effects of transnational digital networks on migrant mobility and integration.26 The aim of this game is to examine, through simulation, current European migrational politics and the power relations connected to them – but also the digitization of the mechanisms of control and surveillance. It emphasizes the contrast between the mobility of the human body and the possibility of being digitally fingerprinted and, consequently, traceable all over Europe through a common database while under constant risk of being forcibly returned to one’s original point of entrance. The ‘player’ takes the avatar-body of a migrant entering the borders of Europe in the north-east part of Greece, with the goal of crossing the country, moving to a harbour in the south-west and then boarding a boat that will take him/her to a Central European city (the common desirable end). Because of all the difficulties that

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FIGURE 4.3 Representation from downtown Athens, screenshot from Banoptikon. Image credit: Banoptikon, http://banoptikon.mignetproject.eu (accessed 10 July 2018).

are inevitably encountered, s/he appears to be constantly moving from rural areas, to the detention camp, to the big city – and then, if not careful enough, back to the detention camp, to the harbour, and from that to the European city. Perhaps, if checked by the police, the player will then, once more, be returned to the original detention camp. Alongside the action of the game itself, the player has the opportunity to watch videos and read newspaper listings relating to the migration practices and politics. The experience of the game is unsettling. Aesthetically it resembles the kind of virtual reality games in which one has to conquer land or fight over territories; here, however, the player takes the role of the subaltern, becoming a person of no-place and no-land. The player needs to constantly hide and keep silent, moving through the most marginalized areas of the big city if they want to avoid being checked for papers by the police and thus being sent back to the detention camp. Occasionally chased by far-right groups, the avatar meets with other immigrants and collects information on how to safely transfer to the harbour, on a journey of endless mobility and instability. The game seems to visualize and simulate the world that Map.crisis-scape.net outlines. As the user plays out the role of the refugee in their experience of the city, s/he is bombarded with news reports and interviews with people who have gone through this process. Players find themselves inserted into an environment of constant transition: as avatars, they shift quickly from one

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place to another, seeking freedom; but as players, they also shift roles between the fictional immigrant striving to escape and their ‘nonvirtual’ selves reading newspaper listings and watching documentaries on similar stories through the game’s interface. Such multiple displacements (from place to place through the avatar, but also from the place of the avatar to the place of the viewer/player) complicate the ‘position’ of the player, thereby emphasizing and foregrounding the gap that opens between the city as the player perceives it and the city as the migrant does and the many things that may take place within it. The furtiveness and the silence of the migrant as s/he is experienced through the game resounds with implications – any form of voiced presence brings exposure to mechanisms of control as well as to aggression and assault. This returns us to the questions of the pan-topicality or a-topicality of urban experience and the sound-space between voice and silence, visibility and invisibility. The aim of the Banoptikon, with its simple graphics and plain appearance, is not to promote a facile and misleading identification with the refugee, but instead to constantly mark the distance between the world of the refugee and that of the player and to expose the situations and interactions that attend this distance. Indeed, the apparently unrefined design of the game supports this critical effect, stimulating a reflective imaginative engagement with the Athenian landscapes projected here through all these hidden narratives.

From emptiness to a place of sonorized appearances In his famous ‘Lecture on Something’ of 1951, John Cage argued that ‘when nothing [i.e. silence] is securely possessed one is free to accept any of the somethings’.27 Cage’s work on silence and his silent pieces have been subject to many different interpretations. For some, the performance of a silent piece calls for an attention to ambient sound and to the background of things: in other words, to noise in its abstraction and the information it carries within itself and often goes unnoticed. For others, the piece stimulates philosophical reflection on silence: if it ever exists and under what conditions, the role of the composer in its making, and whether or not it carries any political implications.28 In her own interpretation of Cage, Susan Sontag argues that there is no such a thing as a pure form of silence – instead it always exists in a dialectical form, ‘a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence’.29 This allows us to understand silence as a form of speech and an element of speech, allowing subjects, situations and events to emerge from an apparent ‘nowhere’. Art historian and cultural theorist Jonathan David Katz

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gives us another explanation of John Cage’s silence, arguing that silence ‘denaturalizes’ and ‘destructures’;30 it becomes a statement through the absence of statement and a performative silence that destabilizes what is understood as music (and beyond), not by opposing the dominant culture but by moving away from a form of music that asserts definitive readings.31 How does a common space feel in which silence performs itself in an analogously destabilizing way? Can this be a space of possibilities, a new type of commons, and a space of appearance? Returning to Steven Connor’s thinking, modern technologies do not mute the conditions of ‘silent reading’ as he identifies it in literature – instead they pluralize it and make it more effective. They do not silence sound, in other words, but instead open up a new space for the performance of voices, for ‘sonorised appearances’.32 In relation to the terms ‘white light’ and ‘white noise’, Connor develops the term ‘white voice’ as the possibility of all voices together – ‘vocality’ itself, independent of any time, space or body. Perhaps this is what the silent reading of the city offers then – vocality itself, but a vocality whose enunciations extend beyond the biological voice to be borne in diverse and complex media forms.

5 The silent present: The contemporary atmosphere of architectural historiography Amy Kulper

Cacophony

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n his 2007 novel Falling Man, Don DeLillo fictionalizes the horrifying and culturally transformative events that transpired on 11 September 2001. The novel is narrated from the vantage point of Keith, a lawyer who emerges from the smoke and rubble only to realize ‘It was not a street anymore, but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night’.1 The opening pages of DeLillo’s novel read like a montage of unspeakable recollections from a character too shocked and disbelieving to deliver a coherent narrative. The predominant tropes of the writing are aural: a cacophony of screams, sirens, explosions and keening constitute the atmospheric din within which Keith must navigate. The character’s realization that the street had become a world is a nod to the acoustic character of the space, for, as Walter Ong observes, ‘sound situates man in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity, whereas vision situates man in front of things and in sequentiality’.2 For Ong, acoustic space constitutes ‘a vast interior in the center of which the listener finds himself together with his interlocutors’.3 DeLillo evokes this encompassing ‘world’ of the acoustic when he writes: The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now. Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning round corners, busting round corners, seismic tides of smoke with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.4 59

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He continues this evocation of acoustic atmospheric immersion when he observes: The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from it and into it at the same time.5 Just two days after the catastrophic events described in DeLillo’s novel transpired, Susan Sontag, writing from her flat in Berlin after admittedly being ‘glued’ to CNN’s coverage of events for the past forty-eight hours, penned a highly critical response to the events and their coverage. In an issue of The New Yorker entitled ‘Tuesday, and After’, Sontag joined the ranks of New Yorker staff writers including John Updike, Jonathan Franzen and Rebecca Mead, recording her recollection of events. While the other writers wrote the expected lamentations, elegiac in tone and loaded with melancholic descriptions, Sontag instead condemned George W. Bush’s oppressive foreign policy as precipitating the attacks and the indiscriminate press coverage that seemed to sanction and even lionize his administration’s behaviour. In a tone of disbelief and assertiveness, rather than despair, she wrote: The disconnect between last Tuesday’s monstrous dose of reality and the self-righteous drivel and outright deceptions being peddled by public figures and TV commentators is startling, depressing. The voices licensed to follow the event seem to have joined together in a campaign to infantilize the public. Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a ‘cowardly’ attack on ‘civilization’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘humanity’ or ‘the free world’ but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word ‘cowardly’ is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.6 The response to Sontag’s essay was swift, dismissive and excoriating. An article in the New Republic, by Lawrence F. Kaplan, posited a vilifying analogy: What do Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Susan Sontag have in common? All acknowledge a truth that most Americans would rather not:

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that what took place last week was, as Sontag put it, ‘[not an] attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions’.7 Kaplan suggested that the terrorist objections were not with America per se but rather with the global power it wields. Claiming that Sontag was arguing for the dismantling of that power, his retort was that, instead, America needed to learn to exercise it more effectively. But generally, Sontag’s political dissent and critique was accompanied by a deafening silence. That silence is the subject of this chapter – the conspicuous absence of political pundits willing to risk critique in the midst of a national crisis. That the controversy emanated from a significant global, economic and architectural site – Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center, designed in 1964 – implicates the discipline of architecture. This was the second of Yamasaki’s projects to meet an ignominious end; the first was his Pruitt-Igoe project in St Louis, Missouri, a mid-century modern housing development that encompassed fifty-seven acres of eleven-storey housing units and was destroyed by controlled implosion just seventeen years after its completion. The significance of this failure was not lost on architectural theorist and critic Charles Jencks, who famously wrote: ‘Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts).’8 With the destruction of the World Trade Center, the discipline of architecture endured another paradigmatic transformation. In the opening paragraphs of DeLillo’s novel, this change is captured through the evocation of a silent image: There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river.9

Deafening silence In an essay written over thirty years before the events of 9/11, entitled ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, Sontag established three critical dimensions of silence that presciently prefigured the intolerant response to her critique. First, she argued that it is an inherently dialogical condition. For Sontag, silence is neither a solitary quietude nor a singular taciturn absence, rather it is a dialogical propensity with a unique capacity to summon its conversational other. She expands upon the dialogical characteristics of silence when she writes:

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Silence never ceases to imply its opposite and to demand on its presence. Just as there can’t be ‘up’ without ‘down’ or ‘left’ without ‘right’, so one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.10 Sontag draws out the dialogical dimension of silence in the aesthetic domain, arguing that here, too, silence only presences itself dialectically: A genuine emptiness, a pure silence, are not feasible – either conceptually or in fact. If only because the art-world exists in a world furnished with many other things, the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence. Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech (in many instances a complaint, or indictment) and an element in a dialogue.11 This oxymoronic characterization of silence as a figure of speech saliently captures the paradox Sontag is so skilfully articulating. Second, Sontag positions silence as a kind of visual opacity, drawing out the cultural dialogue between the aural and the visual. When an object acquires such an opacity, Sontag argues, its silence opens it up to multiple interpretations. Utilizing the visual tropes of the look and the stare, Sontag argues that the silent modern artwork virtually holds vision hostage: Traditional art invites a look. Art that is silent engenders a stare. In silent art there is (at least in principle) no release from attention, because there has never, in principle, been any soliciting of it. A stare is perhaps as far from history, as close to eternity, as contemporary art can get.12 In this sentence, Sontag conjures the relentless attention demanded by silence and its potential historical implications. Significantly, silence here requires distance – physical distance from the work of art, temporal distance from the moment of its creation, conceptual distance from its intended disciplinary positioning. Here, the recognizably human tendency to fill the perceived void results in a multiplicity of interpretations. Sontag observes: ‘For a person to become silent is to become opaque for the other; somebody’s silence opens up an array of possibilities for interpreting that silence, for imputing speech to it.’13 This leads us to Sontag’s third insight, namely that underwriting the aspiration for silence is a desire for a tabula rasa:

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FIGURE 5.1 Albrecht Altdorfer, Alexanderschlacht (1528). Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albrecht_Altdorfer_-_Schlacht_bei_ Issus_(Alte_Pinakothek,_M%C3%BCnchen).jpg.

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Behind the appeals for silence lies the wish for a perceptual and cultural clean slate. And, in its most hortatory and ambitious version, the advocacy of silence expresses a mythic project of total liberation. What’s envisaged is nothing less than the liberation of the artist from himself, or art from a particular art work, or art from history, of spirit from matter, of the mind from its perceptual and intellectual limitations.14 Though her thinking is predicated upon the aesthetics of silence, what I would like to posit here is that aestheticism and historicism share similar structures, values and operations, and that the desire for a clean slate described by Sontag is present in both. Thus, the silence surrounding the global spectacle of 9/11 was not dialogue but monologue, not a medium to see through but a condition of opacity and occlusion, and not an engagement with history and the continuity of tradition but the assumption of a clean slate or a tabula rasa. What precipitated these historical conditions and how were the conditions within architectural historiography inflected in their wake? And, perhaps more importantly, given that architecture was at the epicentre of this catastrophic event, how can future architectures and architectural theories facilitate genuine dialogue with historical conditions such that the silence they engender is neither stifling nor oppressive but, instead, poignant?

Broken silence In the opening paragraphs of his 1983 book Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, Reinhart Koselleck uses Albrecht Altdorfer’s 1528 painting of the Battle of Issus, Alexanderschlacht, to describe a change in the understanding of historical time at the onset of modernity. According to Koselleck, a careful examination of the painting allows us to reconstruct the entire course of the battle. In order to be as accurate as possible, Altdorfer consulted the court historiographer to learn the exact number of soldiers dead or taken prisoner and included these statistics in the various banners throughout the painting. Koselleck writes: ‘Upon an area of one and a half square meters, Altdorfer reveals to us the cosmic panorama of a decisive battle of world-historical significance, the Battle of Issus, which in 333 BC opened the epoch of Hellenism, as we say today.’15 This evocation of a ‘cosmic panorama’ recalls DeLillo’s characterization of the street as world; however, Altdorfer’s painting is cosmic in its conjuring of a previous historical moment, whereas DeLillo’s street is world-making in its relentless elicitation of the present tense.

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Koselleck calls attention to Altdorfer’s intentional anachronism, which shows dead soldiers marching under the banners displaying the number of fatalities: These figures can be found inscribed upon the banners of the relevant armies, including the number of dead, who remain in the painting among the living, perhaps even bearing the banner under which they are about to fall, mortally wounded. Altdorfer made conscious use of anachronism so that he could faithfully represent the course of the completed battle.16 Another anachronistic feature of Altdorfer’s painting is that the depicted Persians resemble the Turks who laid siege to Vienna in the same year the painting was completed, making the event Altdorfer represented simultaneously both historical and contemporary. Among all of the numbers meticulously indexed in the painting, the one Altdorfer neglected to include was the year: Temporal difference was not more or less arbitrarily eliminated; it was not, as such, at all apparent. The proof of this is there to see . . . Altdorfer, who wished to statistically corroborate represented history (Historie) by specifying the combatants in ten numbered columns, has done without one figure: the year. His battle thus is not only contemporary; it simultaneously appears to be timeless.17 Three hundred years later, when Friedrich Schlegel came upon Altdorfer’s painting, he described it as ‘the greatest feat of the age of chivalry’. For Koselleck, the fact that Schlegel could both distinguish the painting from his own time and also from the time of Antiquity suggests that in the eighteenth century there occurred ‘a temporalization (Verzeitlichung) of history, at the end of which there is the peculiar form of acceleration which characterizes modernity’.18 If this is the case, then where along this spectrum do we locate the hyperbolic velocity of the 9/11 media spectacle and the draconian silencing of critical discourse it precipitated?

Reduced to silence These are the questions that Koselleck’s student, François Hartog, takes up in his salient text Regimes of Historicity. Hartog characterizes Koselleck’s historiographical observations in terms of a kind of asymmetry between experience and expectation that is produced by the idea of progress and the opening of time onto the future. He asks:

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Has a somewhat different configuration not taken over since then, in which the distance between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation has been stretched to its limits, to its breaking point? With the result that the production of historical time seems to be suspended. Perhaps this is what generates today’s sense of a permanent, elusive, and almost immobile present, which nevertheless attempts to create its own historical time. It is as though there were nothing but the present, like an immense stretch of water, restlessly rippling.19 This permanent present is what conditions the silence of contemporary architectural historiography. One manifestation of this presentism – this crisis of time – is the emergence of ‘heritage’ in the 1980s. For Hartog, nowhere was this crisis of time more palpable than in Berlin, and the dismantling of the Berlin wall posed difficult questions and problems for the historical agency of heritage: In Berlin more than elsewhere time was a visible and tangible problem that could not be eluded. What should the relations with the past be, or rather with pasts in the plural, but also, and no less importantly, with the future? Not forgetting the present, while also avoiding the other extreme, that of being blind to anything beyond it. In other words: how to inhabit the present, in the most literal sense? What should be destroyed, preserved, reconstructed, or built, and how? For any decisions and actions to be taken, relations to time had first to be clarified.20 A critical feature of heritage is its foregrounding of identity, which shapes issues of historical continuity in a particular way. Hartog writes: In this new configuration, heritage was linked to memory, which both operated as substrata of identity. It was an identity aware of its own insecurity, teetering on the brink, or even to a large extent already forgotten, obliterated, and suppressed: an identity in search of itself, to be unearthed, pieced together or even invented. In this sense, heritage came to define less what one possessed, what one had, than what one was, without being aware of it or without having been in a position to know it.21 Furthermore, central to the definition of heritage – Hartog explains – ‘is that something is being transmitted’.22 These features of identity and transmission allow heritage to translate concerns of the present into the currency of the past and, importantly, they eschew dialogical exchange, supplanting it with something more akin to psychological transference. Here, silence is no longer

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a component of a dialogical condition, as it was with Sontag, but rather it is the outcome of a loss of critical distance. With the advent of presentism, silence becomes a form of quietism, resulting from a colonization of historical materials by the concerns and interests of the present. Here, the richness and dialogical complexity of Sontag’s aesthetics of silence is supplanted by a pejorative silence, instrumentalizing the past from the vantage point of the present while quieting difference, quashing dialogue and suppressing productive friction.

No time like the present Among the many voices in architecture driving design and theoretical interests and advocating forms of presentism, Sylvia Lavin’s gives us, perhaps, the most thoroughly and consistently developed theorization of contemporaneity. A cursory examination serves to unpack some of the prevalent themes of this presentist discourse. In a series of articles – ‘The Temporary Contemporary’ in Perspecta 34 (2003), ‘What Color is it Now?’ in Perspecta 35 (2004), ‘The Newest New Criticism’ in Log 3 (2004), and ‘Toward an Even Newer Architecture’ in Log 4 (2005) – Lavin builds a case for the virtues of contemporaneity. In these essays, Lavin differentiates the temporary, changing and unstable characteristics of contemporaneity from the eternal, unchanging and timeless qualities of modernity. She advocates for contemporaneity’s embrace of affect over modernity’s championing of signification, posits its critical mechanisms as curatorial and always in search of newness, and positions it as post-autonomy, embracing interdisciplinary exchanges through the agency of new media. In her essay ‘The Temporary Contemporary’, Lavin writes: ‘to become contemporary is a project and an ambition that requires the identification of an architectural terrain that activates the sensibility of being with time.’23 Cumulatively, throughout these articles, Lavin identifies the vehicles for the registration of contemporaneity within the discipline of architecture as the deliberate curation of objects; the prolific production of affective surfaces; the informed use of colour in its historical specificity; the illusion of radical interiority that renders architectural interiors as mediums; and the perceptual condition of distracted vision, capable of absorbing current moods and atmospheres indirectly. If François Hartog has identified the historiographical conditions of presentism, then Lavin’s theorization of contemporaneity aims to articulate its aesthetic expression and disciplinary consequences for architecture. Lavin’s embrace of contemporaneity on behalf of the discipline of architecture introduces a negative manifestation of silence into the field. Operative in the

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vehicles listed above (the process of curating, the experience of affective surfaces, etc.) is an explicit silencing and instrumentalizing of architectural pasts in the service of a specific, and aesthetically circumscribed, architectural present. The silence about what is excluded in the process of curating is as palpable and profound as the silence entailed by a historically specific selection of colour, intent upon bracketing out historical references while simultaneously inviting allusions to the contemporary. The perceptual apparatus of distracted vision renders architecture’s relationship to contemporaneity as a sort of feint or sleight-of-hand, in which the silence surrounding the history of the discipline remains unnoticed.

The silent present These questions of architecture’s relationship to historiography are no mere tempest in our disciplinary teacup, they have profound effects on the built environment and on our orientation to the future. How we respond to the grip that presentism has on architecture’s history and contemporary imaginary will determine the discipline’s possible futures. In order to draw some conclusions about this, I want to dive more deeply into Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and analyse what it might offer the realm of spatial practices and imaginaries. After witnessing the silent descent of a shirt billowing through the air, the novel’s protagonist, Keith, emerges from the smoke and dust, confused and disoriented, and somehow navigates his way to the home of his estranged wife, Lianne, and their son Justin. As he heals and recuperates from the trauma, Keith, Lianne and Justin resume some semblance of their domestic habits prior to the tragedy. As the narrative progresses, Keith begins a romantic relationship with another survivor, whose briefcase he accidentally grabbed while leaving the falling tower; at the same time, Lianne’s life seems to unravel, as she spends more and more time with her intellectual and elderly mother. In the latter half of the novel, Keith abandons his domestic life with Lianne and Justin and travels the world playing professional poker. While these plot details are not in themselves significant, the tone, the narrative structure, and the descriptions (both aural and visual) in the novel speak volumes about the relationship of the aesthetics of silence to the historiography of presentism and its manifestations in architectural contemporaneity. In the first pages of the novel, DeLillo establishes Keith as the central character of the story, and distracted vision as the mode in which the reader will access his world. The opening sequence takes the carefully curated objects of the contemporary interior and violently thrusts them into the mayhem and disarray of the streets of lower Manhattan on 9/11:

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There were shoes discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up blood . . . . There was something else then, outside all this, not belonging to this, aloft. He watched it coming down. A shirt came down out of the high smoke, a shirt lifted and drifting in the scant light and then falling again, down toward the river.24 Here, the registration of quotidian objects – shoes, handbags, laptops – is seamlessly juxtaposed with the violent image of a man coughing up blood. The observation of the descending shirt – a description that is both dream-like and hallucinatory because it is ‘outside all this’ – seems to allude to a different temporality, a different history than the one the protagonist belongs to. Not fully capable of taking in what he is experiencing and witnessing, Keith recognizes a shift in the way he sees the world: He crossed Canal Street and began to see things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen, whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paintsprayed walls. Maybe this is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.25 Through Keith’s distracted vision, the city is recast as a collection of surfaces – cobblestone streets, cast-iron facades, shop windows, graffitied walls – all missing some critical ingredient. DeLillo’s words describe a protagonist who is experiencing the aesthetic without aesthetic distance, experiencing history without historical distance. He is fully immersed in a significant historical moment and the present, simultaneously. His world is intensely immersive, and nothing exists outside of the present . . . except the shirt. While the novel is replete with descriptions of interior and exterior surfaces, some of the most poignant depictions are those that align a character with a surface. Repeatedly, Lianne, Keith’s neglected and estranged wife, is depicted as a surface by the narrator. After recounting her compulsive need to read newspaper profiles of the dead, DeLillo describes her as follows: After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he

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came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts, and thighs stamped on the mirror.26 In Lavin’s terms, it would be difficult to imagine a more affective surface than the one Lianne creates on the bathroom mirror, and whether the technique for producing the surface is ‘lamination’, or ‘decoration’, or even ‘environmentalization’ (as a result of the fog), her action contributes to the sombre mood and vulnerable, almost elegiac, atmosphere surrounding the couple and their relationship. Near the end of the novel, DeLillo once again depicts Lianne obsessing over obituaries (a journalistic recording of the precise moment in which a life is rendered historical by death), and once again likens her character to a surface: She clicked forward. She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks, nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past. There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.27 In the case of this falling man, Lianne is rendered a recording surface upon which his death is imprinted. This impression, both literal and figurative, the simultaneous formation and retention of memory, is attributed to a character consigned to forever be a witness in an age of presentism and contemporaneity. In the absence of criticality in the forms of aesthetic distance and historical distance, knowledge and understanding reside in the surfaces of things. The contemporaneity of colour plays a critical role in structuring the temporality of DeLillo’s novel, specifically in guise of 9/11’s monochromatic pall of smoke, ash and dust. The connotations of dust are not merely to do with death and destruction. Cultural historian Steven Connor reminds us that it is also generative and formational when he writes: Much of the power of dust may derive from the fact that it is what might be called quasichoate. It instances the condition of the subtle body, a body that is as diffuse or scattered as it is possible to be while yet maintaining a minimal or even imaginary cohesion. Evacuated of the vital moisture, juice, or serum that Aristotle and many others believed to be necessary for a being’s coherence to be maintained, the parched dust seems to thirst after being, to be stirred and charged by a straining after contour and concretion. Dust, in all its allotropes—powder, sand, grit—rarely appears as pure, or

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uniform dissolution, but borrows the suggestion of form, gathering into clumps or clouds.28 The narrative of Falling Man is liberally strewn with dust and ash. It is the material articulation of the before and after – colour is muted, grit is dispersed, a ghostly pall falls over the city and its inhabitants. In a pivotal scene occupying the threshold of before and after, Keith appears to Lianne after narrowly escaping the falling tower: ‘She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face, and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments.’29 These ablutions index the transition to life after the catastrophe in which dust and ash are omnipresent. Later, when Keith returns for the first time to the site, he realizes in a moment of profound irony that the ongoing search and rescue missions are predicated upon the production of even more dust: The men with the vacuum pump were gone. He heard the drone and grind of heavy machinery at the site, earth moving equipment, excavators that pounded concrete to dust, and then the sound of a klaxon that signaled danger, possible collapse of a structure nearby. He waited, they all waited, and then the grind began again.30 In this hiatus, in the interregnum between the deafening blare of the sirens, dust settles and the silence of intensive listening prevails. In these fictional scenes, dust and ash – like a visual corollary to silence – become the very medium through which the characters encounter the city: Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down by the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park. It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.31 Like a latter-day member of the four horsemen, the solitary rider pierces the curtain of falling ash with the colourful apparition of her yellow helmet, while in his state of distracted vision, Keith struggles to make sense of the fleeting image.

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Though it is often a surrogate for what is missing, for entities and bodies that are no longer present, dust can also be revelatory, as Steven Connor observes: ‘Thus, dust, itself formless and edgeless, can both dissolve form and disclose it, like snow that, in the right amount, can give to things a magical new clarity of outline, but passing beyond that point erases landmark beneath its featureless drifts and dunes.’32 Dust plays a similar role in Falling Man, revealing the lost intimacy between Keith and Lianne: This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores.33 Throughout these scenes, DeLillo probes the vicissitudes of dust both for its monochromatic expression of the now of 9/11 and for its connotations of destruction, creation, medium and revelation. In stark contrast, the other colour that appears repeatedly in the novel is baize. Referring to both material and colour – woollen felt and verdant green – baize typically describes a cloth-covered table for poker or pool. As Keith transitions from his life as a lawyer, before the events of 9/11, to his life as a professional poker player, baize becomes the symbolic terrain of a man who no longer lives, but rather, simply goes through the motions: He saw the place differently now. Here he was, seen clear, with nothing that mattered to him in these two and a half rooms, dim and still, in a faint odor of nonoccupancy. There was the card table, that was all, with its napped green surface, baize or felt, site of the weekly poker game. One of the players said baize, which is imitation felt he said, and Keith more or less conceded this. It was the one uncomplicated interval of his week, his month, the poker game—the one anticipation not marked by the bloodguilt tracings of severed connections. Call or fold. Felt or baize.34 If the monochrome of dust marks the contemporaneity of the events of 9/11, then the baize of the poker table is an anachronism – a moment out of time in a radicalized interior where the rituals of the game occlude the violent and unthinkable nature of current events. Similarly, if dust has its corollary in the deafening silence of presentism, then baize symbolically mutes the sounds of real life and real time, until they become the white-noise soundtrack of evacuated lives:

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There were moments between hands when he sat and listened to the sounds around him. It surprised him every time to find what an effort it takes to hear what is always there. The chips were there. Behind the ambient noise and stray voices, there was the sound of tossed chips, raked chips, forty of fifty tables of people stacking chips, fingers reading and counting, balancing the stacks, clay chips with smooth edges, rubbing, sliding, clicking, days and nights of distant hiss, like insect friction.35 Against the promise of the verdant green felt of the poker table, DeLillo depicts a future for Keith replete with thoughtless mechanical repetition and the syncopated din of tossed poker chips. Baize’s capacity to reduce friction, to encourage the sliding of cards and chips, to mute their rustling and clacking, becomes the metaphoric backdrop for the protagonist’s hollow and habitual life. Throughout the narrative of Falling Man, DeLillo unsparingly depicts not only the aftermath of a violent and tragic national event, but also the manifestations and consequences of presentism. In a world regulated by an omnipresent present, every gesture is simultaneously enacted and recorded, every utterance is simultaneously spoken and documented, every event simultaneously transpires and is captured. Falling Man is the narrative of presentism and contemporaneity. Within its pages we witness the collapse of historical distance and understand that it has a critical corollary in the collapse of aesthetic distance. If the mechanisms of implosion and explosion within the novel create a cacophony signalling the collapse of critical, historical distance into presentism; then, the violent eradication of the boundary between interior and exterior, private and public, is equally signifying the collapse of disinterested, aesthetic distance into contemporaneity. If DeLillo were to leave the novel there, the reader would simply sink into solipsistic depression. However, in a surprising and significant turn at the conclusion of Falling Man, DeLillo bends the linear narrative into a cyclical recurrence not unlike Altdorfer’s evocation of the Battle of Alexandria. By returning to a salient image from the opening pages of the novel, he calls into question whether the events he has so meticulously described ever really transpired. In the repetition of this image, all of the references to the negative connotation of silence instantiated by presentism are swept aside, resolving the narrative with the replete quietude evoked by Sontag. DeLillo’s allusion to this singular, silent image both concludes the narrative and proliferates its possible interpretations. In the concluding sentences of the novel he writes: He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone face-down, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That’s where

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everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name. Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.36 A shirt silently descending from the sky – an ending, a beginning, an opening – for as Susan Sontag reminds us, ‘Silence keeps things “open”’.37

PART TWO

Material silences

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6 Between the lines Manuela Antoniu

What is the sound of one hand? ZEN MASTER HAKUIN EKAKU (1686–1769)

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ontrary to how it may appear, the epigraph’s question is not rhetorical. In order to probe how this might be the case, we could start with the phenomenology of another speculative sound, one that is, however, not aurally but visually inferred. A sound of material dissolution and of breakage – a sound of un-making.

Kintsugi – ceramic The sound in question has to do with a praxis that is inextricably linked with Japan, although – as almost everything else in Japanese culture – it originated in China. It is the highly ritualized practice of the tea ceremony or sado, as it is called in Japanese. There, tea is served in receptacles whose admiring examination, after the tea has been drunk, is a sine qua non of sado etiquette. These are quite frequently tea bowls that could be hundreds of years old. However, they are considered less valuable than a much newer bowl that had previously broken and been repaired. This is the first of many apparent incongruities we will encounter. Yet it is entirely in keeping with a culture that seems predicated on simultaneously viable contradictions. Valuing an ordinary refurbished bowl over an antique one that has remained intact for centuries is an expression of the philosophy of sabi, most commonly referenced in tandem with wabi, two terms that have no direct equivalents in Western languages. While, on one hand, wabi could be understood as a kind of cherished melancholy, sabi, on the other, refers to 77

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the finding of beauty in the impermanent and the imperfect, in that which has been marred yet thereby somehow enhanced by the passing of time. As a consequence, a broken bowl from the tea ceremony, far from being discarded as so many shards, is reverentially restored by bonding the pieces back together with a mixture of natural resin and gold dust. This restoration technique is called kintsugi in Japanese, where kin means gold and tsugi to join.1 In contrast to a Western view of this kind of repair, where the skill would be understood to reside in managing to dissimulate to near-invisibility the fissure line, in kintsugi the line is not only brought to the fore and enriched (literally and figuratively) but also becomes an integral part of the design, at times even serving as a new design datum. Thus, it redefines the objecthood of the object. Sometimes patterns of breakage may suggest themselves as arboreal, like the branch of a cherry tree with attendant blossoms, or run in a spider’s web of veins that map out the trajectory of the cracking. Occasionally the bonding resin is speckled not with gold, but with pigment, and when the resultant lacquer is the colour of blood, we perhaps draw closer to the revascularization of a post-surgical fracture. This enables us to imagine more vividly the sound that kintsugi helps visualize – the sound of damage. This absent sound is always already given with the technique, which in its turn is given with the philosophy of Zen Buddhism from which it hails. Originally the tea ceremony arose from the practical need of Zen monks to stay awake during long periods of meditation. Over time it became ritualized, yet every aspect of the tea ceremony has remained conceptually articulated to philosophical tenets of Zen, chief among which is the transience of all existence. This helps us to better understand why an ordinary bowl that has been repaired with kintsugi is preferred to a perfectly preserved antique – because it instantiates both impermanence and the need to navigate impermanence with care, imagination and fortitude. One of the central figures of Japanese sado was the Zen philosopher Sen no Rikyu, who in the sixteenth century revitalized and streamlined the tea ceremony. He not only returned it to a more spiritual basis from the ostentatious display of material ownership it had become, but also introduced the aesthetic simplicity of Zen by taking inspiration from an architectural element, a common roof tile, which generated the Raku bowls still venerated today as the epitome of wabi sabi.2 Seeing into the impermanence of all existence and experiencing ultimate reality is a teleology that Zen Buddhism shares with Socratic and Platonic thinking. (By coincidence, Sen no Rikyu and Socrates share a biographical detail: both were silenced in the same way, being sentenced to death by suicide.) However, while Socrates and Plato – as we shall see – choose to remain silent about matters which they consider of utmost importance, Zen does not eschew words. As scholars have hastened to specify, Zen masters

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are never ‘averse to using language as a means of conveying their message, even as they stress the ineffability of the experience that their message attempts to describe’.3 If the experience is ineffable, we may ask, what then is the status of the words that purport to describe it and why are these preferable to silence, to no words at all?

Kintsugi – mental The words that Zen uses to point directly to objective reality belong to the centuries-old, vast expository literature of Zen koans. These are pithy dialogical exchanges between masters, or between masters and students, and are used as teaching materials in Zen meditation practice. Several collections of such koans exist, the best-known of them being the Mumonkan (or Wumenguan in its original Chinese), meaning the ‘Gateless Barrier’, which was compiled in the early thirteenth century. Students of Zen typically start by working on Case no. 1 in the Mumonkan (aptly named the ‘breakthrough’ koan), and then gradually progress through the remaining 47, then on to the next collection of koans, and so forth.4 To the uninitiated, the surface appearance of a koan (such as the one used as the epigraph to this chapter) may seem at worst nonsensical and at best akin to a paradox, to use a term that returns us to Greek philosophy. However, while Zeno’s paradoxes, for instance, are solvable through discursive reasoning, attempting to resolve a Zen koan by similar means invariably leads to a dead end, as they deflect all theoretical solutions.5 This is despite/because of the fact that ‘the question each koan confronts us with is the same as the question Zen as a whole confronts us with, which, at the deepest level, is the question that life itself confronts us with’.6 In a typical koan dialogue, one of the speakers asks about that which is beyond speech and thought. The questions and the responses are presented and expressed, respectively, in the form of language (including body language and silence).7 At first sight, a koan’s perplexing exchange looks like a broken linguistic bowl, like shards of language deprived of the kintsugi of sense. Yet, as commentators have noted, the through-line that connects the two linguistic termini of questioner and responder cuts a path of great complexity through, out of and into language. Let us attempt to unravel some of its loops. How to express that which is taken to be inexpressible? Koan work involves, on the part of the practitioner, absorption in the question to a point where, in the words of Thomas Cleary, a ‘radical transformation of consciousness’ ensues.8 By arresting the arbitrary, habitual patterns of thought and reconfiguring them along the force field of the koan’s presentation, the process of constant engagement with the koan question leads to an initial

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insight. This breakthrough, the entry into that ‘radical transformation of consciousness’, occurs when – experientially – one realizes the non-duality of the seeking subject (the person striving to ‘solve’ the koan question) and the object of the search (the presumed solution to the koan question). All of the koans (some 700 of them) are designed to further refine this initial insight into non-duality and actualize it in every aspect of life.9 An understanding of nonduality can, of course, be arrived at through logic and discursive thinking, but in doing so one would mobilize only intellectual faculties. The insight into nonduality that koan work affords mobilizes not only the mind but, as Hakuin insisted, the whole person and is therefore fully experiential. To that extent, it could be just as incommunicable as in the analogy offered by Mumon (the compiler of the Mumonkan): ‘. . . like someone without the power of speech who has had a dream, you can only know it for yourself’.10 And yet, demonstrating that particular realization can take the form of language – including, indeed, body language and silence. A few examples might be useful here. One of the earliest koan dialogues is Case no. 84 in The Blue Cliff Record, in which the Indian sage Vimalak¯ırti is asked the question of how to enter the door of non-duality. He responds by sitting in silence. Or rather, in Robert Thurman’s translation, in ‘thunderous silence’,11 the adjective vividly emphasizing the performative nature of koan exchange. A similar example (sans thunder) is ‘An Outsider Questions Buddha’, Case no. 32 in the Mumonkan: A [non-Buddhist philosopher] questioned Buddha in these terms: ‘I do not ask about the spoken, I do not ask about the unspoken.’ The Buddha just sat there. The outsider said in praise, ‘. . . opening up the clouds of my confusion, you have enabled me to see through.’ Then he paid his respects and left.12 Clearly, the philosopher did not take Buddha’s silence as ‘the unspoken’ pole in the conventional duality with which he had approached him, nor as transcendence of that duality. In Case no. 36, ‘Meeting Adepts on the Road’, we read: ‘Zen master Goso said, “On the road, when you encounter people who have attained the Way, you do not face them with speech or silence. So tell me, how do you face them?” ’ How indeed? Case no. 81, ‘Speech and Silence’, in Shu¯mon Katto¯shu¯ also appears as Case no. 24 in the Mumonkan (‘Detachment from Words’). We follow here the former’s translation: Fengxue Yanzhao was asked by a monk, ‘Speech and silence partake of both transcendence and functioning, so how can we proceed without transgressing?’ Fengxue answered, ‘I always remember Jiangnan in the third month, partridges calling amid all the flowers so fragrant.’

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The translator, Thomas Yu¯ho¯ Kirchner, comments: Speech offends against transcendence; silence offends against function. How then can we combine both aspects? The questioner is saying, in other words, ‘Express the ultimate through silence, and you’re limited to the noumenal. Express it in words, and you’re limited to the phenomenal. So how can one function in true freedom without erring on either side?‘13 Mumonkan Case no. 43 is titled ‘The Bamboo Stick’: Zen master Shuzan held up a bamboo stick before a group and said, ‘If you call it a bamboo stick, you are clinging. If you do not call it a bamboo stick, you are ignoring. So tell me, what do you call it?’ Mumon comments: ‘Call it a bamboo stick and you’re clinging. Don’t call it a bamboo stick and you’re ignoring. You cannot say anything, yet you cannot say nothing. Speak quickly! Speak quickly!’ We find a similar enjoinder from the same collection in Case no. 5, ‘Up in a Tree’: Master Kyo¯gen said, ‘Suppose someone is up in a tree, holding on to a branch by his teeth, his hands without a grasp on a branch, his feet without a toehold, dangling. Someone under the tree asks him about the meaning of Zen. If he does not answer, he is avoiding the question; but if he does answer, he loses his life. Tell me, at just such a time, how would you reply?’ Here the difficulty of verbalizing one’s Zen realization is further emphasized by the physical impossibility of opening one’s mouth. This state of suspension between being given, simultaneously, both the ability and the inability to speak is what Jean-François Lyotard termed le différend, ‘. . . the unstable state and instance of language where something that must be able to be verbalised cannot yet be’.14 In this scenario, silence emerges as an indeterminate zone between the capacity and the incapacity to speak. This in-betweenness is analogous to what Plato denotes as metaxy in the domain of human knowledge and what one of his finest exegetes expands into a figure of thought that comes to encompass the entire cosmos.15 In the Symposion, in the philosopher’s myth recounted by Diotima, the spiritual man (daimonios aner) in search of truth finds himself between knowledge and ignorance (metaxy sophias kai amathias) (202A). As Eric Voegelin elaborates, ‘the truth [of the metaxy] is . . . the insight . . . of the soul when it . . . investigates its own suspense “between

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knowledge and ignorance”‘.16 What brings this insight close to a Zen realization is the fact that, when it arises, it has the character of ‘truth’ because it is experiential, and therefore the subject-object dichotomy does not apply to the event of an ‘experience-articulating-itself’.17 The examples of koan cases cited earlier return us to our initial question – why do koans use words rather than not words to point to the ineffable? – although on a slightly different register. Their performative rather than descriptive manifestation18 ‘does not signify primarily the transcendence of dualism so much as the realization of dualism’ – that is to say, a koan ‘realizes itself in duality, not apart from it’.19 Paraphrasing the Buddhist scholar Shizuteru Ueda, we can say that Zen encompasses language – that which the language cannot express is approached through the language, then experienced beyond language.20 Describing what could occur during deep concentration on koan practice, Ueda refers to a ‘leap’ that – not unlike kintsugi, we might remark – ‘separates yet simultaneously bridges the language of the question and the language of the response’. In this process, the question emerges from words and the response emerges into words.21 Thus the through-line between the two linguistic foci of the koan exchange completes its complex trajectory. If we were to cast the non-dual epistemology of koan practice in Western philosophical terms, we could well say with Voegelin that ‘since the exodus from reality is a movement within reality, the philosopher has to cope with the paradox of a recognizably structured process that is recognizably moving beyond its structure’.22 As adumbrated earlier in this chapter, in Western philosophy the allusion that serious knowledge might be unspeakable is made by Plato both in his dialogues and in his correspondence, particularly in his ‘Seventh Letter’. Both Socrates and Plato state implicitly and explicitly that they refrain from writing or speaking about serious things, or those things which they consider serious, but that knowledge of the serious things is somehow communicated without being spoken.23 This closely echoes the notion of mind-to-mind transmission in Zen, which professes to be a teaching outside of formal doctrine: A separate transmission outside scripture, Not founded on words or letters.24 Plato’s statements about his practice of silence regarding his own doctrine, the core of his philosophy, are contained in the ‘Seventh Letter’, where he states: there is no writing of mine about these things, nor will there ever be. For it is in no way a spoken thing like other lessons, but, as a result of repeated being with and living with the matter itself, it is brought to birth in the soul

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suddenly, as light that is given off by a leaping flame, and it maintains itself thereafter.25 In his close reading of the ‘Seventh Letter’, James Rhodes argues that what Plato proclaims cannot be put into words like other knowledge means that ‘the serious things’ are inexpressible, not that they can be spoken in a different way.26 Their understanding needs a long period of gestation and, when it kindles, it erupts in the soul like a blaze. This simile finds epistemological equivalents not only in the illuminations of the cave in the Republic, but also, we might suggest, in the aforementioned ‘leap’ of realization experienced in Zen. We can therefore infer, with the two Plato scholars, that there are realities that can be known, but not in the same way other things are known – that is, by means of verbal propositions. Socratic wisdom would be communicated in a non-propositional way, but we would have to discover how this process works by experiencing it27 – much as in Zen, in other words, where in koans we have devices that touch the ineffable. If we recall the last koan example we looked at (Case no. 5 in the Mumonkan), where groundlessness was both literalized and symbolized by the precariously dangling figure who could neither remain silent nor speak without risking major consequences, we can see that it epitomizes the imperative condition of loss of all certainties: no conceptual foothold is available, no handhold in ideation, nothing representable to grab on to. We are enjoined to ‘arouse the mind without resting it on anything’.28

Kintsugi – architectural Returning now from the ‘ground of being’ to the ‘ground under our feet’, one datum that in architecture is invariably taken for granted is the solidity of the supporting ground. Could it be just mere coincidence that kintsugi originated, and is being practised, in a notoriously seismic country whose ground may break open at any time? How would an architectural kintsugi be configured elsewhere on earth where terra firma’s firmness was being constantly tested by natural phenomena? One example that presents itself in this regard is Carlo Scarpa’s angioplasty performed on the Querini Stampalia building in Venice, where his intervention has been allowing the building to receive, rather than shut out, daily perfusions of acqua alta from the Venetian lagoon. Reminiscent of the sound of material dissolution that kintsugi renders visible, the cyclical rush of water within the building is perhaps the sound of Venice’s potential un-making. For the high tide that floods in and then retreats serves as a constant reminder of the precariousness of all that is built upon it, in

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marble and gold alongside humbler materials – materials whose adjacency Scarpa often articulates with lines of natural light. Combining natural light as a bonding agent with architectural conditions of rather uncertain groundedness was also a concern in Gordon Matta-Clark’s ephemeral project from 1974, Splitting. In contrast to that of ceramics, in this case the breakage is not accidental. An inverted kintsugi, as it were, here the deliberate lines of incision into the architectural body fill up with golden rays of sunlight to underscore not the unifying but, rather, the parting of the fragments. If, as we saw at the beginning, the sound of a Japanese ceramic splitting open is visualized by lines of gold, what sounds – we may wonder – would the immaterial golden lines of light in Splitting have incorporated? And what, for that matter, was the symphony of all the power tools that contributed to the undoing of this house? The New York-based sculptor Robert Morris had addressed just that question a decade earlier, although – perhaps in keeping with the gentler, kinder political climate of the time – it was not the sound of un-making but rather that of making that Morris had captured. In his 1961 piece, entitled Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, Morris recorded the entire soundscape of fabricating a plain wooden cube with carpentry tools, a process that took him some three-and-a-half hours. Using the acoustic technology of that era, he then placed the resultant tape, cassette player and a small loudspeaker inside the box, ready for playback. Upon completion of the installation, the first person in New York that Morris invited to his studio to see and hear it was, quite fittingly, the composer John Cage who, a decade earlier still, had introduced a breakthrough in concert performance with his so-called ‘silent’ piece entitled 4ʹ33ʺ.29 Precursors notwithstanding, the composition literally broke through the expected sound of an instrumental work, leaving a gap of four minutes and thirty-three seconds, during which the only perceptible sound was the audience’s growing discomfort at waiting for the silence to end – the sound of waiting for sound to happen, Cage’s compositional kintsugi. Cage was reportedly transfixed by Morris’s work, as the sculptor himself recounts: When Cage came, I turned it on . . . and he wouldn’t listen to me. He sat and listened to it for three hours, and that was really impressive to me. He just sat there.30 Tuning out Morris’s words, the composer, a Zen practitioner, sat in silence to listen to the unsilent making of the box. We may recall someone else who had ‘just sat there’ when he was asked to instruct a philosopher neither with words nor with non-words. Quite conversant with Western philosophy and quite articulate, by a twist of fate Morris is now gradually losing his hearing and looks forward to the prospect of complete silence. However, he ‘mishears’

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Hegel’s Aesthetics, taking the order in which the five arts (architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry) appear in Hegel’s system to be descending, and therefore to mean that architecture is the highest art form. But in his objection to this and his assertion that it is in fact the lowest, Morris unwittingly turns out to concur with Hegel, supporting his view with examples of museums designed by Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry.31 For museums that exhibited his own work in the 1960s, Morris found it easier to construct new boxes or to have them constructed for him each time – competently but not expertly – and to discard them afterwards. He once sent assembly instructions for the boxes to a museum whose staff built them rather too well, and he took exception to that, commenting: ‘If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.’32 Are we to suppose, therefore, since the original Box with the Sound of Its Own Making was likely not an ideal Platonic solid, that its recording actually contained the sound of not making something too well? How perceptible would the difference be to the listener between that recording and a potential one of the museum’s workers assembling a perfect piece from written instructions? Would there be a difference in sound between choreographed versus non-choreographed carpentry – between expert and just competent sawing, hammering, drilling? Writing about Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, Rosalind Krauss wanted to interpret the recording as the box’s memory.33 If we concede her equation, then that particular memory was nevertheless constructed for the sole purpose of remembering itself at every playback. This conjures the image of an infinite projection through time, as playback endowed the recording with a recursivity arrested only by technological obsolescence. Indeed, an enforced silence may have already muffled the piece if the original tape recording has not been digitized, as the caption from a recent article on Morris seems to suggest. Our original premise, that the sound of damage endures through material transposition in kintsugi repair, can now recast the lines of repair as virtual playbacks, free from the technological contingency limiting Morris’s piece, for instance. However, how does sound perdure even without such material encoding? The fate of sound in time, once it is emitted, has been an abiding preoccupation of the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Inspired by the reverberating sounds of bells (or tintinnabuli, to use their Latin name, as the composer does),34 he developed a harmonic technique called tintinnabulation. This is based on the central note that one hears when a bell is struck, and on the retreating overtones that encase it in harmonics. The meditative resonances of his compositions attest specifically to that retreat, for Pärt’s question – borne out in his music – is: ‘Where does sound end?’35

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Silentio conclusit? Pärt’s koan-like question is perhaps a fitting note on which to return to our epigraph and its author, Zen master Hakuin, who, as a young man, is reported to have had his first insight, his first ‘awakening’, upon hearing the sound of a temple bell.36 Throughout koan literature, examples abound of awakenings precipitated by sound – whether that of a Pärtian tintinnabulum (‘Were I to speak of this matter, I’d say it’s like a great bell that resounds throughout the universe the moment it’s struck’37), or of a broken tile against a bamboo (‘Hearing this sound, Xiangyan was suddenly enlightened’38), or else that of falling kindling: Hearing some firewood fall to the ground, [Xingjiao Hongshou] had a clear awakening. He said: The sound of the wood isn’t separate from me; My surroundings aren’t outside things.39 Xingjiao’s res cogitans and res extensa verses remind us of the anti-Cartesian nature of the ‘leap’, that inextinguishable – once ignited – flame in Plato’s soul.40 And yet, as we noted at the beginning, while the Zen practitioner may well resort to versification to convey it, the Greek philosopher famously averse to poetry prefers to abstain from words altogether. In his commentary on the Parmenides, Proclus concludes that Plato gives silence the last word: For by means of a negation Parmenides has removed all negation. With silence he concludes the contemplation of the One. (Silentio autem conclusit eam que de ipso theoriam.)41 The oneness or non-duality experienced by the Zen poet remains inextinguishable only as long as it is fully integrated within, and allowed to fully permeate, ordinary dualistic experience – what Michel de Certeau would call an ‘artefact of silence’, in the sense that ‘it produces silence in the rumble of words’.42 And yet, whether as air waves or mind waves, whether contingent upon external or internal antennae for capture, and ‘even if it takes a radically new form of metaphysics to pull it off, we would still like to learn how to hear “the sound of one hand . . .” ’.43 Acknowledgements: I wish to thank the Place of Silence symposium organizers and participants, as well as (in chronological order): Yasumiko Tone, Thomas Yu¯ho¯ Kirchner, Zsuzsanna Szabó, Clara Goehrs, Tatiana Schneider, Yoko Sasagawa and Takaharu Yamazaki.

7 The silence of Michelangelo’s hammer Jonathan Foote

Do not infest your mind, with beating on The strangeness of this business. SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT V

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ichelangelo began the mutilation of his Florence Pietà by fervently hammering the lower right section of Christ’s leg, which has been missing ever since. The entire work might have been destroyed beyond repair had it not been for the persuasive power of his servant Antonio, who managed to stop the master, collect the fractured pieces and assist in their reassembly. An uncommissioned work intended for Michelangelo’s own tomb, the motivation for the destruction of the nearly completed figure group has remained a mystery. When asked, the artist replied that it was due to the ‘importunity of his servant Urbino, who nagged him every day to finish it’.1 Michelangelo’s response has generally been dismissed or received with incredulity – Vasari himself reasoned that the assault on the sculpture was simply because ‘he was never content with anything he did’.2 Yet, if we take Michelangelo at his word, what becomes clear is that the devastating hammering of his own masterpiece was a deliberate effort to silence the repeated petitions of the faithful Urbino.3 This is indeed an act of negation, since destroying that which requires to be finished would presumably elicit more protestation, not less. Michelangelo’s given reason seems strangely incoherent, but upon further investigation becomes somewhat intelligible. Urbino was one of Michelangelo’s most endeared servants, having worked under the master for almost thirty years. Rarely noted is the fact that, at the time of the Pietà mutilation, Urbino was 87

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quite ill and near death. To finish the Pietà, then, would satisfy the servant’s pleas but would also invite his imminent demise, as Urbino could rest in peace knowing he had lived to see the marvellous work finally finished. Rather than use the hammer to finish it, Michelangelo chose the same tool to destroy it. With the possibility of ever finishing the Pietà effectively eliminated, Urbino’s nagging pleas were quieted, but not for the reason he had hoped. Having his life prolonged by Michelangelo’s actions, at least temporarily, perhaps it was in the end the artist’s own grief that the work of the hammer came to silence.4 In this enigmatic episode, the instrument of silence may be unequivocally understood as Michelangelo’s sculpting hammer. It brought forth Urbino’s pleas and later silenced them – and it silenced, at least for a brief period, the onset of the artist’s inevitable pains of grief for his servant’s death. The hammer is, of course, a tool for creation as well as destruction, but the proverbial line between the two is quite thin, perhaps not a line at all, and in fact Urbino’s story reveals that it can fashion a tale of indissoluble love even through a shocking act of physical destruction. Creation and destruction are not, then, distinct sides of the same coin, rather they contain each other. As a tool that enables both outcomes, the hammer contains the possibility of rendering the terms’ apparent ambiguity with a flash of clarity. In the confrontation with the material and the marks left by its use, Michelangelo’s hammer reveals its potential as a symbol of direct, unmediated will, translated outward. No doubt this primordial bluntness is at the root of its power as a symbol of poetic agency, having an established and well-known lineage often linked to the creative power of Plato’s demiurge. The characteristic instrument of Hephaestus, the divine craftsman, was the hammer. Depicted inevitably at the heat of the forge – naked, lame, and among the ugliest of the gods – Hephaestus’s physical coarseness was matched only by the intense beauty of Aphrodite, to whom he was married. Indeed, the connection with creation and the hammer has meant that Plato’s demiurge was often conflated with the blacksmith and his art.5 In the hands of the earthly craftsman, the hammer was not only employed to shape or remove material, it also released the inherent power of material itself to reflect its divine origin, leading to its direct link with poetic agencies. Marsilio Ficino, the fifteenth-century Neoplatonist philosopher, wrote: ‘This hammering and heating, if it happens under a harmony similar to that celestial harmony which had once infused power into the material, activates this power and strengthens it as blowing strengthens a flame and makes manifest what was latent before.’6 The manifesting power of the hammer had much to do with the rhythmic beating of the material, carried out with great skill, and the work was not revealed in its final appearance but rather in the process of making. Like the brute iron that, when beaten, takes shape as hardened and refined metal, a well-beaten idea receives the violence of intellectual scrutiny to

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emerge impervious to doubt. Horace imagined the role of the poet as a sculptor, carving his verses ad ungeum – ‘to the judgement of the fingernail’, a phrase deriving from the uninhibited pass of the fingernail across a wellfinished work. ‘Condemn that poem’, he wrote, ‘which many a day and many an erasure has not pruned and whittled down and chastened tenfold to the nail [ad unguem].’7 Operations energized by the hammer, such as whittling and carving, play central roles in Gaston Bachelard’s analysis of the encounter between the human will and the resistance of matter, conveying the tool’s implicit importance in converting a raw thought into one of coherence and lucidity.8 Nietzsche captured this sentiment in the title of his short book, Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (The Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer), the last section of which, entitled Der Hammer redet, equates the hardness of materials with the will of creation and thus with the nobility of the written word. Notably the fifteenth-century sculptor-architect Antonio Averlino, better known as Filarete, portrayed himself working with his hands, no doubt as a mode of thinking rather than as an unreflective act of production. On the reverse side of his self-portrait medal, Filarete wields a hammer. Although this might be a normal posture for a sculptor, the front face proudly proclaims him as an architectus, showing again the intimate connection the hammer provides between physical and intellectual labour.9 If we imagine ourselves as actual auditors of a hammer’s blows, however, we think of it as a noisy thing, perceived in a range of ways from resonant music to outright cacophony. Walking near a blacksmith’s forge and eavesdropping on the mysterious sounds emitted by the toiling smiths within, Pythagoras observed that the normally cacophonous ringing of the iron sledges suddenly came into sonic unison, later discovering that the surreptitious consonance lay in the weight of the hammers themselves.10 One may say that Pythagoras’s space of inward contemplation emerged from within the normally raucous ringing of the hammering iron. This suggests a third possibility for the clanging hammer: not noise, nor music, but silence – the silence, that is, of one’s own inner thoughts. Just as we saw in the story of Urbino, where the double-faced agency of the hammer created a parallel opportunity for the tool as an instrument for silence, the aural space created by the rhythmic hammer was characterized by both the presence and absence of sound at the same time. Michelangelo’s hammer provides a poignant window into this multifaceted ambiguity. As is well documented, the artist wielded the hammer almost daily – up until his final hours, in fact, as he stubbornly modified his last work, the Rondanini Pietà, at eighty-eight years old. During his lifetime, he laboured upon scores of works in Carrara marble, leaving more than half of them unfinished.11 His biographer Ascanio Condivi recounts a story in which

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Michelangelo claimed to have received his skill with the hammer and chisel through the milk of his wet-nurse, whose husband was a stone carver.12 With the hammer in hand, he cultivated a mythical skill that amazed his contemporaries, as represented in Sigismondo Fanti’s 1527 drawing of the sign of Jupiter in the Triompho di Fortuna, in which the artist assumes an image of a partially clothed Hephaestus dominating a piece of stone in a fury of poetic passion.13 The French traveller Blaise de Vigenère vividly recalled seeing the sculptor in action, instilling an image of heroic frenzy amid the stillness of brute matter: I have seen Michelangelo, although more than sixty years old and no longer among the most robust, knock off more chips of a very hard marble in a quarter of an hour than three young stone carvers could have done in three or four . . . and I thought the whole work would fall to pieces because he moved with such rashness and fury, knocking to the floor large chunks three or four fingers thick with a single blow so precisely aimed that if he had gone even minimally further than necessary, he risked losing it all.14 Michelangelo’s dexterity in wielding obdurate material with great facility upset the established order of the common artisan. Sensitive to this, he was careful to separate himself from those who had mere technical mastery. Invoking the traditional name for an artisan’s workshop, the bottega, he declared in one letter: ‘I have never been a painter or sculptor as those who keep a boctega [sic].’15 Rather, Michelangelo on occasion acknowledged his debt to the fabbrica divina, where the hammer belongs not to mere execution but rather to the hand of heavenly will: If my crude hammer shapes the hard stones into one human appearance or another, deriving its motion from the master who guides it, watches and holds it, it moves at another’s pace. But that divine one, which lodges and dwells in heaven, beautifies self and others by its own action; and if no hammer can be made without a hammer, by that living one every other one is made. And since a blow becomes more powerful the higher it’s raised over the forge, that one’s flown up to heaven above my own. So now my own will fail to be completed unless the divine smithy, to help make it, gives it aid which was unique on earth.16

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FIGURE 7.1 Michelangelo’s hammer, detail from Sigismondo Fanti, Triompho di Fortuna, card 38, 1527. Image in public domain.

The ‘master who guides it’, announced in line three, is revealed in the resolution of the sonnet as the ‘divine smithy’, setting up a parallel movement between Michelangelo’s hammer and that of the heavenly demiurge. The notion of stone containing the latency of life within, only to be released through the skilled and deliberate hammer, could be interpreted as a nearconfirmation of Ficino’s theory of harmonic beating. Perhaps appropriately, it is the crudest of tools, the rozzo martello, that enacts these most transcendental movements. Michelangelo returned to this image repeatedly, projecting it into his own self-representation. In one known episode, the artist Benedetto Varchi approached Michelangelo and declared: ‘Signor Buonarroti, you have the brain of Jupiter’, to which he replied: ‘But one needs the hammer of Vulcan to make something come out of it.’17 Vasari seems to have captured this in his

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1564 painting, Fucina di Vulcano, conserved in the Uffizi, in which the nude blacksmith’s face has an uncanny resemblance to contemporary portraits of Michelangelo.18 Painted for the newly formed Accademia del Disegno, Vasari was not only eager to secure Michelangelo as the spiritual and artistic father, but also to depict the artist’s hammer and, by extension, his workshop as a synthesizing device of physical and intellectual fabrications. Among several hammers shown in the painting, the one wielded by Vulcan/Michelangelo shows this most clearly. Raised in preparation for a material blow, it also responds to the upward gaze of Minerva’s instructions and the three arts of disegno, represented by the Three Graces, dancing beyond and to the left. In connection with this iconography of Michelangelo and his hammer, it might be noted that the artist produced very few works at the forge, the most notable being a large bronze statue of Julius II. Undertaken in Bologna under heavy duress, the project was proclaimed by the artist himself to encompass some of the most dispiriting days of his life.19 In one of history’s great ironies, the ten-braccia-high sculpture was destroyed by the Bentivogli and melted down into a cannon, aptly named Julius, to fight against him. Instead of beating around the hot forge, Michelangelo preferred the meeting of a hammer and chisel on cold white stone from the quarries of Carrara. This asks for a subtle shift in the images, where, in contrast to an instrument of material transubstantiation, the hammer is strictly employed as a tool for removal. This has led to the famous premise that, for Michelangelo, the superiority of sculpture over painting lies precisely in the difficulty of the via di levare, the mode of subtracting material rather than adding it.20 The identification of Michelangelo’s hammer with that of divine creation might be expected, particularly since he was already referred to as il divino during his lifetime.21 Concealed beneath the myth, however, lies the potential of Michelangelo’s hammer to open other, unforeseen associations. When Michelangelo completed his colossal tomb for Julius II, he tapped Moses on his bare-skinned knee with a hammer and exclaimed: ‘Perché non parli?’ – ‘why don’t you speak?’22 Michelangelo’s hammer, or course, was met with silence, but – as in previous episodes – it was a silence laced with ambiguity. To begin with, the hammer tap occurred after having finished the sculpture. Thus, in contrast to the Florence Pietà, where the hammer prolonged the sculpture’s completion, perhaps indefinitely, the hammering of Moses’s knee was used as a declaration of completion and the final stage of a transmutation from brute to living matter. Employed up to that very moment as an instrument of creation, the hammer assumed a new, instantaneous identity as a tool for summoning life. As the story is handed down, Michelangelo’s hammer tap occurred specifically on Moses’s knee. This seems natural on the one hand, considering that the figure reaches well over two meters tall in the seated position and

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FIGURE 7.2 Giorgio Vasari, Vulcan’s Forge, 1567–68, Oil on copper, 38 x 28 cm, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. Image credit: bpk/Alfredo Dagli Orti.

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that the naked knee is his most prominent projection. But another association seems possible. The knee was also an ancient symbol of life, with the Latin word for knee, genua, lexically related to genus, genitalia and genius. Euripides, in fact, referred to the knees as ‘generative members’, and Pliny the Elder believed that piercing the bulging cavity at the front of the knee causes ‘the spirit to flow away’ in a similar way as cutting the throat.23 The thematic of the use of the hammer as a test for life returns – albeit in a transformed way – in 1875, when Erb and Westphal first described the use of the now familiar reflex hammer as neurologic device for inducing the knee jerk. Following late-eighteenth-century work on the diagnostic importance of involuntary reflexes, tests and probes for coaxing such reactions became commonplace. Specialized hammers had been used to probe the interior of the body since the late seventeenth century, and they were eagerly adapted for use in the burgeoning discipline of neurology.24 People who are subjected to a knee jerk test often react with mild delight at the sudden exposure of an impulse generally hidden from common experience. That Moses would offer no such reflex increases the intrigue. Moses’s silence was the abundant reflex to the ring of Michelangelo’s hammer, a sign of awaking from the latent, stony flesh. The marmoreal knee is in the end actualized through the skilled hammer, which must be struck at the proper moment. ‘Just as the touch of the broom or the wild strawberry excites a dormant madness,’ wrote Ficino, ‘thus perhaps hammering and heating alone brings out the power latent in the material, if it is done at the right time.’25 The use of the hammer as an extension of the sculptor’s ‘final touch’, the one that turns marble into flesh, is curious and relies on images from several sources. Writers often connect the episode with the sculptor Pygmalion, who, upon carving a beautiful woman in ivory, fell in love with his own creation and turned her body into flesh through a series of seductions.26 In Ovid’s account, Pygmalion breathes life into his stony creation in several steps, first by dressing her and bringing gifts, then by bringing her to bed and lying with her. In desperation he makes offerings to Aphrodite, who grants his wish, as Pygmalion later discovers when he kisses lips that had suddenly become warm. With Moses, there appears to be no evidence of an elaborate seduction, unless the confrontational tone of the encounter may be seen as such. Rather, the image of a polished and completed work is curiously violated by the blunt tap of the sculptor’s hammer. Legend speaks of a strange ‘scar’ on Moses’s right knee, possibly left by Michelangelo’s hammer. For another case of provoking life through the hammer, one may turn to a famous incident during Donatello’s carving of the Zuccone. As Vasari recounts it, Donatello carved with great fury, repeatedly taunting, ‘Favella, favella, che ti venga il cacasangue!’ (‘Speak, damn you, speak!’).27 One can well imagine the high-

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FIGURE 7.3 Michelangelo, detail of Moses’s knee from the Tomb of Julius II. Photo by author.

pitched clanging of the hammer on the chisel during such a scene. The reiteration of the curse, along with the detail added by Vasari that the sculpture was a work in progress, stands in contrast to the case of Michelangelo, who tapped his Moses following its completion and framed his desire in the form of a frustrating question rather than a shouted curse. Like Donatello, however, Michelangelo’s call to awakening is issued through the tapping of his hammer – a relatively forceful gesture and markedly different from Pygmalion’s vital touch through a tender kiss. Presumably, Zuccone stood in stoic silence, but the implication is still clear: the silence is the obverse of the hammer strike, the absence of sound, in the midst of it.

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If Michelangelo’s hammer silently bestowed life, the sounds of beating hammers within the marble quarries around Pietrasanta and Carrara created a sonic condition where refuge could be found through immersion in a certain material landscape. As is well documented, Michelangelo maintained an unusually active presence in the quarry landscapes, making more than twentyfour trips between 1498 and 1525 and at times spending up to eight months searching and directing quarry operations. In one notable journey related to his commission for the façade of San Lorenzo, Michelangelo departed Florence for the quarries of Carrara, a two-day journey by horseback. Shortly after his arrival in late 1516, he received the first of many letters from the Pope’s agent in Rome, Domenico Buoninsegni, informing Michelangelo that the Pope would like to see a model of the proposed work. Receiving only silence, Signor Buoninsegni wrote again to Michelangelo in Carrara two months later, on 2 February 1517.28 After two more weeks, having not received a model nor a reply to his previous letter, another inquiry arrived from the Pope’s agent: ‘make [the model] according to your fantasy’, he writes, ‘and don’t worry about what Baccio or anybody else thinks.’29 Letters from Michelangelo’s friends in Florence started reaching him in Carrara wondering about the model, again receiving no reply.30 In frustration, Signor Buoninsegni wrote to Michelangelo’s brother on two separate occasions asking him if he knew anything about the reclusive artist, now entrenched in the quarries for several months and having made no response to the Pope.31 On 8 March, still another letter arrived in Carrara from the Pope’s agent. The frustration in Rome has grown, he writes, and ‘[they] are in despair, waiting so much’.32 Finally, on 20 March, after a full four months of silence, Michelangelo replied to the Pope’s agent stating that, yes, he will send a model of the façade very soon.33 To what may we attribute the artist’s stubborn silence? Michelangelo’s remoteness from urban and civic life in the quarries was aural as well as spatial. Bearing names such as Sasso Alto and Monte Altissimo, most quarries required a two-hour walk from the nearest village to reach. Quarrymen would stay in the mountains for days or weeks, constructing temporary huts out of marble. However, Michelangelo’s silence was no doubt maintained by the ceaseless alpine echoes of the quarry hammers. More than merely providing a veil of distracting sounds, perhaps the hammering created a protective soundscape for the imagination within a space of exception cut off from civic life.34 It penetrated the remote and otherwise silent landscape and constructed a place to think. It was here among the hammers that, repeatedly, Michelangelo found solace. Then, after a silence of nearly 450 years, Michelangelo’s hammer reappeared on 21 May 1972, when a Hungarian-born geologist named László Tóth marched into St Peter’s in Rome during Pentecost Sunday, vaulted a marble balustrade

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FIGURE 7.4 Michelangelo, Pietà, detail of damage inflicted on the face of Mary by László Tóth on 21 May 1972. Vatican, St Peter’s Basilica. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

and attacked the artist’s two-figured Vatican Pietà with a common onekilogramme hammer. Leaving Jesus untouched, he landed fifteen blows to the left arm and face of the Virgin Mary before being subdued by an off-duty fireman named Marco Ottaggio. During the nearly two minutes of hammering, Tóth repeatedly shouted in Italian: ‘Io sono Gesù Cristo, sono Gesù Cristo!’ Shortly after the incident, insisting on speaking English, he declared to the authorities: ‘You want to kill me. Kill me, but I am Jesus Christ, and if you murder me, I go directly to heaven.’35 Interviewed in prison some weeks later, Tóth did not retract his claims, although he added several new details. Speaking in the first person as Christ himself, Tóth stated that he personally chose Michelangelo to carve the Pietà and that, in making the divinely inspired work, ‘le sue mani erano guidate da me’ (‘his hands were guided by me’). He added, still in the persona of Christ: ‘La statua della Pietà è mia [. . .] io l’ho fatta ed io posso distruggerla’ (‘The Pietà statue is mine [. . .] I made it and I can destroy it’).36 With these statements,

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Tóth cunningly assumed a dual identity, quite literally taking the place of Michelangelo mutilating one of his own sculptures. He even claimed a prophetic origin for the surname Buonarroti – ‘è bene sia rotto’ (‘well-broken’) – to establish the ultimately redemptive quality and inevitability of his attack. As the Michelangelo-Christ figure, Tóth became an instrument of God’s will and, by extension, so did his hammer, a stunning manifestation of the DemiurgeHephaestus figure. Just as Michelangelo’s hammer was once guided by angels, so it is again, but this time as a manifestation of God’s anger.37 The smashing of the Pietà was both tragic and bizarre. The mutilation of Mary’s face, in fact, remains among the most disturbing images, a silencing of her radiant piety that speaks volumes. The latent power of the Pietà as a mythical icon was suddenly disclosed through the violent and primitive assault of the hammer. More than fostering creation or destruction, it became a radical tool for iconoclasm and it left the world speechless.38 Concealed within the popular narrative of Tóth’s apparent insanity, however, is his entirely rational choice of tool. Not only does the hammer symbolize the dual capacity of creation/destruction and hence transgression/redemption, its decisive association with making sound magnifies its hidden capacity to produce silence. This appeared in the shock and stupor of the world, that of Pope Paul IV, who solemnly descended minutes afterward from his private chambers, and the disturbing calmness of Tóth himself once apprehended. And finally, in the official account of the Pietà restoration published by the Vatican, silence appears when the attacker goes unnamed, as does the content of his exclamations while hammering – amounting to a veritable damnatio memoriae on the part of the church, a silencing of that which cannot be said.39 Michelangelo’s hammer tapped the knee of Moses, who would not speak, offering an enduring stillness; he found refuge in the cavernous white mountains of Carrara, which rang with hammer blows; and near the end of his life, he hammered into silence the humble Urbino, who was thereby finally freed from the expectation that the Pietà would ever be finished. In the mystifying events of that Pentecost Sunday, Tóth’s actions loudly amplified Michelangelo’s now absent hammer, the instrument of refuge for generations of admirers, connoisseurs and fascinated scholars. To speak of a hammer as fashioning silence somehow captures these strange negations, where the audible action of the hammer creates both sound and silence at the same time.

8 Making silence: Modes of emptiness in Iberian art and architecture Ross Jenner

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ouis Kahn ‘used the word “Silence” for the unmeasurable’, for that ‘which is not yet’.1 Likewise, void is a figure of potentiality. Galician poet José Àngel Valente wrote of the Catalan painter Antoni Tàpies: to create is to generate a state of readiness, in which the first thing created is . . . an empty space. For all that the artist creates is perhaps the space of creation. And in the space of creation there is nothing (so that something can be created in it). The creation of the nothing is the absolute principle of all creation.2 Valente then quoted the Sevillian poet, Antonio Machado: ‘God said, let the nothing appear. And he raised his right hand to hide his eyes. And the nothing was made.’3 A profound interest in the potentiality of artistic space was a key concern of twentieth-century thinking. Entering through the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé, space as void became an essential element of modernist art, architecture, much continental philosophy, and the music of John Cage. It was Cage who equated emptiness with silence in space and time – as the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz, noted of him: ‘Music invents silence, Architecture invents space.’4 In Cage’s book, Silence, as anticipated by Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès, ‘the blank, white page becomes a metaphor for silence, with variation in typeface, text density and style of paragraph, creating a visual dialectic with this silence’.5 Cage himself insisted: ‘There is no such thing as an empty space 99

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or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.’6 Nevertheless, if pure silence is unattainable, a silence can at least be made manifest and ‘the artist who creates silence or emptiness must produce something dialectical: a full void, an enriching emptiness, a resonating or eloquent silence’.7 Such thinking is prior to the simple binaries of figure-ground and solid-void. It offers the possibility of re-examining the first moment of creation where everything is possible and nothing yet has actually happened, a space of becoming. For Valente, ‘the void is that space where the other can be manifested: the very space of creation’.8 Spatiality may be most manifest when space is unoccupied. The questions that arise, then, through the works of the sculptors Jorge Oteiza and Eduardo Chillida and the architects Alejandro de la Sota, Alberto Campo Baeza and the brothers Aires Mateus examined here, is how to make space a sensory experience, how to make void palpable? By its nature, silence is elusive, intangible – how then to evoke silence through the material?

Stereotomy Architecturally, the creation of space by emptying, excavating, subtracting, cutting solids or cutting space from solids contrasts with the notion of a spatial continuum made by addition, armature, framing and jointing.9 This distinction between stereotomic and tectonic modes of making was probably first made by Cornelis van de Ven in his book Space in Architecture.10 There, Van de Ven read the first couplet of Chapter 11 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching – which refers to the assemblage of spokes that constitutes a wheel – as a description of ‘tectonic form’. Turning to the second couplet, he then related the empty space created by hollowing out a lump of clay to ‘stereotomic form’.11 In effect, Van de Ven interpreted Lao Tzu’s different types of construction by connecting two of Gottfried Semper’s Four Elements. One is a process of addition, the other of subtraction. The latter, the interplay between solid and void, presence and absence, might be termed design by erasure – that is, configuring void by clearing, excavating, freeing, stripping and ridding space from solids. Naum Gabo, the émigré Russian Constructivist, once made a pair of cubic models, one that appeared as a solid mass and the other as an open object with top and bottom braced apart by two intersecting vanes. For him, this was an opposition between (presumed) ‘old-fashioned’ stereotomy and modern tectonic construction.12 And yet, stereotomic approaches have endured to form a rich seam within recent and contemporary architectural practices where the tectonic is no longer privileged. These characteristically involve

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hollowing, clearing and excavating solids to open voids that are understood in terms of a fertile emptiness, offering a potentiality analogous to that of silence. Theorist Manuel de Prada notes that ‘in the stereotomic mode, the loss of constructive reason may be compensated by an increased spatial expression’.13 Here, the hollow reverberates and resonates, even in silence. Alberto Campo Baeza, contrasting stereotomic with tectonic architecture, proposes that the former be understood to be one in which gravity is transmitted in a continuous way, in a continuous structural system where constructive continuity is complete. It is massive architecture, stony, heavy. One that sits on the earth as if it were born from it. It is an architecture that seeks light, that perforates its walls so that light might enter it. It is the architecture of the podium, the basement. That of the stylobate. It is, in short, the architecture of the cave.14 Hence, Baeza proceeds to read the vast cuboid void of his Caja General of Granada as ‘a large stereotomic box, where, in the manner of the Pantheon in Rome, there is a decided continuity of enclosure from vertical to horizontal’.15 Curiously, for him a trabeated system of massive structural skylights, an impluvium of light, becomes a new version of dome with oculus. The work of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who trained as an architect and defined himself as an ‘architect of the void’, offers a distinction between a caged void, made by forging and jointing, and an excavated void.16 Chillida’s iron pieces, from the 1950s on, bristle like knives, spears and pitchforks, piercing space and eventually becoming anvils, tongs, pincers and the famous ‘wind combs’ of the esplanade at San Sebastián (1977) grasping at ungraspable oceanic airs. However, through a long series of alabaster pieces developed from 1965 onwards, he discovered something more intimate: the void born within blocks by the excavation of matter, in which it is as if the stone were irradiated by light from within. In these solids, he introduced cubic and prismatic hollows and carved small labyrinths, chambers and galleries. In some works, the void diminishes to a minimum to produce a powerfully charged interstitial space, like that which opens between clenched fingers or teeth. Perhaps, however, the excavated void flourishes only when it can be imagined as inhabited, in the Mendi Huts for example, or when perceived from inside, as intended in the sculptor’s great controversial and unrealized Tindaya project.17 While acoustically one enhances the shrill shriek of the wind, the other proposes a reverberant silence. It is in enclosed reverberant spaces, inordinately sensitive to sound, in which a pin might be heard to drop, that silence is at its most potent.

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Obviously, the architecture treated here is not all excavated physically like rock-cut tombs, temples or dwellings, but may be so metaphorically – as indeed is the case with some of the sculpture. Shifting between material and non-material, the works I will examine establish an endlessly intriguing rapport, play, and reversal of mass and space, fullness and emptiness, presence and absence, what is and what is not. These unsettled containers pose the questions of how to make the void visible and how to voice the void.

Solid and/or void? In the brothers Aires Mateus’s House in Brejos de Azeitão (2000–2003), a former winery south of Lisbon, a double-height central volume was converted into a house, the new programme inserted without evident change on the outside. Within, the ground floor walls are thickened. All the auxiliary spaces, stairs, kitchen, storage and toilets are pochés.18 Upstairs, vertiginously – impossibly – balanced on the brink of the perimeter gallery are nine white, apparently solid, cubes suspended in the overall box. Cubes are stable forms in themselves yet, as dice, fall. Here, they are inhabitable private areas: bedrooms, bathrooms and a studio. Threatening the overall volume, they are an invasion of cuboid solids, an extreme of anti-hollowing. The force of the intervention derives from the unmitigated contrast between excavated concavities and invasive cuboid masses – even if, when viewed at the upper level, these solids are found to be hollow receptacles. A monument of minimalist art, Tony Smith’s 6 x 6 x 6 ft steel cube, Die (1958), hovering a fraction above the ground, alludes to the singular of dice. But it also – as its title and dimensions imply – resonates with the upright body and horizontally with the emptiness of death, even if the cube itself is not demonstrably hollow. Art historian Joseph Masheck has likened it to Albrecht Dürer’s 1520s sketch of a box with uplifted lid, whose interior is drawn as visible as if this cube – which yet still casts a shadow – were transparent.19 Both are different ways of indicating that apparently solid cubes are voided. Since dice are normally solid, how, except by reference to death, do we know Die is empty?20 The intrigue here, as with much of Aires Mateus’s work, is that, though coded as solid, cubes can nevertheless be intuited as hollow – as, for example, in their Home for the Elderly in Alcácer do Sal (2004– 2010). Rough-stacked, with all the solidity and unity of a cyclopean wall, it is nevertheless clear that the cuboid solids alternating with voids that compose this building are not actually solid but perfectly hollow. Except in the case of tombs and monuments, architecture tends not to deal with massive volumes of purely solid material. Cubes and cuboids are things to enter and exit. In the hands of Aires Mateus, they are objects endowed with

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FIGURE 8.1 Aires Mateus, Casa en Brejos de Azeitão, 1999–2000. Photo by author.

voids, volume carriers. In the flickering reversals of solid and void in their work, paradoxical things emerge that come close to minimalist practice. Take, for example, Smith’s description of his sculptures, in which he commented that the ‘voids are made up of the same components as the masses . . . If you think of space as a solid, they [the sculptures] are voids in that space’.21 Similarly, Carl Andre defined a thing as ‘a hole in a thing it is not’.22

Oscillation Paradoxes cannot be stabilized. Similarly, the perpetual oscillation Aires Mateus open at the core of their practice energizes and directs their projects. The built dialectic of their work involves an intimate, simultaneous and

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unsettling coexistence of regular, crystalline solids and hollow receptacles. The brothers challenge us to think the contradictory – first, to see what we do not see, void, and then to think solid and void together. The works poke holes in what is taken for granted by turning attention to the unnoticed. Emptiness becomes content. De-familiarization, alienation even, dis-occupation happen when the unnoticed medium of empty space is unexpectedly foregrounded. The works also remind us that we exist in air. We have hollows in our chest. We breathe. Finding balance in the fragility of vacillation, Aires Mateus’s works concern the potential for spaces to swell and shrink in a spatial ‘respiration’. This is implied, for example, both in their presentation of house plans, which highlight the reversibility of black and white (effects already anticipated by Chillida) and in their perforation, venting and puncturing of walls, as in their Lisbon Central Library and Municipal Archive project (2006). There is not only a breathtaking hollowing but breath itself, inhalation and exhalation animating solid bodies – an ambivalence, that is, an in-betweenness that cannot quite be turned into objecthood. Chillida, we find, also spoke of the relation between form and breath: Space? Sculpture is a function of space. I do not talk about space outside the shape surrounding the volume and the living forms, but the space generated by forms that live within them and it is the more effective the more hidden it acts. You could compare it with the breath that makes them swell and shrink back to form, which opens the space of vision in them, inaccessible and hidden from the outside world. For me, this is not something abstract, but a reality as bodily as the volume that encompasses it.23 This is close to Aires Mateus’s practice, which not only concerns inhabiting a solid or wall like a poché, but also potential oscillations of solid and void, convexity and concavity. In their work, solid bodies are animated by inhalation and exhalation.24 Oscillation, moreover, brings rhythms into play and a ludic element appears: design as an alternation of opposites like the on/off of game boards. There is a flutter between presence and absence, found and lost, secret and manifest, emergence and inhumation. In Aires Mateus’s competition project for the Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo (2002), for example, plates alternate, suggesting mastaba-like mounds and sunken courtyards. The overall horizontality of conception gives the impression of a board game fused with a necropolis. Oscillation, from the Latin oscillum, originally referred to something aerial, the swinging of little masks, little mouths, in the wind.25 The oscillations at work here may also be conceptualized in maritime terms as ebb and flow. This is a coastal architecture with coastal forms: shells and their sonority;26

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allusions in the Hyatt Park Hotel project, Dublin, to the Giant’s Causeway in the north of Ireland; elsewhere, references to Tiberius’s Sperlonga grotto; the Baiae Temple of Mercury; the Serapeum at Hadrian’s Villa; and labyrinths in many other works. New possibilities for production open here, just as the archaic reverberates in these interior hollows.

Clearing-away Chillida realizes the spaces of his later works by extractive processes: carving, excavating, cutting away, subtracting, erasing, freeing and clearing from closed solids.27 As with his elder compatriot, Jorge de Oteiza, the voiding of material and of closure is the essence of the work. Chillida’s collaboration in 1969 with Martin Heidegger coincided with the latter’s definition of space as clearing-away (räumen). In his essay ‘Art and Space’, handwritten on lithographic stones to accompany Chillida’s litho-collages, Heidegger, in accordance with the Grimm brothers’ dictionary definition, traced the word for space (Raum) back to räumen,28 meaning to clear away, to rid, to free from wilderness, to make room for (einräumen). Thus, as has been noticed perhaps only by Valente,29 Heidegger’s principal conception of space in this essay is precisely the same as Chillida’s, one of clearing-away. For Heidegger, the clearing that is freed is not simple emptiness, but the potential of space to be filled. Emptiness is space that may either receive or contain. It denotes a condition of preparation for gathering. The verb leeren, to empty, emerges in the act of clearing as lesen, to gather/collect. The opposites belong together, mutually but mutely. Clearing-away as a condition creates potentiality and relationship, as opposed to the Cartesian notion of space as geometric extension, which detached entities might simply occupy. Spatiality, moreover, does not precede our being-in-the-world: rather, human beings give space to the world. As the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz put it: Space is not outside us nor is it merely an extension: it is that in which we exist. Space is a where. It surrounds and sustains us; at the same time, we sustain and surround it. We are the support of that which supports us and the limit of what limits us. We are the space in which we are.30 For Heidegger, being-in-the-world and its disclosure is an event – that there is something is a revealing, an opening and a freeing. Space makes room, gives space – space spaces as an event. The ‘special character of clearing away’ is to be found ‘in the grounding of locality’.31 At one point Chillida writes: ‘nothing would be possible without that rumour of limits and the space that allows them’.32 Similarly, Heidegger, arguing that

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making-present begins from limits, defines categories of artistic space, finding that the forming of space happens by demarcation as setting up an inclosing and excluding border. Herewith, space comes into play. Becoming occupied by the sculptured structure, space receives its special character as closed, breached and empty volume. A familiar state of affairs, yet puzzling.33 For Oteiza, Chillida and Heidegger, there is a hidden dimension portrayed but withheld, invisible but without which nothing could take shape. ‘In clearingaway’, noted Heidegger, ‘a happening at once speaks and conceals itself. This character of clearing-away is all too easily overlooked. And when it is seen, it always remains still difficult to determine.’34 In dialogue with Martín de Ugalde, Chillida reiterated this difficulty: [C] Of course, the fish will also not ask any questions about the water in which it lives and for which it lives, nor about the oxygen that it contains and that the fish breathes. [U] It’s too close, it’s too Everything, to notice. [C] Clearly. In the same way as man before the enigmatic reality of space; and that is why we are trying to explain the inexplicable, at least, still. [U] What man has not yet come to understand. [C] Yes, and on this that he does understand man will be asking and always wondering . . . Well it is at this level of things, these problems of space around a form, say at the level of positive space, negative space and great space that spans all spaces, right? . . . around these problems is where we come to pose the problem of space in a generic and very acute way around ‘place’. [U] These are the concepts that touch the text of Heidegger . . . [C] Yes, and at a very precise level, but difficult to understand (difícil de comprender).35 Moreover, in Chillida’s work clearing-away is in search of intimacy. He writes: ‘then, through the tributes I made to Jorge Guillén after his death, relying on his statement, “how deep is the air”, I started to place myself inside rocks, rocks with spaces tucked into the stone . . .’ 36 This remarkable phrase from one of the illustrious Spanish poet’s verses with which Chillida entitled a work reflects the sculptor’s attitude toward space. Chillida gives silence an architectonic image and thereby ‘gives silence a form, a physical structure. In

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sculpture, silence would correspond to empty spaces.’37 Air, moreover, was for him as much a material in sculpture and in architecture as stone, metal or timber, particularly when it shaped the solid around it.38 Indeed, the main façade of the Gobierno Civil de Tarragona (1957) by the Galician architect Alejandro de la Sota, who was familiar with Oteiza’s works, anticipates Chillida’s mode of excavation.39 ‘The simplicity of the abstraction which the building presents is direct’, notes architect and painter Juan Navarro Baldeweg: it corresponds to an image formulated in a single blow, it is a fast appearance closer to Malevich than to Mondrian. In contemporary architecture, we will meet with difficulty an object so iconically specified, so hypnotic. It is a figure of presence like three beats of a drum aroused by the spontaneous encounter with our looking.40 Thus encountered, this ‘figure of presence’ might equally be characterized as three beats of silence. De la Sota saw in Chillida a degree of abstraction that tolerates ‘silent music’ (musica callada), a title Chillida, in fact, had taken from St John of the Cross, who proposed the metaphor of inaudible music as spiritual silence sounding within one’s soul.41 Paz later noted:

FIGURE 8.2 Alejandro de la Sota, El Gobierno Civil de Tarragona. Competition 1956, built 1959–1963. Photo by Carme Ribes Moreno, 2013. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Govern_Civil.jpg

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Like the Silent Music of the Spanish mystic, Chillida’s forms speak – and say nothing. They speak the dual reality of the universe, the mutations and variations engendered by the never-ending amorous battle between form and space. Chillida’s sculptures tend neither in one direction nor another; they say that the universe is dual, war and harmony.42 This duality for Chillida was only partial, since he had ‘the impression that it is speed that separates matter from the spirit, that duality that has been the constant that man has been maintaining for so many centuries, and with the names that are’.43 Thus, he saw matter as slow spirit and spirit as very fast matter. Whereas Heidegger understood space as clearing-away (and allied to Lichtung, glade/clearing) and truth as dis-closure (alétheia),44 Oteiza emphasized the notion of dis-occupation (desocupación). This he founded on

FIGURE 8.3 Jorge Oteiza, El Mirador Mirando, 1958 [from the series ‘Cajas Metafísicas or Cajas Vacías’], Artium Museum Square, Vitoria. Photo by Zarateman, 2010. Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vitoria_-_ Artium_13.JPG

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his understanding of the megalithic cromlech as an empty standing stone circle. Oteiza could argue, therefore, that ‘the whole process of prehistoric European art finishes in the transcendent void of the empty space of the neolithic Basque cromlech’.45 By ‘dis-occupation’ Oteiza meant less the idea of leaving something empty by hollowing than ‘shattering the neutrality of empty space’.46 He distinguished unoccupied space from dis-occupied space, only the latter being ‘the result of a treatment of space that reveals “emptiness” ’.47 Emptiness is made and activated by this very act, an outstanding example being his Homage to Mallarmé (1958). Oteiza’s shift from figuration to spare abstract hollows concluded with his Empty Boxes and Metaphysical Boxes (1958–59), objects that show loss. In such works, his void-cromlech activates space by activating emptiness, making absence manifest. Mass is corroded, whittled down and atrophied, as void takes over the work. Exterior space penetrates into the limits of the sculpture and merges with it, leaving only imprints of a laborious process of subtraction and elimination. Carlos Martí Arís writes: the void generated by Oteiza’s sculpture is permeated by mystery, charged with questions, and the viewer is posed in front of it with a stance of expectation, trying to wrench a reply from it, which the sculpture keeps silent. The silence is however absorbing and friendly. Oteiza says: ‘for the statue I seek an empty solitude, an open spatial silence, which man can occupy spiritually.’48

Affects Heidegger’s extraordinary intuitions concerning space appear to be a generalized proposition of space making in art without mention of specific affects. Nevertheless, there is an undertone of inexplicable mystery and difficulty that stretches from the introductory epigram, taken from Aristotle’s Physics (‘ “it appears, however, to be something overwhelming and hard to grasp, the topos” – that is, place-space’),49 to the phrase on clearing-away, mentioned above – ‘this character of clearing-away is all too easily overlooked. And when it is seen, it always remains still difficult to determine.’50 Then, there are the questions: ‘In what manner space is, and whether a Being in general can be attributed to it, remains undecided.’51 Immediately following this he raises the question of awe: Space – does it belong to the primal phenomena at the awareness of which men are overcome, as Goethe says, by an awe to the point of anxiety? For behind space, so it will appear, nothing more is given to which it could be

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traced back. Before space there is no retreat to something else. The special character of space must show forth from space itself.52 The works treated here are concerned less with representation than experience. How then might auras or atmospheres of such voiding and freeing be felt? How to characterize creations of space whose key role is to make us step outside ourselves to apprehend space, by making us aware that we have not always consciously been in space yet are always already of it? Silence, moreover, involves a certain hush. Of the oscillation of aspiration and expiration, Gaston Bachelard observed: the lips can remain motionless. Then it is really breath that speaks, and the breath that is the primary phenomenon of our silence. Listening to this barely audible breath, we can understand how different this is from the taciturn silence characterised by pinched lips.53 In potentially reverberant spaces, the tendency is to hush. Silence here, as also between individuals, has the capacity to keep things open. Silences leave worlds in suspense.54 Documenting her collaboration with and understanding of Chillida, the poet Clara Janés entitled one of her books La indetenible quietud (The Unstoppable Stillness). Already implicit in the ‘unstoppable’ is a force beyond stillness, tranquility or serenity, even as it embraces them. This force is a movement of penetration, an ever-increasing opening inwards ‘into a numinous place of silence’.55 In Chillida’s alabaster pieces, it is clear that he preferred this stone for its inherent translucency whereby matter seems to become immaterial – as in the five versions of Homage to Goethe (1977), in which light conveyed though passages shimmers in crystal cells, as if air were ‘slowed’ to the point of solidity. In Homage to the Sea II (1979), alabaster becomes solid foaming water, excavated in turn into waves. In one of her poems, Janés writes of ‘transparente balbucir / geometrías de cristal’ (transparent babbling / crystal geometries).56 Alabaster, here, argues Candelas Gala, ‘corresponds to a type of primordial language preceding any semantic layer imposed by time and usage. It also conveys the mystical character of Chillida’s and Janés’ work’.57 Chillida’s works do not necessarily convey any single affect, they are complex – but, according to Paz, they are the home of space and are inhabited by one sole, plural being. Chillida calls it ‘inner space’, but it could also be called emptiness or god or spirit or logos or proportion. It bears all names and no name. It is the invisible interlocutor he has been confronting since he began to create.58

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This ‘inner space’, which only for the sake of brevity I confine to the single word ‘void’, appears as a founding act along the lines of Heidegger’s räumen. For this reason, Valente considered that Chillida’s work is not situated at a point of fleeting equilibrium of contrary factors, a point where, for an instant, totality and emptiness may coexist, but instead at a point where both are fused definitively, in the totality of emptiness, in the absolute compliance of light in fulfilling the visible.59 Here, experiencing the interpenetration of emptiness and a light-filled world takes us close to states like awe and wonder. Wondering, thaumazein, as is clear from Plato, is not only amazement and astonishment but also puzzlement, confusion, perplexity, aporia, bewilderment, stupefaction, the vertiginous and being lost. Such would have been the effect of the sublime inner void of Chillida’s Tindaya project. Here he intended to create a large empty space within a mountain and that is for all men . . . To empty the mountain and create three communications with the outside: with the moon, with the sun and with the sea, with that unattainable horizon.60 To speculate on this project, then, by attuning to the plans, sections, models and renderings of what might have been: one enters a sculpture that is, uniquely, a pure hollow via a dromos, an opening or mouth to and from the sea into a space illuminated by eyes, occuli, to sun and moon. The core is a 50 x 50 x 50 metre cube, our final cube – or, rather, anti-cube – of pure void. Chillida has converted an art form in which space is occupied into an art form of clearing-away. One enters a gaping chasm. The jaw drops in incomprehension. There is a breach, a yawning, a gaping, both in the work and in the beholder who reacts to it. ‘Gape’ means to ‘open the mouth for wonder’.61 Etymologically, gape, gap, gob and gab are cognate – they refer to the mouth. Moreover, as Mary-Jane Rubenstein recognized in citing Charles Darwin on the topic of awe, ‘widely open eyes and mouth are universally understood as expressions of surprise or astonishment’.62 ‘As with the sublime’, writes Gernot Böhme, ‘the experience of silence is . . . connected with the sensing of one’s own lostness in space.’63 Some might understand the works, barely touched upon in this chapter, in terms of a normative figure-ground Gestalt. However, released from schematic closure, the ground, the blank, that is to say, silence, must be understood as pre-ground, empty void, no-thing, nothing, or the air, breath or whatever precedes, prefigures, accompanies and grants making – and this is what is most bewildering of all.

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9 On becoming petrified: The erotic gaze in architectural conception Carolina Dayer

A person turning to stone is usually bad, while a stone coming to life is desirable. But perhaps it is the confusion of the two realms that is really, and unavowedly, attractive.1 BARBARA JOHNSON, PERSONS AND THINGS

T

he myth of the irresistible charms of Medusa, which condemned her to a life of seduction, turning men into stones, holds empathetic parallels with architectural conception. Different versions of the myth surrounding the erotic and terrifying figure help elucidate the act of petrification as analogous to the materialization of architectural ideas. In Hesiod’s Theogony, Medusa is presented as a mortal with a ‘woeful fate’. We first find her lying on a ‘soft field amid spring flowers’ with Poseidon2 – she was apparently a young and beautiful woman prior to her transformation and was frequently portrayed as such in other texts and iconography.3 Under this plot lineage, she is often personified as both beautiful and wise but also terrifying and deadly.4 In Ovid’s telling in the Metamorphoses, before Medusa is transformed into a hideous Gorgon, she is an enchanting maiden until raped by the sea-god. He writes: She was most beautiful in form, and the envied hope of many suitors. And there was no part of her more attractive than her hair: I learned that from someone who said that had seen her. The ruler of the sea, Neptune, is said to have raped her in the temple of Minerva. The daughter of Jupiter turned 113

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FIGURE 9.1 Bronze ornament from a chariot pole, c. 1st–2nd century AD (Rogers Fund, 1918).

away and hid her chaste face in her aegis; but the deed was not unpunished. She turned the hair of the Gorgon into ugly snakes.5 Medusa’s gaze is not only frightening, but acts upon whoever makes eye contact with her, resulting in their petrification. This transformation into stone has a deeply ambiguous character – while it was, on one hand, an effect of horror, it could also be thought of, on the other, as an outcome of the experience of transcendent beauty. So, Lucian, the satirist and rhetorician writing in the second century CE, tells us that ‘The beauty of the Gorgon, inasmuch as it is most powerful and that it deals with the most vital aspects of the soul, drives the beholders senseless and makes them speechless, so that, as the myth indicates and people say, they were turned into stone, from astonishment’.6 This double-sided character is reflected in the belief that ‘two drops of blood from the Gorgon were equally powerful, and that while one could be deadly, the other one had the powers of bringing healing effects to the diseased’.7 In addition to this duality, Medusa holds the powers of the life continuum: birth, death and regeneration. It is after Perseus’s task and success in finding and killing her that the decapitated Gorgon, as if she had been pregnant, gives

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birth from her powerful blood to the beautiful winged horse Pegasus and his brother Chrysaor.8 The former is usually associated with divine inspiration and poetry, while the latter is a warrior and the carrier of a golden sword. Through these twin offspring, Medusa again addresses a duality that is concerned with the human creative condition. While Medusa’s story is one of creative and destructive actions in an erotic process of transformation and evolution occurring through the invisible forces of the gaze, it also shows, in its embodiment, the erotic as a force capable of producing speechlessness and stupefaction. In other words, the experience of the erotic goes beyond understanding and for a few seconds elevates the self to a state of ecstasy qualified as loud and silent, moving and paralyzing. Certainly, the capacity to transform desire into stone is one that has characterized the practice of the architect. The specific role of the gaze in the materialization of such desire poses a difficult and extensive historical project. Vitruvius tells us that one of the qualities the architect must possess is the capacity to see well, and he appeals to the Greek notion of logos opticos, or reasoned sight.9 According to him, the architect must also make sure that his constructions please the eye. In Book III, Chapter III, ‘On the Elevation of Temples’, Vitruvius elaborates on the Greek notion of entasis to explain the adjustments the architect must make to the building elements so the eye will meet them in a pleasurable encounter.10 The role of the erotic gaze in the materialization of architecture is generative and transformational. In this chapter, then, I will explore the myth of Medusa as a paradigm via which to reflect upon the active force of the gaze in the embodiment of architectural ideas through the medium of drawing.

Stupefied bodies We wish to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around these buildings and gardens.11 FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, THE GAY SCIENCE, 1882

The relationship between erotic embodiment and that of becoming speechless in architecture has primarily been evident in documents recording the experience of places. We find a clear example in Poliphilo, the dreaming character of the late-fifteenth-century architectural treatise the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.12 Liane Lefaivre has pointed out that as Poliphilo walks in the gardens and buildings, he experiences architectural voluptas in the most intense ways.13 He is, the author of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili writes, often ‘enraptured and captured’ by the architecture, and so ‘conquered and occupied’ with what he experiences that he cannot think of anything else.14 In one

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instance he observes a pyramid in ‘stupor’. In another, he ‘loses his senses’ while experiencing a temple with ‘pleasure and delight’. Often he is so intensely ‘stupefied’ that he feels as if he is ‘separated from his soul’. A particular obelisk described in the narrative is made of ‘such amount of marvels’ that he feels ‘insensate with stupor at its contemplation’.15 The heightened words of utter sensuality and voluptuousness that the treatise uses to describe Poliphilo’s emotions often imply, as we see, a state of stupefaction and perplexity. An earlier instance of the presentation of the role of the gaze in an erotic context appears in a celebrated tale related by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.16 This tells of a young woman who, before her lover departs on a journey, fixes the profile of his face upon a wall by tracing his shadow, which is cast upon the wall by a lamp. The image of the youth, now belonging within the wall, represents a terrifying future absence as well as an eternal captured presence. The maid’s father, Butades the potter, on seeing the line drawing, fills it in with clay and then fires the piece to further harden its existence. Pliny attributes the origin of sculpture to this event. In the story, representation is outlined as an act embodying a desire that, in its longing, makes the absent present. Architectural conception, I argue, is driven by the same principle. Much like Medusa’s gaze, architectural desires are petrified as architects gaze and are gazed at by the work they draw and erase, make and destroy. However, unlike Pliny’s story in which the subject pre-exists its representation, architecture remains undetermined before its conception through drawing and bringing it to visibility results in exalted feelings of pleasure. The erotic force that Medusa ultimately embodies can be associated with a state of stupor, a word that is derived from the Latin stupire, which means ‘to harden, to become thick or solid’.17 The feeling can thus be associated with stiffening – as if one has reached death and yet is still alive, experiencing it. In a state of stupor, the suspension of one’s sensibility creates numbness and awe. Stupor, as a condition in which one experiences a kind of somatic solidification, is perhaps the ultimate embodiment of architecture – a condition of becoming-architectural. As an affect of the erotic, stupor bridges the soft origins of our bodies and the stiff essence of architecture. Its embodiment becomes defining and revealing not only in the experience of edifices, but also in their conception. In his book Built Upon Love, Alberto Pérez-Gómez examines and discusses the intertwining of creative forces with the erotic.18 Falling in love with one’s work perhaps is not an egotistic practice as it is sometimes superficially thought to be, but a way of conceiving architecture from within the inherent erotic qualities of being. Such process of creation contains, much as in Medusa’s shifting forms, a rhythmic change of emotions, states and outcomes.19

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Erotic drawings A certain fire flares up; it is conducted through the hand, flows to the picture and there bursts into a spark, closing the circle whence it came: back into the eye and farther.20 PAUL KLEE, THE THINKING EYE, 1961

On 4 February 1976 at a lecture at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), Carlo Scarpa described the role of erased marks in his architectural drawings. Stressing that strong paper better hosts erased marks, he compared the traced memory of lines to the swirly nature of architects’ thinking. By creating a mnemonic machine for remembering, the architect would face his forgotten thoughts through the gentle presence of lines engraved within the body of the paper. Elaborating upon this, he compared the act of remembering to a form of encounter. Such an event, he explained, emerges from an acute intuition that is comparable to the thoughts aroused while staring at the hair of a woman.21 On repeated occasions Scarpa proclaimed: ‘I draw in order to see.’22 To him, drawing was a vital practice to conceive the project. Usually beginning with measured and light construction lines, the architect slowly and silently proceeded to mark the sheet of paper. The moments of drawing were focused and quiet, as some of his assistants have attested.23 Under this mood, he sketched thoughts, wrote notes and very often drew the bodies of voluptuous women, mostly naked.24 The drawing became quickly populated with all kinds of marks and characters. During this process, once he recognized a solution for an architectural detail or fragment of the project, he accentuated those lines with colour and graphite, adding significant pressure on the sheet of paper. But often, as he remarked, he would decide to erase what he had apparently encountered. The process of discovery in his work seems not to be related to the production of certainty, but rather to a pleasure that exists in its erasure. Marking the sheet so strongly left impressions that slowly stiffened and changed the material reality of the medium. Once colour and graphite were removed, the sheet of paper was left with clear indented lines. It is over this field of erased lines that the architect kept on thinking by re-drawing other ideas that seem to forget the previous design through its incorporation within new ones. In the midst of this process of discovery, erasure and continuation, female figures inhabit the interstices of the architect’s imagination. The tension created by attaining a revelation and subsequently submitting it to the act of erasure is perhaps one of the places where stupor – the embodiment of petrification – begins to make itself evident. The obliterated presencing of previously dark lines insinuates a form of working that instigates further realizations where unexpected material and spatial discoveries can emerge. It

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is perhaps not a coincidence that Scarpa’s eraser – a Faber-Castell kneaded eraser, to be precise – has been referred to as ‘the stomach’, as if by swallowing the hard lines of the building they became incorporated by the architect’s own body.25 The externality of Scarpa’s ‘stomach’ works like the externality of his own self in the field of the drawing. In his book, The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion explains the erotic as a creative force impelled by a desire to see. To regard or gaze, he explains, is to hold something under one’s guard, which ‘means to be able to constitute and reconstitute it, after having analyzed its parts, with each part being clear and distinct enough that the gaze takes possession of it without blurriness, or residue’.26 Scarpa’s possession and analysis of the lines he draws entail also their erasure, as if he wants to see what lies behind each drawn trace. The action of the gaze in his drawings seems twofold. On one hand, he creates an elaborate method of seeing and not seeing the drawn architecture. And on the other, the depiction of women gazing at the very same lines he observes, or sometimes staring at him directly, creates a sense of bodily projection that moves from his sight into their bodies, from their bodies into the drawn building and from the drawing back into the architect’s gaze. The presence of women in Scarpa’s drawings, I argue, embodies the architect’s fantasy and belief that only through their bodies, positions and moods can Medusa’s erotic gaze be exerted in the realization of his architectural ideas. Often these women have a frontal relationship to the architect, or else they seem to be gazing at specific architectural details. In other words, Scarpa’s muses mirror the architect’s gaze and also assume the architect’s voice and eyes as they perform in the architectural discourse of the drawing. The female figures are powerful ambassadors of the architect’s desires. As Marco Frascari has pointed out, ‘In Scarpa’s architecture, the human figure is both the subject that produces the buildings sub specie corporis and the object starting from which the building is made’.27 The human body is foundational and generative for his architecture, and the role of the gaze plays a key role in such architectural conceptions. Drawing, an activity theorized by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy as intrinsically pleasurable, in Scarpa’s case gives birth to a realization that once a desired design is grasped it becomes petrified within the paper – first by emphasis and then by erasure.28 Its partial removal and not its elimination anticipates its rebirth in new architectural offspring. Possibly invoking Paul Valéry, Scarpa aligns his passion with the thought that ‘the will is necessary for seeing; and both the end and the means of this willed seeing is the drawing itself’.29 His compulsive practice of purposely delaying the architectural project equates with the intense pleasure embodied within the act of drawing, punctuated periodically by moments of stupor.

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Stupefaction does not arise from within intentionality, but when it is exceeded. On this subject Nancy argues that ‘the moment of tension (and not intention!) in art is privileged, the moment of formative force more than that of the formed work, and that of pleasure desiring more than that of pleasure satisfied’.30 If drawing is a practice of discovery, then the design has to hold a balance between its motivation by the intentions of the architect and the degree to which the drawing comes to speak for itself. Essentially, it is when the drawing speaks the loudest, either when it is strongly marked or strongly erased, that the architect embodies the petrifying silence of a design realization. To realize is a fundamental creative act concerned with the discovery of architecture. Taken in this light, an abundant field of lines, from notes and sketches to highly defined drawings, the acts of erasure that delay or suspend the resolution of the drawing, and the peculiar and abundant presence of women, inhabiting the drawn world of his ideas, constitute Scarpa’s formative force in conceiving architecture.

The embodied gaze The face is a source from which all meaning appears.31 EMMANUEL LEVINAS, TOTALITY AND INFINITY, 1979

In one of the hundreds of drawings that Carlo Scarpa produced for the design of the Brion cemetery chapel, his work on erasure can be clearly noticed. A field of horizontal and vertical parallel lines, which was later erased, was drawn as part of the chapel façade. The marks create a ghostly presence within the drawing that propitiates a sense of depth beyond the external surface of the wall. A pair of round marks within the upper part of the elevation suggests that Scarpa was exploring where to locate the water drains for the chapel roof, which can be attested by two other options he draws within the same elevation and also by his use of the word scarico, which translates as ‘drainage’. The representation of the drains mimics a pair of eyes that seems to be looking downwards. Straight lines that descend obliquely further emphasize the direction of their probable gaze. The sense of depth beyond the field of erased lines immediately appears in connection with what happens on the other side of the wall. Although none of these drains remained in the actual construction, the sense of falling water they invoke did not disappear in the actual building. The formwork, which might be thought of as a built form of erasure since it makes visible a removal, was constructed with vertical wood boards on the wall’s exterior side, while in the interior it was positioned horizontally. The decision to rotate the formwork from horizontal to vertical at this portion of the chapel is not indicated on any of the other drawings.

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FIGUREs 9.2a and 9.2b Chapel elevation (9.2a) and enlarged detail (9.2b), Carlo Scarpa, NR #2573 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa.

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FIGURE 9.3 Diagram by author over fragment of chapel elevation drawing emphasizing eyes and projected lines that the architect drew.

FIGURE 9.4 Chapel exterior concrete wall. Photo by author.

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In the lower part of the same drawing, a series of linear horizontal openings has been drawn in the concrete wall. Behind the horizontal windows at least two human figures – emphasized by their eyes, which are drawn in the same fashion as the drains – faintly peek through the slits. Further pairs of eyes, insinuated by curved portions of body outlines, linger nearby in various locations. Underneath the drawn lines, we encounter a rich field of erased marks that have left indentations in the sheet of paper without any graphite excess. When Scarpa used coloured pencil over these inscribed marks, it passed over the indentations, consequently rendering them more clearly within the tinted surface. Astonishingly, the design of the horizontal openings resembles the very same process of erasure, where there is an alternating rhythm of thinly rendered coloured and white lines. Although formally different, the final design and built work is experientially very similar, where small square windows, when opened, frame and expose fragments of the body in the inside and fragments of the views on the outside. In fact, Scarpa carefully proportions the square openings in relation to the eyes and face of a woman centred within the frames. In the drawing we observe her full face and feel the significance of her eyes. When the windows are closed, the sense of a faint presence on the interior side of the chapel is accentuated through the use of thin alabaster sheets placed on a steel frame to enclose the openings, while from the outside the alabaster conceals all views of the inside. The evident role of vision in the making-solid of ideas through a projected act of embodiment positions the gaze as foundational to the architect’s imagination. Behind one of the tall openings in the wall of the corridor, on the initially mentioned drawing, a female figure appears (see Figure 9.3). Her sinuous and voluptuous presence is contrasted with the rectilinear narrow opening of the concrete wall, which frames her naked body, two parts of which have been highlighted: her eyes and her breasts. She is looking away towards the more undefined area of the drawing, but a line crosses over her gaze and coincides with one of the chapel openings. Slightly further to her right on the same drawing, we see another pair of eyes, this time without a defined body. Two intersecting lines also cut across them, the diagonal one pointing exactly towards the lowest part of the chapel corner window. An additional line projected from an eye in profile located at the right edge of the sheet of paper converges also at that corner. The marks that define the eyes in this drawing point, in all instances, in different directions and are emphasized by horizontal and oblique lines that cross through them, extending onto various parts of the elevation. The eyes are mostly shown in pairs, sometimes looking sideways and sometimes gazing directly outward at the architect – and thus also at us, the viewers. Scarpa’s fantasy and desire to see becomes transferred into narratives of architectural seduction through the very materiality and

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FIGURE 9.5 Chapel elevation (detail), Carlo Scarpa, NR #2573 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa.

pleasure of drawing female figures inhabiting his buildings and, most importantly, creating them. Architects that worked with him – among them Marco Frascari and Guido Pietropoli – acknowledge the importance of the role of vision in his work. As Francesco Dal Co has written of the female forms that inhabit Scarpa’s drawings, ‘the primary reason for their presence lies in the fact these figures are first of all observers, who gaze’.32 He suggests that these figures are not for the purpose of abstract measurement or the scaling of the drawing, as might be the case in the work of other architects. Instead, they are literally active projections of his own body: ‘the ears listen, the eyes see, the hands trace and the task of the architect is to offer to hearing, sight and touch the echo of what has taken place . . .’33 Ultimately, it is a matter of the play of gaze between what he sees, what the characters he creates can see, and what he is able to see through them.

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FIGURE 9.6 Carlo Scarpa, NR #3455 recto. MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma. Collezione MAXXI Architettura, Archivio Carlo Scarpa.

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The erotic realm of Scarpa’s imagination and his disciplined practice of drawing silently worked towards encountering moments of stupor – passionate speechless instants that became petrified in the drawing and eventually realized in the built edifice. With admirable constancy, he permitted different stages and scenarios for the erotic to take place and shape the intercourse of architectural possibilities. In his book Earth and Reveries of Will, Gaston Bachelard dedicates a chapter to ‘Petrifying Reveries’. Through various examples he demonstrates the innate relationship between imagination and matter. He unfolds how dreams of stone evoke pleasurable feelings within our physical bodies and how our bodily imagination naturally seeks solidity. In one example the philosopher recalls Leonardo da Vinci, who ‘advised painters to sustain and at the same time to liberate their imagination by dreaming while gazing at the cracks in a wall’.34 By imagining what is inside and beyond a surface, in other words, through its solidity, imagination opens up via the gaze. This creative exchange occurs in silence while drawing, marked by moments of stupor, a form of intense silence in which the architect experiences the full potential of Medusa’s gaze through a design realization. In a seminal essay on the ethics of the gaze, Ivan Illich exposes its early understanding as being essentially synaesthetic – that is, the gaze acts as both a bodily projection into the world and a holistic apprehension of it.35 Towards the end of the essay he discusses the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who resisted the ‘dominant trends of visualization’ and defended its constitutive condition as embodied. Illich explains Levinas’s concept that ‘my face comes to life from the face of the other’, meaning that, in gazing at the other, I can recognize myself. In Scarpa’s architecture the recognition of the other, as architecture, is mediated through the invention of female figures and faces with eyes and bodies that describe a field of emotional participation between the building and the architect. The embodiment of the other (female figures) through the gaze allows him to create an erotic link between himself and the drawing. In there, moments of stupor emerge through discoveries and are solidified into proposals that in their built form have the power to also make us feel the effects of Medusa’s erotic gaze.

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PART THREE

Practising silence

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10 Silence, paradox and religious topography Christos Kakalis

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s distinct from the total absence of sound, silence is a material condition incorporated in the experience of both architecture and natural landscape. Its occurrence involves a multi-sensory interaction with the environment as it is organically interconnected to the other phenomena taking place in it. In the case of religious topographies, silence becomes important as, on the one hand, its human performance may be part of a meditational technique and, on the other, its atmospheric character usually enhances the sacred qualities of the place. In this context, silence in different religious traditions has been connected to the coexistence of entities that are seemingly antithetical (sound/ muteness, emptiness/fullness, darkness/light), combining space and time in a dynamic whole. This chapter examines the role of silence in religious topography as expressed through the paradoxical interpenetration of polarities. It focuses on the case of Mount Athos, a peninsula in north-eastern Greece that is one of the most important Christian pilgrimage sites and a UNESCO heritage monument since 1986. Herein a male monastic community is organized in different monastic complexes (twenty coenobitic monasteries, sketes, huts and hermitages) practising hesychasm, an ascetic way of life with intense meditational qualities. Hesychasm derives from hesychia, the Greek word for silence and/or tranquillity, and is based on immersion in the continual silent invocation of one phrase: ‘Lord Jesus Christ Son of God have mercy upon me the sinner.’ Silent prayer combined with communal rituals opens a field of ascetic struggles for the Athonites who seek a psychosomatic transformation (transfiguration, as it is called) that is believed to lead to a communication with the divine (theosis). 129

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Polarities and the spatiality of silence Both human and atmospheric silence can appear as a space ready to be filled or as something that fills a specific space in a meaningful way. By human silence, I mean a state that has to do with vocal restraint and by atmospheric silence, a relation to a material condition which, although not soundless, creates a sense of solitude and sensual opening to the surrounding environment. Human and atmospheric qualities of silence are usually combined – something common in Mount Athos, where silent prayer interacts with the silence of the natural landscape and architecture. Silence, especially in the context of religious worship, is usually connected to the realization of the mutual interdependence of entities that are seemingly antithetical: acoustic silence – sound/discourse; nothing – something; emptiness – fullness; darkness – light; movement – stasis. Thus, in different religious traditions, silence has been related to the idea of paradox.1 The role of paradox in worship is mostly related, according to the theologian Matthew Bagger, with ‘cognitive practices’ that are embodied ‘techniques of selftransformation’, which aim to change the individual’s spiritual condition and are theologically related to notions of alienation and union with a cosmic environment. The most common practice for the writer is meditation.2 In religious traditions such as Christianity, Judaism and Islam, the liturgical connotations of paradox are influenced by Neo-Platonic ideas, being part of a ‘self-annihilating’ ‘perpetual martyrdom to God’ or of a mystical or ascetic process, a preparation for a communication with God who remains hidden, a gradual communication with the divine but not identity with it.3 On the other hand, for the so-called ‘eastern’ traditions such as Buddhism and Hinduism, mystical experiences of paradox relate to the reciprocal relationship between the conceptual and the non-conceptual, aiming at a union with a universal principle that may be considered as divine – a holistic divinization, a participation in the divine itself based on the simultaneous coexistence of polarities.4 Acoustic silence is reciprocally interrelated with sound and human discourse. It always carries the possibility of a sound’s birth and, in parallel, sound is always open to its possible silencing.5 For the philosopher Bernard P. Dauenhauer, vocal human silence is actively incorporated in the event of human discourse with silent gaps and phonic utterances being mutually interdependent.6 At the same time, acoustic silence cannot be a totally soundless event. As the cultural critic Susan Sontag argues, ‘one must acknowledge a surrounding environment of sound or language in order to recognize silence. Not only does silence exist in a world full of speech and other sounds, but any given silence takes its identity as a stretch of time being perforated by sound.’7 This silence–sound event is an embodied experience in which body movement, gestures, winks and hints actively contribute to its

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occurrence.8 For the philosopher Martin Heidegger, through ‘letting something be understood’, silence opens a field of meaningful hearing and becomes part of a more authentic existence: the person who is silent can ‘let something be understood’, that is, he can develop an understanding more authentically than the person who never runs out of words. Speaking a lot about something covers things and gives a false impression of clarity to what is understood, that is, the unintelligibility of the trivial.9 An important articulation of silence and listening is found in the distinction between two types of human attunement to sonic atmospheres developed by the philosopher Gernot Böhme: ‘listening as such’ and ‘listening to’ (i.e. attending to an acoustic object emitted from a specific source).10 In ‘listening as such’, silence and listening are combined in an opening to the surrounding context that involves a number of existential qualities: A listening which does not leap over . . . sounds to the sources where they might stem from, listeners will sense . . . sounds as a modification of their own space of being. Human beings who listen in this way are dangerously open: they release themselves into the world and can therefore be struck by acoustic events.’11 This possibility of ‘listening as such’ is therefore diminished when audible elements enter that demand that individuals ‘listen to’ them. ‘Listening as such’ opens a space for a sense of solitude that uncovers conditions of silence in a place. Solitude is something different from loneliness and absolute isolation. Highlighting this distinction in his essay ‘Why do I stay in the provinces’, Heidegger argues for the importance of solitude in our embodied experience of the world: In large cities one can easily be as lonely as almost nowhere else. But one can never be in solitude there. Solitude has the peculiar and original power not of isolating us but of projecting our whole existence out into the vast nearness of the presence of all things.12 The question of solitude is important in the case of Mount Athos as, on the one hand, it is involved in the monks’ individual silent prayer and, on the other, the quite untouched natural landscape opens the individual (both the religious community and visitors) to the experience of solitariness. This interdependence between human and atmospheric acoustic silence and sound/speech plays an important role in different religious traditions. For

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example, based on the realization of the unity of opposites, Zen Buddhism also involves practices in which the dynamic interaction between sound (chanting and sound of musical instruments) and silent meditation contributes to the acquisition of a desired silent listening and synaesthetic immersion in the world.13 For its part, Christian hesychast practice aims at a stillness achieved through the constant silent rhythmical repetition of a phrase, which is also reciprocally interrelated with sonorous events in communal rituals – a silence that involves the regular invocation of twelve words which aims at an inner conversation with God and leads to a simultaneous sense of detachment from and redefined connection with the surrounding world. This is also manifested in Athonite ascetic life, as we will see later in a more detailed way. Besides the polarity between muteness and sound, silence has also been connected to that of emptiness and fullness. In Buddhist religious tradition, emptiness (su¯nyata¯) is considered as the final stage of silent meditation and involves a kind of liberation of both mind and body from logical polarities. According to D. T. Suzuki, ‘Buddhist su¯nyata¯ does not mean vacancy . . . In Buddhist emptiness there is no time, no space, no becoming, no-thing-ness; it is what makes all these things possible; it is a zero full of infinite possibilities, it is a void of inexhaustible contents.’14 This silent emptiness is connected to the realization of boundlessness and attunement to the wider universe that carries endless possibilities of fullness. It is a movement from the internal to the external, a gradual synaesthetic engagement with the world. Void and fullness are thereby dynamically fused.15 Silence is characteristically connected to vision through the interaction between darkness and light. Darkness and the subduing of vision, together with the intensification of our senses of hearing, touch and smell, are often related to atmospheric silence. At the same time, human silence has been related to light, mainly in the forms of meditation and prayer in which the experience of a physical-spiritual illumination plays a key role. In the case of hesychasm, in particular, communion with the divine (theosis) may be followed by the experience of a ‘white light’, an embodiment or physical manifestation of the spiritual illumination of the individual. God is beyond the logical polarity of darkness and light as, according to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘[t]he simple absolute and immutable mysteries of divine Truth are hidden in the super-luminous darkness of that silence which revealeth in secret’.16 The experience of the white, uncreated light – as it is called because of its Godoffered and charismatic appearance – is an embodied communication with this idea. The constant invocation of a phrase creates a sense of stillness that unites with atmospheric silence and darkness, for it is usual for the hesychasts to conduct their personal prayer during the night or in a dark environment. We have to emphasize that although hesychasm may share commonalities with Buddhism and Hindu yoga, it has a different orientation to religious worship.17

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While Buddhism is about transcending the self and uniting with the rest of the universe that might be also fully divine, hesychasm is about transcending the self in order to communicate with the divine but never fully unite with it. Hesychast silence concerns a journey of prayer to the individual’s inner self that can be practised in different ways. It may be individually practised at specific periods of the day, during communal rituals, or in a more spontaneous way. The latter involves the free repetition of the prayer during the diurnal course, something that changes the individual’s perception of his environment, shaping the meaning of art, architecture and natural landscape as it is encountered.18 Silence is part of a process of waiting and preparation – an embodied, vigilant and suspended opening to the stimuli of the environment during which intelligible sounds come to consciousness and senses are fully engaged. This may be related to the idea of Gelassenheit as defined in Heidegger’s ‘Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking’. Often translated as ‘releasement’ and connected for Heidegger to a meditative way of thinking, Gelassenheit also involves a dimension of waiting, a disorientating opening to a possible reception of something that we may meet but cannot know with certainty.19 It is a condition of ‘letting go’ or ‘letting be’ with an intense future orientation, which for the philosopher David Levin may be also related to an open listening to the surrounding environment, a condition of silent release: Gelassenheit clears a ‘neutral’ space for good listening; it situates us in a space of silence that makes it easier to listen well and hear with accuracy; it enables us to hear what calls for hearing with a quieter, more global, and better informed sense of the situation.20 Whereas silence as a mode of Heidegger’s Gelasseneit is closer for Levin to the experience of the empty-fullness of Zen Buddhism,21 in the case of hesychasm the qualities of silent prayer are different, for they seek to express the creation of an inner stillness that is open to conversation with God.22 And while hesychasm aims at the ‘inner prayer of the heart’, the body plays an important role, not only through the prayer techniques but also through its active presence in the world – something emphatically expressed in the case of the monastery, where the monk is at the same time alone and an active member of the community. The emergence of silence in the mutual interdependence of polarities, together with its future-orientated character, is fundamental for understanding the Athonite architecture and natural landscape.23 We must recognize that at times silence can also be experienced as a prohibition, something that, as we will see, happens in Mount Athos as a result of the interaction between the insiders and the outsiders. When silence

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is imposed upon a person, they are confronted with a constraint, distancing them from the place and playing the role of a non-physical barrier. We often find, in places such as libraries or museums, an expectation that visitors will keep quiet and contribute to the preservation of an atmospheric silence that allows different activities to occur without interruption by noise. This is also found in churches where the sacred character of the building, combined with its specific characteristics (scale, lighting, and so forth), calls for silence as an orientation towards an always-open field of individual prayer or communal rituals. Finally, it is important to note that silence – as one of the key practices of the hesychast experience of Mount Athos – is directly connected to the paradoxical combination of positive and negative theologies. Hesychasm is considered to be a path to realize this contradiction, aiming at a communication with God and the experience of the ‘uncreated light’, the white light that – according to the ascetics – can be felt on both material and spiritual levels. The ascetic aims at an embodied realization of the simultaneous completeness and incompleteness of his union with the divine. As we have already remarked, in parallel with his participation in the communal rituals, the individual practises silence in combination with ceaseless prayer, seeking to open a path towards the divine. In her book Silence in the Land of Logos, Silvia Montiglio underlines the difference between the role of silence in ancient Greek religion and the Christian tradition. For Montiglio, in ancient Greece vocal prayer was more important than moments of silence.24 The latter was mainly used as a preparation for vocal prayer or a process of purification of the unfit members of the community.25 By the time of the Christian New Testament, however, silence acts both as a method of prayer and spiritual preparation, and also as a way for Christ to disclose his being. In the narratives of Jesus’s passion, it is stressed that, on several occasions, he maintains silence. In front of Pontius Pilate, for example, he answers the priests’ accusations through a ‘patient silence’ and in the Garden of Gethsemane he silently prays to God, preparing himself for what is to come. While in the Old Testament silence tended to be treated negatively and in connection with powerlessness and death,26 in the New it becomes a positive gesture of Christian worship. As such, it is developed and practised through the fourth century CE by the desert fathers. At the same time, sound and speech always maintained an important role, either through community worship or through the interaction between the ascetics and the inhabitants of the villages near which they practised solitude. Weeping and groaning were also included in the fathers’ embodied prayer.27 The origins of hesychast silent prayer, therefore, go back to the fourth century, although its main period of development was during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries CE. This is the period when the relevant

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psychosomatic techniques also evolved. For hesychast writers of this period such as Nikiphoros the Hesychast, St Gregory of Sinai, and St Kallistos and St Ignatios Xanthopoulos, this technique has three main components: body posture, control of breathing and inner exploration. The ascetic should sit at a low stool, in an almost foetal position, while controlling their breathing – either as a preparatory exercise or in relation to the recitation of the prayer. Moreover, concentration upon the physical heart (its region and its beating) aims at a deeper relationship to God, opening the way to a communion with Him (theosis).28 This posture is related to Old Testament descriptions of the life of the prophet Elijah, who is said to have prayed with his face lowered between his knees. The aim is the ‘constant supervision of the whole psycho-somatic man’ and his transformation. Beyond this seated devotion, the activity of the hesychast is one of continual prayer, even while his body is involved in everyday tasks.29 While traces of the seated technique still exist on Mount Athos, it is not a compulsory one and there have been different attitudes to it in the history of hesychasm.30 Nevertheless, it underlines the importance of the body in hesychast life. Silence as both an atmospheric and human condition is part of this physical-spiritual understanding of ascetic life. Consequently, the theologian Kallistos Ware, discussing the meaning of hesychia, describes different experiences of silence. Having demarcated the outward framework of their spiritual struggles, both hermits and monks seek to ‘confine their incorporeal within their bodily house’, striving to discover ‘the ladder that leads to the Kingdom of God’. On the one hand, the hesychasthermit has to define his spatial relationship with other human beings and seclude himself in places of solitude, such as the caves of Mount Athos’s desert. On the other hand, the monk who is a member of a coenobitic community has the ability to depart from it and practises the silent prayer in his cell.31 A characteristic definition of hesychia that describes this journey of the individual from the exterior to the interior and his heart is given by Ierotheos Vlachos: [Hesychia is] the peace of the heart, the undisturbed state of the mind (nous), the liberation of the heart from the thoughts (logismoi), from the passions and the influence of the environment; it is the dwelling in God. Hesychia is the only way for humans to attain theosis. External quietness is helpful so that humans can reach the noetic hesychia.32 Thus we can speak of three different modes of Athonite hesychast silent prayer depending on the way it is practised: a more ‘structured’ individual one; one shared between the members of a monastic community during rituals; and a freer one practised spontaneously during the course of the whole day. In the case of the first mode, the body of the monk who spends a specific period of time daily only on the invocation of the prayer – a process that usually

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happens during the night and that involves meditational techniques – is relatively static, set in the same position and concentrated on inner stillness. Nevertheless, his environment keeps changing with the fluctuations of the natural light, alterations in temperature, and different intensities of wind and of sounds. Constant invocation of the prayer may result in a sense of detachment from the mundane world, a gradual movement towards the interior of the self and preparation for the possible communion with the divine, something that can be also supported by body posture (foetal, kneeling, prostrations) and breathing. The modes of hesychia illuminate the role of silence in relation to the Athonite topography. Silence demarcates the personal sphere of the monks who prefer quiet places such as the desert or their cells. They try neither to talk nor to hear more words than necessary. Silence is not similarly perceived in all the parts of the peninsula.33 Hence, whereas silence in the desert is intense and mainly atmospheric (mostly connected to ‘natural’ phenomena and for some outsiders even ‘unbearable’), in the case of a coenobitic monastery, silent prayer takes place in a different context, leading to a soundscape in which human and atmospheric silences are dynamically incorporated. Silent prayer is shared between different individuals who seek to constantly practise it. Contemporary practice of hesychast silence on Mount Athos involves a complex combination of solitude, the elimination of sound and sight, and the repetition of prayer. Athonite monks believe that acoustic silence reciprocally relates to an inner understanding of silence leading towards moments of theosis. During these moments the individual ‘goes beyond even the boundaries of its own body’.34 The Athonite monks also use the word ‘grasp’ to describe this state, something that includes a sense of violent/forcible detachment from the mundane/monastic sphere, and underlines the intensity of the experience of the white (uncreated) light. This process is also enhanced by a sense of rhythm through the recitation of the same phrase that leads to a condition of stasis, a vibrating stillness of prayerful journeys towards theosis and the embodied understanding of the coexistence of both positive and apophatic theologies. The ascetic returns back to the mundane sphere transformed. Having already attained a theosis experience makes every next attempt a more directed movement, based on the recollection of a previous illumination. During my field trips, most of the monks of Gregoriou monastery kept silent and tried to avoid any interaction with the visitors by passing in front of them quickly with their heads bowed. During the three years of my research, I observed a decay or gradual loss of silence. For example, during my first trip in 2010 it was common to see a monk alone walking back and forth to the port in prayer; however, by 2012 this was no longer happening, as the monks

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became disturbed by the increasing presence of visitors. Nevertheless, I had the opportunity to hear ascetics reciting the Jesus Prayer while walking along a path. Notably, visitors are still asked to keep quiet while in the courtyard of the monastery, atmospheric silence demarcating its general sonic context. Silence becomes a kind of a language with different intensities that are sensually perceived and communicated in various ways. This condition is changed when an acoustic boundary of silence is crossed, thereby opening the possibility of short conversations between the monks and the visitors or of noisier activities that, when not included in the predefined rituals, may disturb the silent qualities of the monastic life. As the comments above suggest, the conditions of silence are influenced by the presence of visitors, whose numbers have increased greatly since the 1980s. Despite the positive reception of the conditions of silence on the peninsula by a great many of them, quite a few experience difficulties. On one hand, by infringing rules concerning silence in a monastery or by not realizing the importance of the atmospheric silence of the landscape, they add noise to the soundscape of the topography that disturbs the sense of solitude required for silent prayer;35 and on the other, their presence as viewers can erode the character of the sacred topography by transforming events in it into spectacles. Nevertheless, silence is still intensely perceived on Mount Athos, being also part of the experience of the strangers, whether pilgrims or otherwise. The regulations concerning entry to the peninsula and the long Athonite monastic tradition has led to the preservation of an environment that, although recently injured by uncritically executed infrastructural and building developments, is still experienced by outsiders as something very different from our contemporary cities – something coming from the past that even forces visitors to recollect experiential qualities of place that are now lost from their lives. One of them is silence, the atmospheric experience of which infuses their explorations. A long walk in a forest, climbing to the peak of the mountain, walking along the seashore, or a journey through the desert are situations in which we feel the involvement of silence. Phenomena such as wind, rain, snow and changes in temperature are part of this, as is the play of light and shadow, and alterations in their intensity may lead to either an enhanced sense of solitude or the sudden intrusion of noise. It is usually through walking that visitors to Athos read the silence of the landscape as an integral component of the peninsula. Depending on their motivation, they may interpret it as a sacred/hesychast quality or even a phenomenon with intense existential qualities. Walking and direct interaction with the natural landscape opens a perception of the way that silence patterns the landscape and of the way that cultural-religious practices respond to that patterning. As we have seen, the monk’s cell – but also the stall (the monk’s seat at the church) – are vital spaces for the construction and experience of silence. Built

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around the church, the sacred centre of the monastic city, the cells are considered to be part of the monk’s necessary physico-spiritual introversion; they symbolize the possibility of a personal encounter with God and, in parallel, the monk’s active membership of a living community. One could say that their diversity of form is an architectural inscription of this process. It is the result of the evolution of the general Athonite model through the ages, being combined with the movement of different hypostases towards the future through the practice of silence.36 In parallel, the monks in their cells communicate with the open, common spaces of the monasteries in which different sonorous rituals occur, the regular tempo of which dynamically interacts with the silent invocation of the prayer, incorporating the members of the community in a shared reality. Similarly, sitting in their stalls (stasidi) while participating in the liturgy, monks keep silent. In their stall, which some of them call the ‘earthly grave’, they sit with lowered heads, focusing on the repetition of the prayer, whose rhythm is held through the playing of the prayer rope (a rope with knots that the monk uses in order to keep the pace of recitation by counting them). In this case the spatial boundary of the stasidi coincides with the one created by the silent aura of the monk. During this process, predefined ritual movements, the readings and the chanting of the liturgy give rise to an aural environment in which sound and silence dynamically interact with each other. Byzantine iconography, natural and artificial light also infuse this situation as embodiments of the ideas of stillness and spiritual illumination. Mount Athos offers an important example of a silence-patterned soundscape in which different conditions and practices of silence are fused with one another: silent prayer, the silence of the visitors (both intentional and implicit), and atmospheric silence (both natural and intentionally preserved). This is organically incorporated in the topography, being dynamically interrelated to the phenomena found in it, including communal rituals, various natural phenomena, and the presence of outsiders to the monastic community. The exploration of silence as an embodied atmospheric phenomenon illuminates new aspects of architecture and natural landscape that are usually overlooked in our discussions of sound and visuality. By preserving an ancient silence into late modernity, the Athonite topography encourages us to reconceptualize ‘conservation’ discourses in order to take account of ‘objects’ that are fundamentally aural-experiential.

11 Silences generating space A. -Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul and Carl Mika

Introduction

S

ilence often has a special value in indigenous thought and practice, including those of the Ma¯ori of Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as in certain Western theories. It is typically conceived of as an absence of sound, but all forms of absence – of clarity or definition, for instance – are silences of sorts. Silence in the indigenous and Western contexts we want to highlight is, despite its status as a noun, always active. To Ma¯ori – the first-nation people of Aotearoa New Zealand – silence can be an un-voicing or diminution, a lessening of self, in which one of the conditions of the co-constituted silence– audibility couple becomes temporarily more apparent. The self withdraws from the present in favour of what is covert or hidden, supporting a perception and awareness that makes way for another. Thus, silence is always ‘worlded’ (in the sense that the world and its parts are always in a mutual interrelation)1 and constituted in relation to its apparent other – appearance or presence. The deep significance of silence, considered in its various aspects of absence, remains to be fully fleshed out in both theory and practice-related discussions. In this chapter, from our different perspectives as a German and a Ma¯ori author, we aim to speculatively explore this depth, insofar as it is accessible to thought. In academic rationalistic thinking, there is a temptation to misconceive things in the world as fully describable through their characteristics of presence, with their lucidity (and hence their truthfulness) at the forefront. But in many indigenous philosophies, the present entity is underpinned and made possible by its nothingness. Language that tries to represent this phenomenon must 139

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have a double aspect: it must try to accommodate the description of a thing in its difference from others, while also accounting for its own failure to fully represent its referent. It is for this lack – as opposed to the full presence that Western thought privileges2 – that language must take responsibility. Hence, our own attempts at describing silence are necessarily somewhat futile because they rely on an ‘imprisoned’ type of representation that only allows us to talk clearly about the presence of an object rather than its silence, or its silent presence, or its absence. The reader, then, must suspend any presumption that an object can be fully grasped or that any description of it can be fully sufficient. To ask what silence is thus opens questions that concern both the subject matter and language itself. This enigmatic proposition can be justified when we think about the material and spiritual implications of language,3 which participate in what is being asked or said as much as the intentions of the person who is speaking. To ask ‘what is silence?’ is not just to ask someone to say what silence is – it is to force silence to become visible and hence to no longer be what it is. ‘Speak, that I may see you!’ But this greatly oversimplifies silence and indeed all constellations in which silence and audibility participate. We are certainly cautious in attempting to adumbrate silence as it is manifested in certain Ma¯ori and European contexts, because we want to leave something of it to itself – while at the same time trying to reflect upon it according to the protocols of Western scholarly tradition. In some respects, we are hence diminished by the impossibility of representing silence, and by our attempts at describing it through a language that supposes itself able to determine things with clarity.4 In order to give specificity to our discussion, we engage with the question of silence in examples of Ma¯ori and German ceremonial and philosophical scenarios, as well as in the selected observations of theorists who have noted that silence has tended to be dismissed in Western thinking because it is supposed to equate to non-existence.

The co-constitution of silence Silence is commonly seen as the sort of negativity or voidness that sometimes manifests as a contrast with audibility and presence. However, it may also issue forth together with what is taken to be ‘unsilent’. In Ma¯ori thought, the dialectic between negativity and positivity, or between silence and audibility, is premised on a unifying matter that gives rise to it. One term for this unifying matter is Papatu¯a¯nuku, the Earth Mother. This primordial being is constituted by all phenomena while giving rise to them at the same time. She gives rise to the visible and invisible, the silent and the audible. Silence, deriving from Papatu¯a¯nuku, pervades solid or audible objects such as the meeting house, which embodies unspoken centuries of ancestral history. From a European tradition, the

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philosopher Mario Perniola describes how one phenomenon can imperceptibly run into another, in a chromatic mediation flowing ‘from the simplest sound to the fullest formal eloquence and exuberant phonic wealth and, turning back . . . mov[ing] on to the infinitely small fragment and to the greatest possible concentration of silence’.5 There are no clear distinctions, only relations. Silence is hence not a separate entity from the audible, rather they intermesh. And even though at times silence may seem to be lying between – or interstitially resting with – sound, it constructs sound as well. We only know it as it appears to us, in our perception, and it is through this that we can cope with the immensity of silence itself. Thus, in Jakob Böhme’s Signatura Rerum: or the Signature of All Things, the disciple, approaching to address his master in the morning after a night of prayer, left ‘a little space of silence, bowed himself’ and only then broke forth to speak.6 Deliberate silence here mediates the coming together of disciple and master, of finite and infinite, generating an enveloping atmosphere – a space and receptivity towards another. Partially as the opposite of sound, and ‘more intensely as the depth, ground or level from which the sound rises’, silence establishes complex relationships.7 Issuing from the unifying matter of Papatu¯a¯nuku, for example, it constitutes phenomena just as much as the audible, positive and physical world does. Papatu¯a¯nuku saturates phenomena of a silence that is material while, at the same time, transcending that materiality. The experience of silence as a quasistuff is highly affective,8 and it is regularly deployed in Ma¯ori and Pacific protocols of encounter and place making.9 Yet, this experience depends on the emergence of something prior to language, through the confluence of uncountable strands and constellations of memory, matter, history and experience. As rifts within speech and song, silences are often palpably replete with the totality of the world in ways that speech and song cannot replicate. It is in silence that these phenomena can come to the fore. Thus, while the call to enter the marae a¯tea, the open space in front of the meeting house, is just that – a call – it is equally punctuated with quiet moments. These moments should not be thought of as just providing an opportunity for another party to respond, rather they are spaces in which unseen phenomena are called forth. But since it is not just inaudibility that equates with silence, an even more tantalising possibility arises. It is also likely that, even in the audible aspect of encounter, silence is part of words and sound. The smallest linguistic items of the call – each name or term – is permeated with something much quieter.

Materiality of silence When the German philosopher Gernot Böhme recalls ‘entering silence as if walking into a wall of fog’ at the threshold of Cologne cathedral,10 he describes

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an experience of spatial articulation without walls or other solid material elements. This silence is not soundlessness – it is a density that rises up above the muffled sounds of the city outside, which actually articulate the silence. Like the sublime, silence is a contrastive experience, most clearly apprehended at a moment of ingress, ‘through experiencing the contrast when entering from a different atmosphere’.11 And then, the potent density of the interior’s silence combines with the upward pull of the nave on the viewer’s gaze. Sensing the immensity of space triggers an awareness of one’s own body, one’s smallness in space. ‘Feelings alternate between slipping into infinity and being thrown back upon one’s body’, making palpable one’s own ‘lost, disoriented presence, in an over-large space’.12 To feel a small part of something much larger creates connections with the world, and beyond that the universe, in the present, past and future. An original medium becomes palpable, an atmosphere, which is not just ‘something relational’ but ‘the relation itself’.13 An atmosphere of silence, of stillness, opens toward this experience. In Old English, still meant ‘motionless, stable, fixed, stationary’, and later ‘quiet, calm, gentle, silent’.14 The latter meaning endures as that of still in German, while Stille translates into English as ‘silence’. The close connection between sound and movement is evident in the Oxford online dictionary’s definition of still: ‘Not moving or making a sound.’15 Thus, Böhme says that one becomes aware of the silence in the cathedral through the sound of one’s footsteps. Does this awareness stop, though, when one comes to a standstill? In public ritual and event – in assemblies, performances, processions and demonstrations – this highly affective experience of silence as a quasi-stuff not only serves to mark time and occasion but also to provide spatial structure. Depending on context, it can solidify aural and gestural stillness or create anticipation and an orientation toward the future. This duality resonates with the relation of silence to intensified inwardness as well as outwardness, or with the simultaneous or alternating receptiveness to the world and reflection on the soul. Either way, silence can focus the attention of a collective towards a particular place and point in time. During her adolescence, one of the authors of this chapter participated in many early morning processions at a Catholic boarding school in the Rhineland, Germany. The order, Sisters of Notre Dame, celebrated the months of May and October in honour of holy Mary with daily dawn processions in the cloister gardens. For an hour or so, about seventy girls and thirty nuns sang, walked, prayed and stood silent in the promising May atmosphere or the sometimesmelancholic mood of October. There was to be no chatter and no sudden, uncoordinated movements. A precisely worked-out choreography, reminiscent of strategies for the design of scenes developed by Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, the eighteenth-century theorist of ‘garden art’,16 gradually unfolded

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and with it a carefully patterned space. The slow movements and attenuated voices prepared a diminution of self-conscious activities, opening up a space of contemplation in which silence gradually became palpable – not only in its complete moments but unceasingly within and alongside the chants and the voices. Silence carried us. I cannot today remember the spatial layout of the procession in terms of topology, but I do have a visceral memory of space condensing and thinning, narrowing and expanding, of paths re-crossing, of re-arrivals from different points, of positions of intensity marked by silence and stillness, and of departures with slowly swelling sounds of chanting. It was clear to us that underpinning the elaborate choreography, complete with priest, altar boys and censer, was an intention to reach or make space for God and holy Mary. What did reach me, though, and I believe most of my companions, was the overwhelming beauty of the spring or autumn-inflected gardens, which, without the quietening of the sense of self prepared by ritual, may have passed us by and remained as invisible as the silence folded into sound, obscured by fast and sonic adolescent life. In Pacific cultures, any distinction between time and space is provisional rather than principal. In Ma¯ori, for example, one term, wa¯, designates time and space. Perhaps the structuring role of silence is even more clearly observable here for that reason – space, on certain occasions, is created by collectives through silence in practices regulated by protocols of encounter and place making. Thus, silence marks important moments on a marae, a place of communion and encounter for Ma¯ori. During a po¯whiri (welcome of visitors onto a marae), rhythmic silences structure distances and spatiotemporal relationships, accentuating affective flows, marking imminent danger and memories of catastrophe, and generating space for the new beginnings implicit in each encounter. A detailed description of a po¯whiri is provided below; for now, it is enough to say that such bodily resonance experiences change one’s knowing in relation to the world. For the eighteenthcentury German thinker Johann Georg Hamann, father of the Sturm und Drang movement, knowledge had ineliminable sensuous aspects. To ‘do justice to the immediacy of the individual’s sensuous relationship to the world’,17 knowledge must be receptive to materiality. To understand the space that silences construct on a marae, knowledge must intertwine intimately with perceptions of movement, temperature and breath, the material condition of the ground and the sound of the wind.

Practising silence: Protocols of encounter Apart from speech and song – important elements in marking space–time during the ceremonial use of a marae (and its Pacific equivalents) – Ma¯ori and

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Pacific collective practices implicate movement, gesture, breathing, touch and silence. During ceremonial performances, gaps made of silence open spaces for voice and cultural meaning, anticipation, experience and observation. The resulting atmospherics of silence, with the spatial thought habits and philosophies that accompany them, allow for an intense and material appreciation of space.18 They support generative spatial practices that suggest alternative ways of articulating the relationships between architecture, city and landscape. From the perspective of a relative outsider, Daniel Rosenblatt gives a vivid account of a po¯whiri.19 He begins by describing the spatial arrangement of the participants: ‘Two groups of people stand facing each other across an open space . . . roughly rectangular, and for the moment, the two groups are gathered at the short ends. One group takes its place in front of an imposing and elaborately carved house, while the other gathers around a small gateway.’ Then there is a cry: From a woman in front of the house comes a high-pitched call, almost a keening, which is quickly joined by a similar call from a woman at the gate. The women’s voices reverberate across the space, seeming to charge the air that separates the parties. As the calls from each side mingle in the air over the plaza, the group by the gateway begins to walk slowly forward, bowing their heads. The women walk in front. The group’s advance is punctuated by moments when they all pause at once for several seconds before continuing. As the women’s calls begin to subside – but before they have done so – a chant wells up from the group in front of the house . . . Here too, the women stand before the men, holding their arms out in front of their chests, their hands quivering in a way that recalls air shimmering on a hot summer day . . . As the group that is advancing draws within about fifty feet of those standing in front of the house, they stop for a final time, and both groups fall silent. In silence, the groups wheel about an imaginary focal point halfway between them, moving to occupy rows of chairs which face each other in front of the house . . . Rosenblatt writes: In the process of wheeling about, the internal arrangement of the groups has shifted as well: the men are in front now . . . For a few more moments silence still reigns, and then a man from the group which stood in front of the house . . . begins to chant . . . and after a minute or so, his chant becomes a speech . . . When he finishes speaking he begins to sing, and some of his party stand and join him in song, moving to his side as they

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sing along. When the song is finished he says a few more words and returns to his seat, as the others move back to their places. This sequence, Rosenblatt notes, is repeated several times: a pregnant silence, a cry of warning, a speech, a song . . . Finally, after he finishes his song, one of the speakers walks to the center of the space between the groups and places an envelope on the ground. While a woman from the first group gives a call much like that with which she opened the proceedings, a man from her group walks out to the envelope [in silence], stoops down and picks it up . . . Both groups move towards each other and towards the front of the house . . . The group that had originally stood in front of the house forms a single line . . . [which] stretches from the front of the house back towards the chairs . . . Led by the men who spoke, the other group . . . begins to greet each person in line individually. The sequence of movements results in two lines, which slowly snake past each other, as each person from one group greets each person from the other . . . [and now] the charged silence that marked the earlier parts of the event has disappeared with the shift to individual greetings.20 Here, too, the relationship between sound and stillness gradually unfolds space, giving it orientation, dimensions and qualities. In our experience, the moments of pronounced silence, intrinsically part of any po¯whiri, have a materiality that provides spatial orientation; one can feel the thresholds that are traversed as guests and visitors draw closer. Particularly the intense silence at mid-point, when participants stand and acknowledge those who have died since the last encounter, is an indispensable moment of stillness. It feels as though the large open space of the marae a¯tea opens up even further, to include the world beyond this place and the time before and after this moment. This vast opening has similar effects as those Gernot Böhme describes in Cologne cathedral: the awareness of one’s body; its smallness in the extent of the space, under the sky; and disorientation – or perhaps better, reorientation – as one stops still at the threshold. A greater connection to everything around occurs at the same time as the body feels single, much like the author’s sometimes did during the dawn processions in the Rhineland that we have already described. At the same time, a wa¯ opens that holds much more than what is tangibly present. The atmosphere sustaining this space is, in Böhme’s terms, not something relational, but the relation itself. All this presence is only possible through an enfolding (or worlding), with its apparent other, with definite stillness, or the silence provided by the protocol at various points in time and in space. Once the marae a¯tea – the open space proper – is crossed,

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space shrinks to a size that is more human again and time congeals in the present. Speeches follow, which arouse laughter or controversy, and in which language, silence, chant, stillness and movement are enfolded in a web of relationships that holds presence and non-presence, foreground and background. Songs bind the speeches into the concerns of the community. Henri Lefebvre observed the relation between speech and the instantiation of what he described as ‘absolute’ spaces – typically sites that are set aside for religious or political ceremonies and imbued with an invisible fullness. Speech can, therefore, assign specific qualities to spaces and set them temporarily aside for particular purposes – it can, in Ma¯ori terms, make them tapu. ‘Both imaginary and real, [speech] is forever insinuating itself “in between” – and specifically into the unassignable interstice between bodily space and bodies-in-space.’21 This capacity of speech to create a different kind of space has lost much of its force in modern metropolitan, secular societies. In some protocols of encounter, however, as in liturgies or in po¯whiri, performative speech events still blend with songs and movement, silence and stillness. The challenge of the haka, the keening call and summons of the karanga, the whaikorero (lauga in Samoan), the recital of whakapapa (genealogies, gafa in Samoan), or the recitals, prayers, psalms and anthems during Catholic processions all conjure a space of appearance that exists only for the duration of the performance. Silence shapes space, and place exudes silence. Gaps and delays prepare for, and circumscribe, speech. And speech is imbued with silence – they coproduce each other. The affective relation with something prior to language in silence – to an ontological, ancestral prior – forms an opening for manifold and enfolded strands of memory, history, biology and experience. Often ungraspable, these strands nevertheless pull at us and make us think and subsequently speak out. Ma¯ori terms like korekore (extreme nothingness as a positive condition) and kore (nothingness) indicate a ‘potential for mystery and amazement’ about ‘the non-presencing of aspects of the world’.22 Unknowable but generative, they confront us with a ‘non-foundational ground’ that is not ultimately understandable or even perceivable, but that underlies, in a mysterious absence, all our encounters with the world, whether they be mundane or sublime. In his writings, Walter Benjamin characterized the unity of past and present as an interplay of breath and silence: Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? In the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? . . . [T]here is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one . . . we have been endowed with a weak messianic power, a power on which the past has a claim.23

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Towards the end of a po¯whiri, moments of silence and talking alternate in the general greeting of each and every person through hongi (sharing of breath). Slowly, in stages punctuated by speech, silence and song, we are eased out of an immersive affective experience, ‘dense with the full interplay of the world’,24 and we return to a state of normality. The ground, which was in an exceptional state during the po¯whiri, now may become a more informal space in which adults gossip and children play.

Conclusion: Sharing a common state Practically and philosophically, Pacific cultures engage plural and diffusive relational concepts relating subjects and objects through a shared state of mauri or mauli, the life force inherent in everything.25 In relation to contemporary Western thinking, their ontologies also provide commentary on a peculiar impasse that Böhme identifies as the difficulty of thinking in-betweenness. Böhme’s approach to atmosphere (the co-presence of subjects and objects in tuned spaces) is consonant, for its part, with Pacific ontologies. The sharing of time and space by subject and object, for example, is demonstrated in the Ma¯ori term wa¯, in which each entity opens up onto other realms and dimensions that cannot necessarily be perceived. Time and space are not merely geographical and temporal phenomena here. Papatu¯a¯nuku, who suffuses all things, might be voiced as a materiality across which one glances (space) and backwards and forwards onto which one projects and remembers (time). She is both time and space, yet she arises, in fact, through thought and perception. The glance and the projection are forever simultaneously her. One does not look across or think upon her from some exterior position, but rather one is infused by her at all times. Both the welcome call during the po¯whiri and speeches that follow acknowledge the claim the Earth Mother has on humanity. Silence, in the gap between call and response, envelops relationships that give meaning to particular experiences of time and place within the nonfoundational ground. Through diminution, which we earlier identified as a state of intensified perceptual sensitivity, the self becomes aware of the emergence of time and place. Yet, the intimate relationship in encounters between silence and sound, stillness and action, does not begin and end at the entrance gate of the marae, or at the door of the Samoan or German church. It may be most noticeable in those ceremonial contexts, but this itself is evidence of a reticence of silence that also prevails in other, less ceremonial, spaces. The relationship between silence and voice, though not usually perceivable, holds as much sway outside of those spaces as within. To bring it into perception, an attunement to the oscillation between perceived phenomena on the one hand and non-registered

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phenomena and forms and ideas on the other, and also to the way in which one carries us towards the other, needs to occur – an attunement of the kind that is reflected in the diminution prepared by ritual techniques. Not surprisingly, the inhabitants of densely filled aural environments in contemporary cities in the West have, over the last decades, taken to mindfulness training derived from Buddhist teachings to create space, not only for internal silence but also to make room for perception of and in the present moment. Based on similar non-divisive philosophies as Buddhism, Ma¯ori and Pacific protocols of encounter, such as the po¯whiri, provide nuanced conditions, replete with silence and audibility, to allow this to take place in collective practice. These are generative spatial practices, which could articulate the relationships between architecture, city and landscape in alternative ways – ones supported by oscillating, mutually suffusing atmospheric relationships that create a common state.

12 Silence in the middle ground: Aesthetic immersion in the geologic Tiago Torres-Campos

Introduction

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etween 1974 and 1977, the Italian post-modernist architect Gaetano Pesce imagined an underground church beneath an empty parking lot in Manhattan. The Church of Solitude was a speculative project that emerged as a reaction to the architect’s own experience of the overcrowded and overwhelmingly chaotic city of New York. Contrasting with the noisy metropolis above, the underground sanctuary was conceived as a place of silence, but not necessarily one of easy tranquillity. As shown in three large-scale rendered drawings, Manhattan’s extreme density and congestion were counterpointed by the design of a complex prism-shaped cave hollowed out of an unstable and reactive ground, in which tilting floors and uneven walls merged with rock riven by cracks and water leaks. The feeling of insecurity amplified by the deliberate isolation of being underground, ‘invested [the place] with what Pesce referred to as “fraught significances” ’.1 The uneasiness and symbolic freight of The Church of Solitude should be understood in the context of Pesce’s prolific body of work during the 1970s and, more widely, in relation to the characteristic anxieties of late modernism. Drawing on this historical contextualization, discussed by theorists such as Jane Pavitt and Beatriz Colomina, I will argue that Pesce’s anxious spaces clearly manifested a set of environmental preoccupations that have maintained an enduring contemporary relevance. Moreover, the representational qualities of Pesce’s 149

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FIGURE 12.1 Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Plan View, 1974–77, MoMA Archives_0136115D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

project reverberate with the kind of preoccupations, anxieties and frustrations expressed in Kafka’s tale ‘The Burrow’. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of ‘The Burrow’, I will argue that The Church of Solitude can – like the structure described in Kafka’s tale – be understood as a ‘rhizomatic writing machine’.2 By pushing at the limits of scale representation in space and time, The Church of Solitude can be read as a place of silence that offers us an aesthetic immersion in the geologic, while attuning us to cultural preoccupations and affected sensations directly related to the epoch of the Anthropocene.

Environmental anxieties through dwelling and domesticity During the 1970s, Gaetano Pesce pursued several notions of underground architecture. In her essay ‘The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce’, Jane Pavitt extensively studies the investigative nature of some of these projects, while connecting them in a conceptual web to matters of concern that underpinned the architect’s approach at this time. Of his

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proposals submitted to international competitions, collective and solo exhibitions, and private commissions, Great Contaminations stands out as particularly significant. This manifesto-like architectural intervention appeared as part of the seminal 1972 exhibition at MoMA in New York entitled Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems of Italian Design. Organized by the young Argentinian architect and curator Emilio Ambasz, the exhibition was divided into two sections: one with objects arranged in outdoor containers according to their properties, inherent responses to sociocultural and environmental conditions, and capacity for commercialization and massproduction (thus appealing to an avid American audience); and the other with indoor environmental installations designated as either ‘counter-’ or ‘pro-’ design. ‘Counter-design’ installations were exhibited by those who promoted social and political transformation rather than the addition of new designed objects to the world, while ‘pro-design’ exhibits were shown by those who believed in design as means to further improve life and our physical environments. This second section of ‘counter-’ and ‘pro-’ design installations was more attuned with the socioeconomic and political situation in Italy, where industry and manufacture pledged allegiance to young designers to once again rebuild trust in Italian creativity.3 Hinging between the outdoor (objects) and the indoor (environmental installations) sections, Pesce’s stand-alone commission was classified as ‘design as commentary’. Great Contaminations was conceived as an experiment in which the designer speculatively assumed the role of an archaeologist who found, in the north of Italy in the year 3000, the remains of an underground habitat from the early 2000s. From the objects, pieces and bodies surveyed, the archaeologist was then able to reconstruct a dwelling suitable for two persons, also noting that ‘every element of the habitat never allowed the two to see each other’.4 While the isolation – both from the world and presumably from one another – in which these two people seemed to have lived their lives lacks deeper explanation in this speculative fiction, the motivation for humans to migrate underground might perhaps be related to human-induced atmospheric changes such that safe respiration was no longer possible. Within Ambasz’s influential exhibition, which confirmed Italy as a significant centre for critical and experimental design and architecture, Pesce’s intervention could be considered as an ‘essay in failure’5 that questioned both the subject of utopia as a key theme of the exhibition and also the potential of design practice in the modern age. As such, the piece foreshadowed many of the anxieties and preoccupations that would become visible in the architect’s work in the ensuing decade. During the three years of the development of The Church of Solitude, Pesce made other significant contributions – in competitions and commissions – that echo many of the aforementioned preoccupations. In 1973, for example,

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the architect was commissioned to restore a nineteenth-century villa in Sorrento, Italy, but his project was never built due to strong opposition from the heritage authorities. His proposal was to keep nothing of the building apart from its exterior walls that would act as the entrance hall to a new house excavated nine metres into the face of the cliff upon which it was located.6 In 1976 and in 1979 Pesce took part in two important competitions. The first entry was for the Pahlavi National Library in Tehran, presenting a provocative proposal that challenged not only the terms of the brief but also the country’s totalitarian political regime and its conservative architectural discourses. Where the brief called for a library, the Italian architect replied with a monumental prison. The fortification was part-buried, with a sunken courtyard in which topographical manipulation evoked the oppression of ethnic minorities and suppression of human rights.7 The second entry was submitted for the competition to reimagine the Les Halles district in Paris. Pesce used his proposal as an opportunity to attack French forms of governance that ceded too much power to centralized bureaucracy. Jane Pavitt’s analysis of the designer’s contribution to the art and architectural world in this period interprets Pesce’s underground architecture as a form of protest. According to her, proposals such as Great Contaminations or The Church of Solitude can be read as excavations of the derelict as both emblems of disquiet and forms of resistance to prevailing sociopolitical conditions that, at the same time, also find the bodily and the erotic in the subterranean.8 I shall briefly return to both of these preoccupations later in this chapter. In her study of post-Second World War and Cold War architectural futures as experiments stimulated by fear, anxiety and paranoia, Beatriz Colomina offers a wider analysis of underground architecture in this period. Colomina reads Peter and Alison Smithson’s House of the Future (H.O.F.), conceived and built as a prefabricated house for the Daily Mail’s Ideal Home Exhibition of 1956, as an ‘architecture of paranoia’ and a ‘bunker’ or ‘bomb shelter’.9 She writes: The H.O.F. is a kind of bomb shelter. There is no outside. The house is only an inside. The inside of an inside of an inside. A box (the H.O.F.) inside another box (the outer case) inside an exhibition hall (Olympia). Like a submarine or a spaceship, the walls of the craft are pierced at only one key point where entry is infrequent and carefully controlled. Colomina’s interpretation is taken one step further when she calls the H.O.F. a cave: They [the Smithsons] speak of the space of the H.O.F. as rooms of different sizes, shapes, and heights that flow into one another like the compartments

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of a cave. And as in a cave ‘the skewed passage that joins one compartment to another effectively maintains privacy’. Cave dwelling, like bomb shelters, submarines, and spaceships, corresponds to a time of extreme danger outside. Caves are all interiorized spaces, the first bunkers.10 Colomina’s comparison of this architectural form to a cave has a typological character – the H.O.F, for example, is not compared to a specific cave, but to the concept or the symbol of cave and, therefore, to all caves, whether existing, non-existing, invented or designed. But if one may eventually place Pesce’s work under Colomina’s category of the cave, it is also important to recognize that Pesce’s caves are not just refuges – they are also figures of silent protest. More recently, when asked about the aesthetic formality of Great Contaminations, Pesce redirected the question to its political connotations. The fraught significances of this experiment, which evoke limit conditions of human life on earth not dissimilar to dystopian science fiction narratives, are twofold: on one hand, they index the overarching environmental preoccupations that were emerging in the 1970s; and on the other, they operate as a darkly ironic commentary on the frailties of the contemporary political and economic situation in Italy. Rather than a political response to radical forms of design emerging in the Italian scene at the time, Pesce categorises Great Contaminations as deeply political but not committed to any political parties. For Pesce, political in this case relates to his responsibility, as an architect, to be attuned to contemporary sociopolitical conditions while rejecting collaboration with specific partisan agendas or interests.11 Architectural reiterations of spaces for protection against potential extreme danger proliferated in the second half of the twentieth century: shelter homes, such as the Smithsons’ H.O.F, or the Monsanto House of the Future; postatomic dwellings, such as Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes or Oscar Newman’s 1969 project for a subterranean nuclear-proof Manhattan; or even underground sanctuaries, such as the Basilique at La Sainte-Baume, designed by Le Corbusier in association with Éduoard Trouin, or the Church of Sainte Bernardette du Banlay by Claude Parent and Paul Virilio. Although perhaps overly general, one might be tempted to classify the vast majority of these architectural propositions in two ways: those which focus on defensive dwelling, and those which focus on ritualized domesticity. In Pesce’s work, both these categories are remarkably visible and in the specific cases of Great Contaminations and The Church of Solitude, they seem to have been developed in tandem. Defensive dwelling and ritualized domesticity are generated by successive acts of geological excavation and, while they offer an immersion in the geologic that eventually promises soothing stability in deeper space and time, they are nevertheless, and in their own right, uneasy spaces of silent protest.

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Rhizomatic writing machines: A burrow, a church Kafka’s short tale ‘The Burrow’ tells the story of a mole-like creature in its arduous activity of digging a labyrinth of underground tunnels that it calls home. Every day is spent reinforcing and improving it, making sure that the only entrance from the outside is secured, and constantly moving food and other provisions to different, deeper chambers. The protagonist’s anxiety and obsession with its own safety increases as it hears sounds of another creature it never actually sees. As it detects the sounds seemingly produced by this other being – or perhaps beings – its paranoia is heightened by the fear that they might well be digging tunnels to cut across its own underground construction.12 The original title of ‘The Burrow’ in German – ‘Der Bau’ – denotes perhaps more emphatically its dual significance, Bau meaning simultaneously ‘building’ and ‘construction’, or ‘thing’ and ‘process’.13 Kafka’s cave is a maze-in-progress, in which every channel leads to others with no beginning and no end. In their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari consider the activity of writing ‘as one kind of vast assemblage or machine connected to and also operating within other (sociocultural) machines’ and the minor literature of which they speak as a writing machine – that is, an experimental process of becoming that deterritorializes language and meaning.14 Equally important, the authors describe Kafka’s complete body of work as a rhizome or burrow. Their notion of the rhizome is elaborated in their book A Thousand Plateaus in its relation to a mode of thought that escapes arboreal systems of order, ‘ceaselessly establish[ing] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles’. In that sense, ‘a rhizome connects any point to any other point’ and it is ‘reducible neither to the One nor to the multiple’. Deleuze and Guattari use the rhizome – as opposed to the tree or the root – as a diagram to designate an intricate lateral complex of impulsions and desires, immobilizations and struggles, lines of flight and aesthetic experiences.15 They explain their understanding of Kafka’s tale as a rhizome – but also, as we see, a burrow – when they write: How can we enter into Kafka’s work? This work is a rhizome, a burrow. The castle has multiple entrances whose rules of usage and whose locations aren’t very well known . . . Yet it might seem that the burrow in the story of that name has only one entrance; the most the animal can do is dream of a second entrance that would serve only for surveillance. But this is a trap arranged by the animal and by Kafka himself; the whole description of the

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burrow functions to trick the enemy. We will enter, then, by any point whatsoever; none matters more than another . . . We will be trying only to discover what points our entrance connects to . . . what the map of the rhizome is and how the map is modified if one enters by another point. Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation.16 Deleuze and Guattari characterize the writing of ‘The Burrow’ as a shift from becoming-animal to becoming-molecular. The transformation from the former – ‘still too close, still too perceptible, too visible, too individuated’ – to the latter is related to the ‘thousands of sounds that came from all sides from undoubtedly smaller animals’ and presents itself as an alternative, since it opens up ‘molecular multiplicities and machinic assemblages that are no longer animal and can only be given proper treatment in the novels’.17 Acknowledging that ‘The Burrow’ was written in 1923, at a time when Kafka knew he was dying of lung disease, one might also understand the transformation from animal to assemblage embedded in the paranoid description of the mole-like creature obsessed with securing its life against a multitude of unidentified noises that persistently break into its self-induced silence as an ‘allegorical description of Kafka’s own “grave” ’.18 In this incomplete tale, Kafka’s writing machine deterritorializes sound, but not just any sound – the sound (or myriad of sounds) is in fact a creeping, invasive noise that fills the empty, silent underground labyrinth, just like a disease that creeps within Kafka’s dying body. This account of ‘The Burrow’ suggests a possibility of reading The Church of Solitude as a rhizome. As in Kafka’s tale, the church is also driven by a desire for security, this time from a chaotic and noisy city where inequalities are sharp and people live in a disorderly and sometimes clandestine way. Similar to the burrow that the creature constructs to keep itself isolated from the outside, the drive for security constantly complicates the conceptualization of church, which eventually leads to its development as an open-ended, nonlinear rhizomatic structure. But while in ‘The Burrow’ the incessant construction of the rhizome itself becomes a source of anxiety, a space of (imagined) creeping sounds that perversely augment the sense of insecurity, the underground church is characterized as realizing a silent retreat for introspection and contemplation that the architect creates to push away the congestion and chaos caused by the city’s abusive machines of corporatism and institutionalization. Both burrow and church are conceived as projects of selfinduced silence, although with apparently different outcomes. Detailed inspection of Pesce’s drawings for The Church of Solitude show that the plan and sections do not depict a complete underground building.

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What we see instead are stairs that lead to earthen walls, walls of unpolished limestone, and side aisles in the process of excavation as a series of new labyrinthine connections to the massive central vessel. We are shown an incomplete church and an unfinished tale – an in-progress enfolded cave, growing both sideways and downwards. In many ways similar to the process of transformation registered in ‘The Burrow’, The Church of Solitude submerges in the middle ground to become an intermediary architectural situation poised between still being a city and already being a geology.

Geologic impressions of a fossilized city In her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, political theorist Jane Bennett draws on a long lineage of vital materialist thinking to explain that, in the context of the Anthropocene, environmental preoccupations of contemporary relevance – fossil fuel extraction, atmospheric pollution, urban over-crowdedness, nuclear hazards, etc. – must now be thought within wider contexts that incorporate power, expectation, interaction, desire and affect. They belong to complex assemblages made of ‘vibrant materials of all sorts’ – they are vibrant matter.19 The emerging narratives of the Anthropocene foreground once more the old idea of objects as vital materialities as opposed to passive things that conform to the mind of the subject. They emanate their own power, manifest their own resistance, and create their own connections and relations with and beyond humans. Bennett’s ‘thing-power’,20 similar to the Deleuzoguattarian notion of the assemblage, emerges out of this recognition insofar as it accepts that objects cannot be clearly defined since they exist within complex non-hierarchical networks made of ad-hoc connections with no beginning and no end. Kafka would perhaps classify these endless networks as burrows. Another examination of Pesce’s two sections for The Church of Solitude reveals an unusual inversion in the representation of the relationship between Manhattan and the bedrock beneath it. The city is pushed into a blurred background of fossilised impressions, with which we are only vaguely familiar, while in the foreground the cave fuses with the rock. As an architectural response to the physical conditions of the rock in which it is embedded, Pesce’s cave also reveals its potential to mediate new relationships across scales between the city and the rock that lies below it. It operates as a lens through which we may no longer see a city supported by a rock but can perhaps imagine a rock with a fossilized city above. As ‘agenc[ies] of the assemblage’,21 rock, city and church all exert a ‘vital force’22 in the sectional drawings that strongly suggest geology as no longer just the support for life in the city, nor even just the stage for underground architectural intervention, but also architecture itself.

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It is perhaps interesting to note, too, that one of Pesce’s sections shows a collection of architectural ruins, maybe belonging to an old basilica or chapel – columns of different sorts, a small shrine and a fragment of a gothic arch. Jane Pavitt reads these as ruins littered on the former parking lot – but in light of Bennett’s considerations about the vibrancy of material conditions, one might go one step further and imagine Pesce’s section as a framed moment of Manhattan’s continuous construction within deep time, captured after the island, slowly drifting atop tectonic plates in motion for millions of years, fused with a ruined temple originally from elsewhere and with an in-progress church opening up in the middle ground.23 Utilizing the deep section as a tool to think about the collapse of human and earth temporalities and materialities – a collapse investigated by the Anthropocene debate – Pesce’s two sectional drawings draw meaning both as speculative vertical assemblages of space and also as assemblages of time. The bedrock in the sections, for example, can be understood as a representation of a primordial substrate that was there before the city extended its rhizomatic networks. But the same bedrock can equally be thought of as what is left when the city eventually disappears, or slowly moves elsewhere in the scale of deep time. In this expanded time frame, rock,

FIGURE 12.2 Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Longitudinal Section, 1974– 77, MoMA Archives_0137517D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

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FIGURE 12.3 Gaetano Pesce, The Church of Solitude, Transversal Section, 1974– 77, MoMA Archives_0137516D Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Photo SCALA, Florence.

city and church exert pressure upon one another and are slowly stratified as geological horizons – perhaps to the point where they come to form integral parts of a whole, indivisible geology. And while the two sectional drawings fail to represent a realistic deep section of the present city, they instead work as deep time speculative fictions that provide aesthetic immersion in an apparently more stable geologic condition.

The geologic and the agency of plastic Pesce’s use of plastic as the signature material of his products and installations – such as Great Contaminations, which was built in painted plastic and

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Styrofoam – reached its apotheosis in his 1975 solo exhibition Le Futur est peut-être passé (The Future is Possibly Past), at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Adopting ‘a more visceral and sensuous engagement with both material and the body’,24 Pesce used plastic to replicate dismembered body parts scaled to the size of furniture or embedded in the building’s interior walls. In his review of the exhibition, the designer and then-editor of Casabella, Alessandro Mendini, described Pesce’s work as: Byzantine death . . . death as environment, death as habitat . . . the dialectic with . . . and experience of death . . . because his large plastic objects are nothing but enlarged casts of his own decomposed body, dissected and analysed piece by piece, like an immense corpse on the surgeon’s table, an ‘enormous’ symbolization of death.25 This metaphysical experiment acquires particular relevance when Pesce affirms that his objects fill the space with fraught significances. From the perspective of vibrant material thinking, these fraught significances evoke emotional meaning and construct their own aesthetics in complex assemblages of bodies, plastic, paint, buildings, audience, the exhibition space and Italian democracy; but also of death, blood, sweat, fear, pain and loneliness. Thought as writing machines that act out ‘their own coming-into-being as well as their own demise’,26 Pesce’s plastic objects provoke similar cultural and aesthetic affections to anthropogenic plastiglomerate, a term first proposed by Patricia Corcoran, Charles Moore and Kelly Jazvac to designate a potential horizon marker of the Anthropocene. In effect, plastiglomerate is a rocky assemblage that reveals network relationships between sedimentary beach grains, beach campfires, basaltic lava fragments, organic debris, oil, and hardened molten plastic as aggregate. In her essay ‘Plastiglomerate’, Kirsty Robertson explains how the vibrant material carrying the same name reveals an uncanny ‘ontological inseparability of all matter, from micro to macro’.27 She writes: [P]lastiglomerate indexically unites the human with the currents of water; with the breaking down, over millennia, of stone into sand and fossils into oil; with the quick substration of that oil into fuel; and with the refining of that fuel into polycarbons – into plastic, into garbage. From the primordial muck, to the ocean, to the beach, and back to land, plastiglomerate is an uncanny material marker.28 As yet another confirmation of how plastic, as a hyperobject,29 interferes with and modifies our planetary geologies through its imbrications with capitalism, colonialism and consumerism, plastiglomerate becomes a meaningful tool to

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think with in the Anthropocene and helps reveal the ‘slow violence of massive pollution’.30 But if plastiglomerate is particularly eloquent as a geological marker of human impact on the world’s ecologies, this is perhaps because it appears as a ready-made artwork that indicates human-induced change, making the ‘familiar unfamiliar’ and ‘demonstrat[ing] the permanence of the disposable’.31 In its condition of mute silence, which does not expose its journey or very existence, plastiglomerate brings Mendini’s description of Pesce’s plastic body parts to new scales of (inter)action. Materialized as furniture or fused within interior walls of the building, the plastic pieces become ‘evidence of death that cannot decay, or that decays so slowly as to have removed itself from a natural lifecycle’.32 Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse also reveal this trans-scalar agency of plastic within New York’s geologic conditions. In their short book New York City is a Geologic Force, they position the Freshkills landfill site on Staten Island – soon to become a new park – as a complex topography generating methane gas capable of heating more than twenty-two thousand homes. High concentrations of plastic have generated an impermeable, inorganic cap layer that disrupts decomposition, since it itself will never decompose but simply break down into progressively smaller pieces. ‘Just as other mountains are known today for their concentrations of coal, uranium or granite, Freshkills Park might be known 200 years from now for its photons of plastic.’33 Ellsworth and Kruse’s articulation of the agency of plastic in the greater bay of New York returns us, once more, to The Church of Solitude. Had the church been proposed beneath Freshkills – a possibility if one accepts Pesce’s architectural proposal less as a form benefitting from static local relationships of context and specificity than as a mode of thought through which those same relationships could be tested in different moments between city and rock – then the deep section could have eventually revealed an aesthetic immersion in the geologic through accumulations of plastiglomerate, unstable reserves of methane, thin layers of organic landfill, and alternative embryonic ecologies adapting and perhaps even thriving among plastic. In a short essay that appeared in his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes described his visit to an exhibition on plastic, a material he characterized as ‘the stuff of alchemy . . . the transmutation of matter’.34 For Barthes, plastic was not only a substance that implied a sudden transformation of nature, but also the very idea of its infinite transformation – plastic was ‘less a thing than the trace of a[n almost infinite] movement . . . it is ubiquity made visible’.35 The whole world, he concluded, can be plasticized.36 Even though Barthes, writing in the 1950s, was reflecting on plastic as a material that abolishes hierarchies of substances, one marked by protean malleability and thus the possibility of taking on all forms, his formulation assumes new force when seen in relation to contemporary anxieties regarding the ubiquity and inescapability of

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microplastic particles – which are, indeed, slowly stratifying to become elements of a future geology. Pesce’s plastic objects, developed almost fifteen years after Barthes’s essay, held a similar premonitory power insofar as they depicted the becoming-geologic of the most emblematic material of twentiethcentury consumer culture.

Conclusion Through the medium of the three large-scale drawings that compose The Church of Solitude, we can witness and problematize the materialization of some of the immaterial properties of silence as a precarious condition of contemporary ‘outside worlds’, a ‘strange dimension of matter, an out-side’.37 As forms of architectural representation, these assemblages of paper, graphite, colour and light – as much as of space, time, rock, city, fear, or anxiety – are deliberate in their constitution of silence as a form of protest. Here – if indeed it is possible to show it at all – silence is not necessarily depicted per se but rather emerges as polarized by its opposite. If we think of The Church of Solitude representations as conceptual deep sections, Pesce’s drawings can be understood as a mode of thinking – one which reflects on new geological delineations that mediate the imbricated relationships between the city, the atmosphere above and the geology below, and that ultimately leads, Pesce believes, to an encounter with silence. It is not my intention to refute Colomina’s typological approach to the cave as a place of safety, nor to challenge Pesce’s underground church as a form of silent protest; neither do I question the Deleuzoguattarian idea of Kafka’s burrow as a rhizomatic writing machine. Instead, with the new expanded sense of the geologic as something not just confined to earth sciences but also to do with cultural meanings and aesthetic sensations of our contemporary lives and presence on the planet,38 it may perhaps be possible to enlarge upon all of the above by situating Pesce’s work within more expansive conditions of space and time. In projects such as The Church of Solitude, Great Contaminations, or Le Futur est peut-être passé, Pesce attuned both his conceptual propositions and their material configurations – especially the objects in plastic – to contemporary environmental preoccupations. The theory of the Anthropocene opens new approaches to these projects through important ideas such as vibrancy, as well as a meaningful reassessment of the meanings of scale, frame, or ground in architecture. A contemporary reading of Pesce’s works developed from the perspective of the Anthropocene confirms its proleptic anticipation of matters of concern that were to arise – issues that would in due course emerge, such as geopolitical violence accentuated by social and environmental inequalities,

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the possibility of extinction, or the radicalization of pollution. Even if Pesce’s architectural delineation of silence as an interior form of protest, but also of relief and protection, contradicts Anthropocene theory’s collapse of exteriority and interiority and therefore the possibility of withdrawal, nevertheless the future anterior implications of Pesce’s projects encourage us to retrospectively recognize the ways in which they projected our present and the importance of what they, at the moment of their inception, ‘will have done’.39

13 John Hejduk and Samuel Beckett: Going on, in silence and lateness Jason O’Shaughnessy

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ilence, as a theme, is related to lateness. Such is the lesson that has been drawn from Theodor W. Adorno’s assertion, made in the aftermath of the Second World War, that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.’1 To take this as a declaration of the end of art, however, is to belie the complexity and nuance of Adorno’s position. As he would write in his 1962 essay ‘Commitment’: I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric . . . But . . . suffering . . . also demands a continued existence of the very art it forbids; hardly elsewhere does suffering still find its own voice . . . The most significant artists of the period have followed this course.2 The question then is less to do with art’s reduction to silence than with the imperative for it to reflect upon and problematize its practices in relation to the conditions within which it must endure. This chapter explores the way in which this is developed in the works of the writer Samuel Beckett and the architect and educator John Hejduk, both of whom specifically characterized their practice as late, operating within an almost-exhausted field. It sets out to examine the way their oeuvres develop – both in theme and form – while simultaneously acknowledging the silence and anxiety that surrounds artistic production in the shadow of Auschwitz. 163

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Beckett’s imminent silences The theme of silence in Beckett’s work can be traced to his early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women (1932), in which the protagonist and Beckett’s alter ego Belacqua Shuah meditates on the book he would like to write. This he compares to the compositions of Beethoven that have ‘a punctuation of dehiscence, flottements, the coherence gone into pieces, the continuity bitched to hell . . . the notes fly about, a blizzard of electrons; and then vespertine compositions eaten away with terrible silences.’3 It progresses with words that recall Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, ‘eaten away with big black pauses’.4 This is equally apparent in the overall form of the play Krapp’s Last Tape (1958), which contains some eighty instructions to [Pause.] in the text and frequently includes the depleting direction that a character [hesitates]. In Endgame, which premiered the year before, silence seems to signal the failure to find adequate representation, with words expressing a type of doubtful and prolonged unending – thus Clov’s self-repudiating declaration: ‘Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.’5 Already, The Capital of the Ruins (1946) – a piece of reportage written by Beckett for Irish radio following his work with the Red Cross that went unbroadcast at the time6 – seems, with its references to ruination, to anticipate the dread-filled settings of his writings yet to come: some of those who were in Saint-Lò will come home realizing that they got at least as good as they gave, that they got indeed what they could hardly give, a vision and a sense of a time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition is to be thought again.7 Of Beckett’s wartime experience in France, James Knowlson has noted: ‘It is difficult to imagine him writing the stories, novels and plays that he produced in the creative maelstrom of the immediate postwar period without the experiences of those five years.’8 This post-catastrophic condition perhaps becomes most powerfully configured in Endgame, with its permanent state of failure and alienation and of existence almost at an end. Indeed, its opening scenes suggest an acting-out following an unnamed or unspeakable catastrophic event – a sort of post-traumatic neurosis in which the cataclysmic event has failed to be adequately symbolized and has thus led to a symptomology of prolonged and sustained repetition: Hamm Have you not had enough? Clov Yes! (Pause). Of what?

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Of this . . . this . . . thing.

Clov I always had. (Pause). Not you? Hamm (gloomily) Then there’s no reason for it to change.9 The scenario of Endgame portrays a decided slowing down of things, a countdown that stretches out toward some final collapse of the environment in which the characters contemplate their own diminishing existence. All that seems to remain is a grey ‘corpsed’10 emptiness in which all is ‘Zero’11 and where a list of things that have lost their existence are implicated by the repeated declaration that ‘There’s no more’. Thus, there are: ‘no more bicycle wheels (. . .) There’s no more pap (. . .) There’s no more nature. (. . .) There’ll be no more speech (. . .) There are no more sugar plums! (. . .) There’s no more tide (. . .) There are no more navigators (. . .) There are no more rugs (. . .) There’s no more pain-killers (. . .) There are no more coffins (. . .) Turkish Delight, for example, which no longer exists.’12 The play’s theatrical set comprises a bare internal room, with walls washed in a grey light and two small windows set high on the rear wall. Though the curtains are often drawn, the presence of windows establishes the possibility of looking toward the ocean and a landscape outside. The same grey-lit walls seem to harbour a prophetic and deathly portent – the proverbial ‘writing on

FIGURE 13.1 Stage production of ‘Endgame’ in the Citizen’s Theatre, Glasgow in 2016. © Tim Morozzo Photography.

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the wall’. Recalling Belshazzar’s warning, Beckett’s character Hamm is quick to remark upon and ridicule Clov’s habit of gazing at the kitchen wall by demanding: Hamm The wall! And what do you see on your wall? Mene, mene? Naked bodies? Clov I see my light dying. Hamm Your light dying! Listen to that! Well, it can just die as well here, your light. Take a look at me and then come back and tell me what you think of your light.13 There are instances in which the audience encounters the peculiar physiology of Hamm’s eyes, which remain obscured behind black-lensed glasses: Hamm Did you ever see my eyes? Clov

No.

Hamm Did you never have the curiosity, while I was sleeping, to take off my glasses and look at my eyes? Clov

Pulling back the lids? (Pause). No.

Hamm One of these days I’ll show them to you. (Pause). It seems they’ve gone all white.14 While Hamm’s blindness might be moot – he sees his eyes’ whiteness after all – we are led to wonder about its cause. Is it perhaps the result of a genetic defect; or of some occlusion of the retinal vessel as a result – like the other assorted ailments he suffers – of advanced age; or might it be the outcome of some past event that has permanently corrupted the retina, such as the flash of a weapon whose intensity Hamm’s prophylactic glasses were applied too late to protect him from but remain a memory of? He remains a moment motionless, then goes out. He comes back immediately, goes to window right, takes up the ladder and carries it out. Pause. Hamm stirs. He yawns under the handkerchief. He removes the handkerchief from his face. Very red face. Glasses with black lenses.15 Throughout the play, such character descriptions enunciate Hamm’s agedness. Typically, they refer to and implicate his ocular condition – his ‘seeing blindness’ that articulates with his reliance on glasses and other

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instruments of vision, spectacles and speculae, to deflect the dead, ‘corpsed’ and ashen world beyond the greyness of the interior shelter in which he finds himself. These acts of part-blinded-seeing are used in the play to heighten the sense of carcereal interiority that the characters must endure. It is the bareness and grey light and the grey nothingness of the world beyond the room that suggests that Hamm, Clov, Nell and Nagg may well be survivors of some terrible event – an end of days and a world in which things no longer grow. Hamm

Did your seeds come up?

Clov No. Hamm Did you scratch round them to see if they had sprouted? Clov They haven’t sprouted. Hamm

Perhaps it’s still too early.

Clov If they were going to sprout they would have sprouted. (Violently.) They’ll never sprout!16 Although critics have been reluctant to attribute a specific context to Endgame’s post-catastrophic landscape, Adorno thought it could be read in terms of a historical singularity, suggesting that moments such as Hamm’s inability to conjure a name for the event – his suppressed designation of ‘this . . . this . . . thing’ – indicates a form of repetition in which ‘[t]he violence of the unspeakable is mimicked by the timidity to mention it’.17 According to Adorno, Beckett ‘keeps it nebulous’; he writes: ‘One can only speak euphemistically about what is incommensurate with all experience, just as one speaks in Germany of the murder of the Jews. It has become a total a priori, so that bombed-out consciousness no longer has any position from which it could reflect on that.’18 While Beckett’s characters and staging might suggest an apocalyptic tale – traditionally a warning or prophesy of what is to come – at the same time it is one in which, if we accept Adorno’s comments, the catastrophe has already happened. As Adorno understands it, by keeping it nebulous, Beckett conjures an unspoken sense of dread and unease, Endgame’s haunted and silent enunciation forming an oblique correspondence with wider socio-historic conditions. Thus, Adorno concludes, ‘the name of the catastrophe is to be spoken only in silence’:19 After the Second World War, everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive,

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on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state useless.20 In other ways, the topology and setting of Endgame have deep affinities with an artwork that we have learned to read in relation to this post-catastrophic condition and to understand as embodying something of the sense of ‘lateness’ that infuses Beckett’s play. This is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus of 1920, which was owned by Walter Benjamin (and later by Adorno) and is

FIGURE 13.2 Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Getty Images/Heritage Images.

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widely known through the celebrated reading of it Benjamin developed in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1939). In a proleptic echo of what Beckett would call in Endgame a ‘corpsed’ world, Benjamin redefines Klee’s figure as the ‘Angel of History’: This is how one pictures the angel of history. . . . A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. . . . His face is turned from the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.21 While Benjamin’s angel is powerless before the historical violence that catches its wings and propels it backwards into the future, the dynamic motif of the vortex of history is alien to Beckett whose characters exist in a kind of suspended or incremental temporality and in whose work any dream of redemption, however residual, is foreclosed. Yet there is a relation between Benjamin’s angel and Beckett’s not-quite-fully-present beings who course an ashen world and who survive, in their own way, as powerless witnesses of disappearance and absence. It is a continuing, however, that seems only partial, for in Endgame the characters are sufferers of a type of lateness that, despite their physical endurance, they ‘cannot really survive’. Instead, according to Adorno – in an allusion that recalls Benjamin’s text – they are thrown upon a ‘pile of ruins which even renders futile self-reflection of one’s own battered state’.22 If the characters seem vital, it is only insofar as they manifest a post-catastrophic corporeality in which animation is a pathological symptom. Likening their actions to those of a half-dead fly, Adorno writes: ‘Beckett’s figures behave primitively and behavioristically, corresponding to conditions after the catastrophe, which has mutilated them to such an extent that they cannot react differently – flies that twitch after the swatter has half smashed them.’23 They are brought to a ‘point’ or ‘zone of indifference’ in a way that indicates how ‘pure identity becomes the identity of annihilation, identity of subject and object in the state of complete alienation’:24 There is something absurd in the form of the dialogue itself; meaninglessness of the question-and-answer relationship; gibberish. . . . Hearing oneself talking is like watching a Beckett play . . . One is alienated from one’s own language by B[eckett].25 As seen from the note above, it is clear that Adorno understood the state of alienation in Endgame as one that was specifically linguistic in nature,

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although this response must be understood within a broader context. As a work that attempts neither to render nor represent the Holocaust, nor remains entirely silent, the play offers a distinct form of incomprehensibility. For Adorno, the play’s refusal to stake out any legible political position is laudable; instead, politics in Endgame have penetrated to such an extent that the work can only appear ‘politically dead’26 and the catastrophe only spoken of through silences and elisions. The absurdity of the characters – with their ‘lameness, blindness, and unappetizing bodily functions’ – is presented not only as a sign of biological lateness (agedness) but also as a refraction of wider devastations. These are figures that exhibit, Adorno writes, the ‘post-psychological state’ of ‘torture victims’.27 In this sense, the characters seem doubly positioned as both angels and ghosts: angels because of their communicative agency of foretelling or forewarning; and ghosts because they are traces of past presences whose half-life is itself an intimation of historical guilt. To Hamm’s declaration ‘I don’t know what’s happened’,28 Adorno responds that ‘the reason why the catastrophe may not be mentioned’ is not because it is unknown, obscure, or unfathomable, but because ‘Hamm himself is vaguely responsible for it’.29 However, Adorno makes it clear that the near silence in Beckett’s work should not be confused with actual silence – as he writes in Negative Dialectics: ‘After Auschwitz all culture, and urgent critique along with it, is garbage . . . silence only rationalizes particular subjective incapacity by granting it the status of objective truth, thereby once more degrading truth into a lie.’30 This was, in broad terms, an anxiety that was shared by various thinkers in the postwar period, although different positions were taken around it. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich’s study of the pathology of repression, denial and guilt in the aftermath of the Nazi era, The Inability to Mourn (1967), maintained that the German people had never come to terms with their own relationship to Nazi wartime atrocities. The Mitscherlichs argued that there was an unconscious break with the past, which was why there were ‘so few signs of melancholia or even of mourning’. This they interpreted as being attributable to a ‘collective denial of the past’.31 Adorno anticipated this issue in What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? (1959), concluding that the historicity of Auschwitz had not yet settled into a fact and that ‘the fundamental structure of society and its members, which brought it on, are today the same’.32 In Beckett’s Endgame, as Adorno understood it, it was the specific ‘antagonistic tendencies’33 of the play that displayed a form of cultural production which disavowed any possibility of working through or resolving the trauma of the past. Rather than presuming to adequately render a reality, with all the presumptions of coherence that that would entail, it is the adjacency of Beckett’s work to silence and its articulation of suffering that offered a powerful symptomology of recent history that negotiates culture’s ‘after-Auschwitz’ aporia.

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Hejduk’s Berlin presences From these considerations I will now turn to the later work of the architect and educator John Hejduk, in which, I claim, specifically in his own Berlin projects, we can detect ‘antagonistic tendencies’ that are directly analogous to those we have discussed in Beckett. These include the projects Berlin Masque (1981) and Victims (1986), and the associated thoughts and poems that were developed for the site around the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais in Berlin. Significantly, the latter was a site of torture while acting as the headquarters of the SS and Gestapo during the Nazi period. Much of the way Hejduk’s work would subsequently unfold is anticipated in his Berlin Masque and is part of a broader shift in the architect’s work that he described as a turn toward and architecture of ‘pessimism’.34 The site plan for the Berlin Masque, published under ‘Frame 7: 1979–1983’ in Hejduk’s book of collected works Mask of Medusa (1985), comprises the two regular geometric forms of a triangle and square, both with contoured/rounded edges, and imagines a boundary enclosure of hedges 12 feet high.35 It features twenty-eight ‘Elements/Structures’, as Hejduk calls them, that spread across the two sections of the site with a single element – named the ‘Crossover Bridge’ – connecting both parts of the deliberately maintained split-site condition. Above the site plan and on the same page is a photograph of a model. Describing more of the three-dimensional aspects of the project, this draws attention to the physical remains of the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais complex. These two architectural depictions are counterpointed by a pair of texts on the opposing page, one by Italo Calvino and one by Honoré de Balzac, both of which were included in the brief for the competition for which Hejduk’s project was an entry. The Calvino extract describes the ‘invisible’ city of Maurilla, in which ‘city after city may follow one upon the other in the same spot, with the same name, rising and falling with nothing to say to one each other’.36 This was a possibility, read in the historical context of Berlin, that Hejduk clearly found disturbing. As he wrote in his poem, Victims: The unacceptability of the erasures and of the unaccountable disappearances wherever and whenever throughout the world.37 In an interview in 2009, the poet David Shapiro turned his conversation with Hejduk toward the question of artistic production in the wake of the Holocaust:

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S Let’s talk about the terror. We live in an age in which Adorno said after Auschwitz there can’t be a lyric poem . . . You’ve brooded on the Holocaust. It’s almost a subject that is too terrifying to talk of. You’ve written victim’s ceremonies. How have you been able to deal with that? H ‘Victims’ is . . . it’s a book – but something else is – it’s the work I leave. I don’t know how to say that but that’s simply the work I leave addressing that problem – not problem. You can’t call it a problem . . . It’s something else and the ‘Victims’ book is my elliptical . . . approach to horror.38 Victims is a complex and labyrinthine amalgam that eschews any totalising view. Although it appears navigable through its parts – an introduction with a taxonomy of subjects/objects, a site plan, a diary, drawings of elements, and sketches of structures in various relationships – a legible entry point into this enigmatic system seems withheld. Instead it appears, as Raoul Bunschoten has observed, inherently liminal and in a state of suspension – ‘a threshold condition not part of the normal environment’.39 This sense of the work existing in an intermediate state resonates with Hejduk’s adoption of the word ‘Masque’ for his projects from the early 1980s onwards. Through this, he

FIGURE 13.3 John Hejduk, ‘Partial site plan, Victims I’, Victims, 1984. Reference number: DR1998:0109:003:019. Part of: DR1998:0109:003:017-019, Site plans and plans. John Hejduk fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Courtesy of Canadian Centre for Architecture. © CCA.

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alluded to the concise theatrical form of the Renaissance court and, more broadly, to the tradition of English Mummery, which he claimed was a performance generally lacking ‘story action, crisis or ending’.40 This view exiles Victims’ sixty-seven Elements/Structures and its ordering of the subjects/ objects in a seemingly recognizable taxonomy from any questions of development or resolution. Might we then be justified in seeing Hejduk’s constructions that wander across the site as spectral things – threshold objects that do not so much take up a position upon the site as haunt it? His comments suggest that he understood the site’s absent presences in terms of a vaporous miasma emitted from the ground. In his interview with Shapiro, he says that: although the buildings had been destroyed, and had disappeared, the aura came through the ground. In other words, the physicality of the buildings were not there, but one could feel the sense of structures having been there. . . . There were the disappearances that had occurred, but yet the atmosphere of these structures was coming through the earth.41 Hejduk’s preoccupations with architecture’s agency as a mediator of past presences, a communicator across time and space, and a meditation upon loss are explicitly articulated in his poem ‘Thoughts of an Architect’, which accompanies the Victims project. Subtitling the poem ‘The X-ray’, Hejduk situates his drawings as shadowy traces akin to those of that spectralizing instrument, the X-ray.42 As Hejduk describes them, these forms are ‘[m] editations on the sense of erasures’ that ‘gelantanize forgetfulness’, and it is this synthetic architectural X-ray tracing (perhaps most apparent in the Victims site plan [Figure 13.2]) that, Hejduk contends, reveal ‘apparitions, outlines, figments . . . They are not diagrams but ghosts.’43 In his poem ‘Berlin Looms’ – which is presented in Mask of Medusa, accompanied by the winged figure of an Angel – Hejduk reiterates this sense of the felt presence of what is absent, writing that ‘the vanished can still be felt’.44 And while it is notable that Hejduk’s works increasingly depict angels from this period onwards, we should be cautious in considering their presence to indicate any form of redemption. Instead, Hejduk’s angels seem to have lost their message of hope in the face of an epochal pessimism – a recognition perhaps that the angel’s attempt to open a gap in the continuum of catastrophic history is a failed one. Perhaps it was this that Hejduk was addressing, when he suggested: This is the time for drawing angels. Angels have to do with crucifixion in a strange way. You know from ‘Salambo’ the Flaubert book there is a battle going on in Carthage. And one of the armies comes marching along. They

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hear terrifying screams of an animal. They come over the hill and when they come over the hill they see a lion that has recently been crucified . . . The invading army speaks ‘what kind of people are these that crucify lions?’ So you had animal – the crucifixion of men, of lions and animals you had the crucifixion of men, and then you had the crucifixion of gods. We’re in a time that we have the ability to crucify angels.’45 Clearly, in Hejduk’s telling, an era that crucifies angels is a late one and in it architecture’s inadequacies lie exposed. The crisis of representation identified in Adorno’s dictum ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ points to his conviction that the harmony of lyric form can merely draw an ideological veil across a dissonant and damaged reality. Indeed no ‘positive’ expression of harmony remains possible to art; instead, it can only be indicated negatively through its opposite. The barbarism of post-Auschwitz production, then, would inhere in its false depiction of coherence and the illusory image that it presents of a world that has passed beyond any condition to which representation could be adequate. Artworks must acknowledge this and struggle to wrest their response to it from within their own form. In this way, if a post-Holocaust poetics is thinkable, it would be one that is dissonant and awkward, founded in an abnegation of the naturalism of the lyric. Accordingly, the sites of catastrophic loss that Hejduk contends with become places of ‘reparation and mourning’ that elicit from the architect – in a phrase Shapiro adopts from Adorno – the ‘anti-lyrical response that is indeed required after Auschwitz’.46 For Shapiro, in order to respond to such sites, Hejduk had to develop an architectural repertoire that capably articulated ‘the horror and glory and the boredom’47 of what surrounded him. Perhaps from this viewpoint, Hejduk’s reintroduction of the image and figure of the angel can be best understood to exemplify epochal lateness by the way it draws upon the angel’s paradoxical character. The angel, for Hejduk, is no longer an agent of salvation but is instead emblematic of a wider sense of loss that is refracted through images of the entrapment and suffering of these hitherto transcendent beings. These Berlin projects then come to share the desire of Benjamin’s angel: to observe and make visible what has been silenced, and to bear witness to the victims of a catastrophic history. Understood this way, Victims reconvenes the ‘forces of a poetics within architecture largely lost elsewhere to gestures of parodistic abandon’.48 It is perhaps restrictive to only think about these works in relation to the Holocaust and the horrifying forces of modernity. Yet in their agonistics of near-silence, they offer an important response to them, working to subsist in their ongoing aftermath. So, Beckett’s characters survive only to suffer the incarceration of an unending half-life without limit, while Hejduk’s cast of subject/objects are suspended within a passion play or eschatology from

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which any redemptive moment has been stripped away. Remnants of the fallout of progressive history, their dissonant poetics recall Adorno’s counterblast to Hegel: ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.’49

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14 Quiet places – silent space: Towards a phenomenology of silence Gernot Böhme

Preliminary remarks on terminology

T

alking about silence unfortunately does not go without some remarks on terminology – and it may even be that part of our work will be coming to a common understanding of terminology. This, in my case, might be particularly necessary, because together we have to go from the German to the English language. Thinking in the medium of German language, I am going to talk to you via English. In German the relevant terms that will concern us are Schweigen, Stille, Ruhe; the English ones are ‘silence’, ‘quiet’, ‘calm’, ‘still’. In the two languages, the terms carry different connotations. The term Schweigen is encompassing and predominant for the whole field of phenomena. This may be because it is primarily related to the realm of talking and not talking. The person being quiet does not talk. This means that there might arise a moral problem about talking as opposed to not talking – I will give some hints about this in my second preliminary remark. At the same time, to be quiet may be valued as a virtue.1 To be silent in the sense of not talking is a sort of performance – not talking means to be discreet, or rather to hide something. This estimation of not talking presupposes a view according to which talking is natural to a person – or to put it in another way, that talking is fundamental to social relations. As a consequence, to keep oneself silent is seen as a break in social relations or a refusal of social contacts. My comments reveal that the German term Schweigen does not really mean something like a mood or atmosphere but rather an interruption of the 179

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expected flow of speech, although it is true that it can also be used to indicate a ‘shared silence’ (geteiltes Schweigen) – in the sense, for instance, of a certain attitude or mood that spreads over a crowd. Thus, one can say ‘ein Schweigen (silence) spread across the whole assembly’. The predominant relation of the term Schweigen in German to the field of talking results in considering the term a metaphor when it is applied to, for example, the description of a landscape. Take the well-known evening song by Matthias Claudius, Der Mond ist aufgegangen (The Moon has Risen), which contains the phrase ‘Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget’ (‘The forest stands dark and silent’).2 Here, within the German original, ‘schweiget’ is actually used in order to characterize a certain mood. But through the metaphorical use of the term, this mood is experienced as a sort of refusal – the stillness of the woods contributes to a melancholic and even threatening atmosphere. The relatively easy translation of the phrase demonstrates that the English ‘silence’ – contrary to German Schweigen – is not as strictly related to a context of talking. ‘Silent’ in the English translation is not read as a metaphor. As a rule, one may translate Schweigen as ‘silence’, but the English ‘silence’ seems to have a much broader field of application precisely because it is not strictly related to talking. And thus the term is much more apt to mean something atmospheric. Silence is not primarily to do with the behaviour of persons but is something that characterizes situations. Hence English ‘silence’ must in many cases be translated into German as Stille. Stille in German – unlike Schweigen – signifies the character of a space. And as Stille is in most cases tuned by something emotional, one may say that Stille is primarily the character of an atmosphere. We find this use of the term a little further on in the same song by Matthias Claudius – ‘Wie ist die Welt so stille’. Here the English translation reads ‘How still is the world.’ The world is still, which means that ‘still’ is something encompassing, something which is a totality. Stillness can mantle you, as the following verses make clear: The world in stillness clouded And soft in twilight shrouded So peaceful and so fair Stillness as well as twilight is shrouding you – they are atmospheres, in which you are and in which you feel yourself to be in a certain way. Thus stillness is the atmospheric character of a space. This may be a confined room – Matthias Claudius says that the shrouding atmosphere makes you feel the whole world like a ‘still chamber’. As a consequence, in many cases one must translate the English ‘silence’ by the German Stille. This applies, for example, to the famous book by John Cage, Silence.3 It would be impossible in this case to use Schweigen, all the more so as Cage, following

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Japanese aesthetics, takes silence to be the background from which and against which music arises. For Cage, silence in music is not – as is common in Western music – a break or a pause that interrupts the flow of music. And thus, as the German Stille does not signify the behaviour of people but characterizes the quality of a place, I have titled this chapter Stille Orte in German, which translates as ‘Quiet places’. What I wish to stress here is that stillness does not mean merely the absence of speech, but the absence of any kind of noise. Even more encompassing in this regard is the German Ruhe. It is true that Ruhe can also mean to refrain from talking – as one may say Ruhe bitte! (‘silence please!’) – but Ruhe involves much more, so much so that Ruhe implies the absence of any movement or excitement. As a consequence, Ruhe, which is very often metaphorically understood, has the meaning of being free of movement – as, for example, in the phrases die Ruhe bewahren (‘to keep quiet’) or er ist die Ruhe selbst (‘he is calmness itself’). As a quality of a space, Ruhe – contrary to Stille – cannot mean space as a totality but rather refers to confined spaces, rooms or places. Thus, der Stille Ort or der ruhige Ort must be translated as ‘The quiet place’. Let us review the whole consideration from the perspective of English language. The term ‘silence’ may mean the absence of talking, but can also mean the absence of any noise whatsoever. It is important for us to note that ‘silence’ can be applied to space in general, but is less applicable when we are talking about confined places. As for confined places, one would instead say that they were ‘quiet’. This may mean the absence of speech as well as the absence of movement or any turmoil whatsoever. Even in the phrase ‘the still of the night’, stillness here is rather understood as the interruption of the uneasiness of daytime – thus the title of the famous song Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht is commonly translated as ‘Silent night, holy night’ and not as ‘Still night, holy night’. Given the concerns of the present book, in what follows I want to take my departure by way of examples that are close to architecture. My primary concern is with quiet places. Seen from the perspective of phenomenology, the topic at stake is much broader – silence as a totality must be considered as a quality of space. Whatever term one prefers, the absence of speech may be a topic of consideration. That being so, I want to mention that in an earlier publication I addressed the question of silence as a moral problem.4 I will briefly summarize the content of this article, so that I am free to set it aside for the remainder of this chapter. Silence can be a moral problem in cases where description may be requested or, conversely, when not talking may be morally criticized. An example of the first case, which is important in our times, is the doctor’s duty of discretion. To keep silent, even in the face of relatives’ requests, is demanded from doctors. On the other hand, the idea of the responsible patient requires doctors to have a radical openness towards the patient. As for the second

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case, we can give the example of the way in which, following the Second World War, silence – in the sense of not talking – has become, particularly in Germany, a problem, since perpetrators as well as victims kept silent about their experiences. Or, as it may be more adequate to say, they were unable to talk about crimes perpetrated or the sorrow that they were surrendered to. It was not until the students’ revolution of 1968 that breaking silence about these facts became a moral issue.

The quiet place In 2012 the author Peter Handke, who writes in German, published an essay titled ‘The Quiet Place’. His topic was his personal experiences with toilets, lavatories, closets and restrooms. While the German title der Stille Ort is a common expression for a toilet, the English terms ‘closet’ or ‘restroom’ also etymologically indicate that the toilet is a place separated from the busy environment beyond and its ongoing gossip. Seen in historical perspective, the closet is the essence of the architectural developments that, since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had been engaged in the detachment of the private from the public sphere, and even were busy in constituting privacy. Thus it is not surprising that a reflective figure such as Peter Handke would describe his retreat to the ‘quiet place’ as a narrative of his development as an individual. Relating his own experience to the protagonist of a certain novel, he writes: ‘He made it one of his habits to go to the toilet, to the closet without any urgent need.’5 And he continues: ‘He locks himself into the closet (as the term indicates) in order to hear no more gossip, and he stays there for quite a time.’6 He joins his own experience to this statement in naming the closet a kind of asylum, writing: ‘And it is true, the locking of the closet door was a great relief: finally you are by yourself.’7 This concentration on his own self turns into a liberation and even a new experience of the world. At a Japanese restroom Handke experienced a kind of enlightenment – his account is about a release from Sorge, which is to say the constraints of everyday life as they were described by Heidegger. Handke comments: ‘I felt my insouciance was not restricted to the moments at the temple restroom, it would continue, at least for some time.’8 This way of transcending everyday life is indicated by the boy in the novel that Handke mentions at the very beginning of his essay and of whom he writes: ‘The boy does not do anything there, apart from listening to the silence.’9 The quiet of the closed place is transcended by its orientation towards the silence of the world. With Handke, the quiet place – the closet – is revealed as the essence of that type of architecture that, since the beginning of bourgeois society, was

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engaged in constituting privacy. Accordingly, we will not be surprised to learn that the Japanese author and critic Jun’ichiro Tanizaki wrote: ‘Every time I am shown to an old, dimly lit . . . toilet in a Nara or Kyoto temple, I am impressed with the singular virtues of Japanese architecture.’10 It is true that for Tanizaki it is not the closedness of the place which is to the fore – actually Japanese restrooms are at least at a distance from the main building – but, he says, the fact that the prerequisites of Japanese toilets are ‘a degree of dimness, absolute cleanliness, and quiet so complete one can hear the hum of a mosquito’.11 Tanizaki appreciates most what, with Handke, I have named as transcendence – namely the indefinite listening to the world. He says that he was – as scarcely in any other place – open to the buzzing of insects, the singing of birds and the sound of rain in this room ‘replete with fond associations with the beauties of nature’.12 He talks about silence, not in the sense of a quiet place, but in the sense of the opportunity to be open without care to the world.

The calm of death Having described silence as spatial atmosphere – starting from the quiet place and then extending our consideration to silence as a quality of the whole – we now should turn to quite another phenomenon, namely that silence may have a source. This is the case with the calm of death. The experience of this is also mentioned by Handke, who tells us about his feelings when hearing that his adored author William Faulkner had died: ‘A heavy and painful silence took place in myself and spread around me.’13 It is true that this experience of Handke’s is still symbolically mediated. The silence immediately experienced in the bodily presence of the dead is much more impressive and encompassing. This type of silence can be felt during a funeral. Here the silence obviously emanates from the dead, it fills the room and embraces the participants. Certainly, silence in this case is the absolute absence of speech and movement. However, this absence is actually felt because the dead person is, in a sense, still experienced as alive. It is easy to understand this as a result of the fact that dying does not take place in a moment but is extended over a certain period. In some cases, the experience of the dead being alive goes as far as to give the impression that the person is still breathing. Nevertheless, the calm of death is the experience of definite silence in the sense of the end of speech and the absence of movement. Relatives being present in these moments may for the first time in their life have the opportunity to freely experience their love without the pressure of personal and social relations. In fact, contact with the calm of death may be a foretaste of nothingness. An argument for this may be that the calm of death

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must be protected, although it is not actually diminished by sounds coming from outside, such as traffic noise. This consideration takes me back to questions of space design. If we are considering places of silence, cemeteries will come to mind in the first instance. Cemeteries as fenced graveyards are places in which, according to European culture, dead persons should finally come to rest. According to the language of cemeteries, death means to have finally come to rest. As one reads on tombs: Here rests in peace . . . . This is a state that is even legally protected.14 It is true that the space design of the calm of death is different between southern and northern Europe. Whereas in the south the calm of death is the silence of stones, in middle and northern Europe it is much more to do with the return to nature. Hence cemeteries in southern Europe are designed like cities of the dead, whereas in middle and northern Europe they rather are designed as parks. The places where the calm of the death may be experienced most impressively as a return to nature are abandoned cemeteries which are themselves returning towards nature in an analogous way – as is the case with the famous Highgate Cemetery in London. A special type of architecture is related to that of cemeteries, the architecture of funeral parlours and of memorial sites. As examples, I would like to mention the Aussegnungshalle

FIGURE 14.1 The Old Cemetery of Darmstadt. Photo by author.

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FIGURE 14.2 The Old Cemetery of Darmstadt. Photo by author.

FIGURE 14.3 Aussegnungshalle Treptow by Axel Schultes at Treptow, Berlin. Photo by Sebastian F. Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Krematorium_interiör.jpg.

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Treptow by Axel Schultes in Treptow, Berlin and the memorial site of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Architecture of silence A book written by the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa is entitled Architecture du Silence.15 However, it does not actually fulfil what the title promises – for it is in fact a plea against a rhetorical theory of architecture and explicitly concentrates upon what can be called the elements of the art. Yet we can say that there is an architecture of silence – and that this is the architecture of churches. Churches are buildings which serve as places of prayer and of ritual devotion to God. The atmosphere of silence is therefore an essential element of Christian ritual places. The silence of ecclesiastical spaces in the first instance means an interior which is separated off from a busy and noisy world beyond. From this perspective, churches may be compared with certain other, more secular buildings. But what is special about ecclesiastical spaces is that they are not at all absolutely quiet, but rather provide through their reverberant architecture a background of silence to any spoken word and to any chanting, ringing of bells, or organ music. The built environment of such architecture of silence is not neutral in relation to the emergence of words and singing, but rather supports the sounds that arise within. This particular quality of ecclesiastical architecture becomes more visible when confronted by the architecture of so-called anechoic chambers. Constructed with the help of highly noise-absorbing materials, these chambers serve experimental purposes and are used for special recordings. In order to formulate the experiences one may have in such a room, it is useful to quote the composer John Cage because of his sensitivity to such extreme audio conditions. He says that when he was within an anechoic chamber – in this supposed place of absolute silence – he in fact heard two sounds: One was high and one was low . . . the high one was my nervous system . . . and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that . . . I was making music unintentionally continuously.16 True, it may be that the ecclesiastical architecture of silence is indebted to historical conditions, to Roman stone architecture and to the doctrine of detachment from the world. But, on the other hand, Christianity is a religion of announcement and, as we know, the Catholic papacy likes to celebrate masses in the open air. Nonetheless, ecclesiastical architecture is dedicated to Christianity as a religion of inwardness.

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FIGURE 14.4 The cathedral at Worms. Photo by author.

This is something we have to keep in mind when turning to the fact that in our times, rooms and building are designed that should explicitly serve as places of silence. They still exist in ecclesiastical contexts, although not exclusively. One will find them wherever rooms are needed for people to come to rest and reflect – and in particular for people suffering, no matter what religion they belong to. These places are to be found in hospitals, but also on university campuses, at airports, etc. It is important that these places of silence – even if they originally were built in ecclesiastical contexts – should be free of Christian symbols. An outstanding example is the Kampii Chapel in

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FIGURE 14.5 Elisabethen Stift, Darmstadt. Photo by author.

Helsinki, Finland. This chapel – on the outside surface as well as on the interior one – is constructed of jointed timber elements in such a way that the inside curved walls are smooth and unmarked by contours. Within the space there is an absence of any symbols and there are no visible structural elements – it is as if one is inside a wooden egg. One could claim that in this chapel, silence in a way becomes visible – or better, that here silence develops a synaesthetic quality. The effect is rather important, for silence corresponds to a certain way of hearing, namely listening. In German there is a special term, lauschen. Lauschen means to open one’s ears, being attentive to anything that may be heard. Lauschen is listening to silence. Thus, if any sound rises, it will be heard as articulating background silence. Visual awareness in the Kampii Chapel corresponds to this type of listening. There is no darkness and thus one is seeing – but not seeing something, neither objects nor contours, but rather brightness as such. Soft brightness is what corresponds to silence. Certainly, rooms of silence in hospitals are indebted to Christian chapels and they may – even in a restricted way – still contain Christian symbols. However, the very function of these rooms requires an abstraction from any confessional or religious symbols. They should provide a place of self-reflection for people of any origin, for human beings as such. It is interesting that what seems to be common to all religions is silence. Considering that these

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rooms – if not completely empty – should contain sparse furniture, one could say that these rooms are felt void, or rather that they allow one to become aware of nothingness. What counts is that rooms of silence provide not only the opportunity of self-reflection but also – as we have already seen through our reading of Peter Handke – the chance of relieving Sorge. From here we can make the transition to a phenomenology of silence. Silence is not just the stance of thinking about, but of experiencing nothingness.

Phenomenology of silence Silence is a paradoxical phenomenon. If we say that silence is felt nothingness, one must also say that nothingness cannot be perceived. We mentioned that there is a particular way of listening corresponding to silence as such, namely what is called in German lauschen. Listening in the sense of lauschen is an attentive hearing stretching us towards the open. But if this listening to silence should be some sort of hearing, it must be a hearing of something that is a tone or noise. Actually, one becomes aware of silence in situations in which some note or noise reveals itself out of the background of silence. Silence will be articulated by single notes or noises, or it will be grounded by background murmur. One may say with Aristotle that silence is perceived kata symbebekos, that is, implicitly. Silence is not heard as such but will be felt by transcending anything hearable. Strictly speaking, silence is something transcendent. But what we have already noticed should be kept in mind – that this transcendent silence must be felt. One cannot think silence, it must be experienced (lauschend). It is something unlimited which is actually given together with and through something definite, that is, a single note. It is precisely the definiteness and singularity of such a sound – for example, the barking of a dog during the silence of the night – that makes one perceive silence as the background of such a sound. This fact may be seen as contradicting the experience of silence as grounded by background murmur. Or should we rather say that the murmur in itself is heard silence? Yes, in a sense – for murmur represents silence by obscuring it, makes it felt by hiding it. Background murmur is like a wall behind which one feels unlimited space. Nobody, even if locked in a prison cell for years, will take it to be the world. Any confined room is perceived as a restriction of unlimited space. Silence has no centre. Listening in the sense of lauschen through which silence is perceived is bodily presence abandoning itself to expansiveness. Silence in the absence of any concentrating pole can be experienced like a gorge. There is nothing in the silence which keeps one from losing oneself. It

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is true – silence lets one also become quiet. But this is only true if silence is somehow contained – that is, if it is experienced within a quiet place which is contrasted to the noisy world out there. This fact has been verbalized in a quite sensitive way in the song of Matthias Claudius, when he says that the silence of the world is like a quiet chamber. From the point of view of this analysis, John Cage’s statement that absolute silence does not exist sounds trivial. If absolute silence is nothingness, it consequently does not exist. Actually, Cage wanted to indicate with his sentence that each space of silence gets filled, even if it is with the physiological sounds of the listener himself. But Cage was wrong in thinking that one actually hears sounds and not silence – rather awareness of silence arises in its transcending what one hears. This transcendence can be vertiginous for the listener, and this in a double sense: because of the abyss of silence, the listener may lose any orientation, become terrified and thrown back onto himself; or, quite the opposite, in transcending any sound he might joyously welcome silence as a liberation. It is the skylark who opens the heavenly space. In conclusion, let us return to the difference between quiet places and the silence of space. Quiet places are literally defined by walls which detach the

FIGURE 14.6 The toilet at Café Richard opposite Cologne cathedral, Germany. Photo by author.

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person within from the noise and the busy world outside. However, we have seen that the enclosure does not create the silence of the place, but rather articulates it by making infinite space perceivable through the transcendence of borders. Looking back, we may say that the house of silence is a paradoxical place. This has been wrongly understood by a type of mysticism that is based on an idea of ascension towards spirituality. Contrary to this, we have decided to adhere to sensuous experience through listening in the sense of lauschen. Silence is perceived at the quiet place through transcending the limits of boundaries – actually it is the feeling of infinite space. The other way around, against the background of the deeply silent space, the single sound, the whirl of voices, and finally the ephemeral world will be sensed. Returning from silence, the ephemeral is joyously welcomed. As a conclusion, let me quote again from Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows: And the toilet is the perfect place to listen to the chirping of insects or the song of the birds, to view the moon, or to enjoy any of those poignant moments that mark the change of the seasons. Here, I suspect, is where haiku poets over the ages have come by a great many of their ideas.17

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15 Silence please! A brief history of silence at the theatre1 Louise Pelletier

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n February 1997, following a performance of the Broadway musical Cats in New York, a spectator began legal proceedings against one of the actors, accusing him of having forced her to dance on stage against her will. The complainant demanded compensation for damages, claiming violation of civil rights and invasion of privacy for having forced her to become an active participant in the performance.2 At the heart of the conflict was the assumed convention that tends to treat the spectator as a silent witness to the action on stage. The same year, Offending the Audience by Peter Handke, which had caused a scandal at the time of its premiere thirty years earlier, was presented offBroadway. This anti-play went even further in shaking up the assumed unidirectional relation between performers staging a show and a gathering of silent spectators. As they entered the theatre and took their assigned places, audience members were faced with a projected image of the auditorium that gradually filled up with virtual spectators who mirrored the actual public seated in the theatre. No discernable sign marked the start of the performance, such as the rise of a curtain. Instead, four ‘Speakers’ climbed onto the stage from the hall and stood in front of a projected image of the auditorium to announce that there would be no performance. This statement caused initial confusion as the public continued to watch the mirror image of the projected auditorium filled with virtual spectators, both audiences seemingly waiting for a sign that the play would soon begin. However, the inversion of the usual visual relation, with the public itself now being looked at, contributed to the dissolution of the virtual ‘fourth wall’ of the stage and implicitly questioned the role of the spectator and his/her status in relation to the anticipated performance. As 193

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FIGURE 15.1 Offending the Audience by Peter Handke (2013), director Christian Lapointe. Source: Recto-Verso Productions.

the public remained seated, suspended in a state of perplexed anticipation, the four Speakers started uttering a litany of insults and invective aimed directly at the baffled audience. During an excruciating sixty minutes, confounded by the explicit exposure of their inaction, the passive spectators saw their habitual role exacerbated by the reversal of observer and observed. The actors took aim at the public, accusing every onlooker of stupidly waiting to be entertained, provoking a reflection on the place of the silent spectator and the very nature of the performance. Silence, as we know, is a condition that may be enforced by the authority of a place, as often happens with sacred spaces, and nowhere is it as explicit as in contemporary places of performance. The theatre as a place of social interaction has seen transformations of its configuration, particularly since the eighteenth century, that have conditioned the mediation between actors on stage and spectators – and as Handke’s play shows well, we often remain unable to speak back, even if we feel personally outraged by the action on stage. Since the beginning of modernity, numerous playwrights, directors and stage designers have sought to probe the physical distance between the audience and the actors on stage in the hope of redefining new forms of participation. But the imposition of silence in the auditorium is a rather ‘modern’ condition that reveals its dual potential – as a mode of participation, silence can either assert a passive witnessing of the action, or it can spur an

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active identification with the characters on stage and incite direct involvement in the theatrical performance. In this chapter, I will highlight various moments in the history of the theatre in which silence has either been imposed or encouraged and, more specifically, I will outline the architectural devices or strategies that have been developed to implement it. The genealogy of this alternating condition of detachment and identification between the spectator and the onstage action can be traced back to the earliest theatrical manifestations, through the evolution of architectural structures designed to accommodate such events. In Antiquity, the theatre was already more than a form of entertainment. It had its origins in early rituals in which true participation could not be detached from physical involvement in the action. Rooted first in ritual spring dances, the performance originally relied on one single actor playing two roles, life and death, while other members were active in the dance.3 No scenery was necessary, since the ritual was not a show to be watched, but an event in which everyone was a participant. The very word drama, used to describe a theatrical performance, comes from the same Greek root as dromenon, which means ritual.4 Before the construction of formal structures built for this purpose during the fifth century BCE, theatres were set up against mountainsides to take advantage of the natural topography. In the lowest area, a circular perimeter marked by stones was defined as a performance space. Women and children who were not allowed to partake in the ritual sat on the periphery, on the inclined hillside, and this improvised seating area would eventually give its name to the theatre. This is the context in which the dithyramb was held, an initiatory dance accompanied by singing in honour of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and theatre. The introduction of remote viewers observing the ritual dance was a decisive moment in the development of Greek theatre. If there had been no division between actors and spectators in the ritual, the first dramatic plays imposed a physical segregation made manifest through the evolution of architectural structures designed to accommodate such events. The dramas of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus, the fathers of Greek tragedy, for example, transformed the circular playing area into a round dance floor surrounded by rows of seats, while the actors, now a pair, were moved to a slightly raised platform behind it. Until the fourth century BCE, the theatre probably incorporated no scenery, although a few accessories and some mechanical devices were likely part of the ritual. A skene (a term that gave its origin to the word scène in French) in the form of a stone building in the back was eventually added to allow players to change costumes, thereby creating a backdrop to the action. At the time of their inception, the first theatrical performances probably did not rely on naturalistic acting, since the characters were masked and wore suits that allowed the audience members to recognize them at a great distance.5

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The large open-air structures built for the purpose of such events could contain almost the entire population of a city and would enable citizens to commune through theatrical performance. While intense feelings of pity or fear were created through the identification of viewers with performers, the physical distance imposed by the structures opened up a space of contemplation, a space in which spectators would experience powerful transformations. Steeped in ritual practices, the very condition of the theatre induced a purification of emotions, or catharsis, a phenomenon described by Aristotle as the liberation experienced by spectators during and after a dramatic performance. The physical configuration of the first theatres thus established this space of contemplation that allowed ‘the same cathartic effect on the observer as was done previously through active participation and embodied ritual’.6 In the Roman tradition, a more sophisticated type of construction was developed; under the auditorium, a complex system of corridors and staircases was deployed to facilitate access by the public, and the skene became an elaborate multi-level backstage. The changes of scenery were then introduced with the periaktoi, ‘triangular pieces of machinery that turn’ behind the openings of a fixed stage, described by Vitruvius in De Architectura (first century BCE). The representations probably became more realistic; it is known that bloody acts took place on stage, criminals were killed, prostitutes were involved in sexual acts, and gladiators fought to the death. But the Romans had a preference for satire, a variation on Greek comedies, now devoid of any religious connotation. The images depicted on the periaktoi corresponded to the type of scenery appropriate to each dramatic genre: tragedy, comedy and satire. During the Renaissance, several Vitruvian translators gave contradictory interpretations of the use and form of periaktoi, but they all thought that this mobile stage machinery was a first attempt to give a specific character to each scene related to the genre of the given show, in a unified scenic space. By the Middle Ages, the Roman theatre and its tradition of playing in locations designed for this purpose had completely disappeared. In its place, a new form of play based on biblical stories began to be produced in churches: the ‘Mystery’ plays. Presented in Latin, the liturgical drama mainly told the life of Christ, from his birth to the Passion. The theatrical site of the liturgical drama was the church itself, qualified by the narrative unfolding along a choreographed path, like the Stations of the Cross. In the church, the altar was often likened to the tomb because the first Christians used to celebrate mass above the sepulchre of a holy person, thus it became the Sepulchre of the Resurrection in liturgical plays.7 As with the rituals of Antiquity, no one was a spectator of the liturgical drama; instead, the ceremony involved the entire community of faithful parishioners. A turning point in medieval theatre was

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the replacement of Latin by vernacular languages. The performances, though still related to the Holy Scriptures, began to incorporate the history of the world, from Creation to Judgment. This key moment coincided with the emergence of the theatre from churches into the public square. When the theatre began to occupy the public domain, moral plays developed as allegories representing the temptations and sins of man. The performance modes took different configurations depending on the country. While in France and Italy the actors played on platforms set up in parks or in public squares surrounded by scaffolding, thus anticipating the auditorium, in England theatrical performances often took place on carts transported through the streets of the city, the origin of allegorical floats. However, one of the oldest documented plays in England is The Castle of Perseverance of 1425, and archival documents suggest that it was a precursor to the Elizabethan theatre’s form of staging. A circular performance area was surrounded by scaffolding, which in turn was encircled by a ditch filled with water, but no isolated stage defined any physical limit between the actors and the public, who instead shared the same space. Different scenic spots were identified on the peripheral structure, such as Heaven and Hell, but also Flesh, Greed and the World. Mounds on the edge of this scenic belt allowed some spectators to watch the performance in a sitting position, while the rest of the audience was standing in the centre, around the structure representing the Castle of Perseverance. The actors played either in front of the scaffolding or in the centre under the castle.8 This multiplicity of scenes presented simultaneously was characteristic of medieval drama, as was the absence of a division between actors and spectators. In England, it took a century and a half for these open-air circular performance venues to develop into permanent structures established specifically for theatrical performances. The English Renaissance theatre, also known as Elizabethan theatre, developed early during the reign of Elizabeth I until the prohibition of theatrical performances in London by Parliament in 1642, which led to the closure and abandonment of theatres. English Renaissance theatre had its greatest period between 1580 and 1620, with plays being presented in playhouses of circular form and central stage such as the Rose, the Swan and the Globe. The first framing elements that tended to divide the stage from the public, such as a proscenium partly covered by a roof supported by columns and the two doors giving access to the backstage, date from this period. They would introduce into the space of the theatre a new form of spatial hierarchy. The stage floor projecting forward inside the auditorium (apron stage), for example, would allow actors to cross over to a different realm outside the acting area and advance to the centre of the audience to address the public directly, momentarily stepping out of the story to explain their inner thoughts or motivation without the other characters knowing. The architectural form of

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English theatres would thus allow playwrights and actors new ways of interacting with the public. Several historians trace the genealogy of this form of theatre, lined with tiers of galleries such as those found in the Globe, to inns surrounded by multiple balconies or to bull-fighting and bear-baiting arenas. Others have argued instead that the circular form of English theatres came from a desire to revisit the configurations of Antiquity and give back to this institution a cosmological value.9 It is clear, however, that until the middle of the eighteenth century, spectators would remain vocal participants in the theatrical event, as performances tended to be tumultuous affairs and shouting was not unusual. This condition of the theatre as a place of participation and interaction between spectators and dramatic action was gradually transformed by the changes in the physical configuration of performance venues and the role of conventions guiding social interactions. While during the Renaissance the architectural structure of the theatre expressed the complex relationships between patrons and the general public in a well-choreographed spatial hierarchy, with the actors able to inhabit both the raised platform of a stage and the more fluid space of the auditorium, the essential features of the ‘modern theatre’ would appear in the first half of the seventeenth century in Italy, and a decade later in France. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium, tiers of galleries or boxes, and the ‘picture-frame’ stage, all contributed to segregating the acting area from the public. With the proscenium arch came the curtain that enabled set designers to unveil their scenery with dramatic suddenness. The advent of the stage frame (cadre de scène) with a well-defined acting area seemed to call for the performance to become the main focus of attention and implied a reorientation toward the stage of all the seats, as well as the walls separating the boxes. However, if the play area had been repositioned as the centre of attention just behind the proscenium, it took almost a century for the layout of the auditorium and the placement of seats to reflect this change. A significant exception is the court theatre of Philip IV of Spain, built in the summer palace of El Buen Retiro by the Italian Cosimo Lotti in 1632. It was the first playhouse where special care was taken to improve visibility of the stage and make it into a guiding principle. It anticipated by many decades some important features that characterized French and Italian theatres of a later period, as well as Venetian playhouses. The parquet was provided with benches parallel to the stage, with a central aisle for easy access. It was surrounded with boxes whose divisions were angled to improve sightlines toward a raised proscenium stage, and the box fronts were projected slightly beyond the edge of the gallery, again to improve visibility.10 In his Trattato sopra struttura de’teatri e scene (1676), the first ‘modern’ treatise on the architecture of the theatre, Fabrizio Carini Motta advised the placement of partitions between boxes according to the axes of sightlines in

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order to provide the best view of the stage, instead of positioning them at right angles to the balustrade, although such design decisions were sometimes overruled at the time due to social concerns. In fact, in many theatres, the most coveted seats often had a poor view of the acting area, but a good view of the auditorium. While generally in European countries the baroque stage sets were designed to offer the sovereign an ideal view of the scene, in France fashion dictated that important audience members should sit directly on the stage, as if to display them side by side with the dramatic action. As late as 1758, for example, the majority of the seats were facing each other at the Comédie française in Paris, while the most desirable seats were not in the auditorium but directly onstage, crowding the acting area and competing with the dramatic action. In other baroque theatres, the majority of spectators other than the king were condemned to a distorted view of the stage and preferred to have seats where they would have the best view of the royal box. This preference for social interaction over the visual connection to the stage reflected the importance of theatres as places par excellence for public display. The arrangement of the seats on stage and in the auditorium was irrational in terms of visibility and acoustics, but embodied the social hierarchy – and no architect in France dared challenge this tradition until the last decades of the eighteenth century.

FIGURE 15.2 Plan of the Comédie française in Paris, showing benches on the stage. Source: J.-F. Blondel, Architecture Françoise, 1752.

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The internal hierarchy of the auditorium emulated social order and allowed the participation of each individual in the community. But play-acting was no longer limited to the stage in theatres, it had become a way of behaving in public, an acknowledged form of social interaction. In his Letter to Monsieur D’Alembert (1758) on the growing role of the theatre, Jean-Jacques Rousseau characterized the eighteenth-century individual as an urban actor, while Montesquieu in his Persian Letters emphasized the reversibility of roles between actor and spectator, and the complementarity of seeing and being seen at the theatre. These social changes had obvious repercussions in the architectural design of theatres, but also in the configuration of areas of public and private life. The succession of spaces, the modulation of lighting effects and the development of the notion of character theory in architecture were directly influenced by a parallel transformation in the theatre.11 During the eighteenth century, theatrical staging was also marked by radical changes. The introduction of the oblique perspective (known as perspectiva, or scena per angolo) by Ferdinando Galli Bibiena in his treatise Architettura Civile (1711) profoundly altered the relationship between the stage and the audience. If one compares stage sets of the late seventeenth century with scenery by the Bibiena family and their followers, a remarkable shift is readily apparent. The centralized perspective constructed around a single vanishing point was replaced by more complex compositions of perspective angles, in which multiple axes of foreshortening visually drew spectators beyond the limits of the stage area. Indeed, the illusion of perspective created by the scena per angolo projected vanishing points beyond the frame of the stage and created the impression that the walls of virtual cities were projected forward, encompassing the public. The viewer’s eye was deliberately pulled in various directions to create the illusion of an infinite extension of the scenery. The illusion suggested that the stage set was spreading outward beyond the wings, above the proscenium arch and into the space of the auditorium. The composition created a sense of expansion for the spectator, precisely because the boundaries of the virtual space could not be grasped. Throughout the eighteenth century in France, transformations in the acting area, including its fluctuating boundary with the space of the spectators, were never resolved into a single, universally accepted solution. The dimensions of the proscenium arch and the stage proper, including the protruding apron stage, underwent enormous changes subject to technical and acting considerations. The most radical changes in the design of theatres were implemented by Charles de Wailly and Marie-Joseph Peyre at the Comédie française in the 1770s, where a sitting parterre appeared for the first time in an official French theatre with a royal privilege. Previously, the middle class, students and intellectuals in France had stood in the parterre throughout the

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performance. The theatre was a breeding ground for all kinds of disturbances. Montesquieu described in his eloquent style how some spectators were looking to draw attention not only from other members of the public, but also from the actors on stage with which they interacted loudly. Part of the public even took the initiative of monitoring the quality of new plays by encouraging commotion in the auditorium when a performance was deemed to be boring. They were known as la claque and could make or break a performance. One of these groups of improvised critics in Paris was led by the Chevalier de La Morlière, a Casanova of sorts and a king of mischief. Very influential in theatre circles, La Morlière’s claque was feared by everyone involved in the stage. Its authority was such that it could make a play a resounding success or a total failure even before the end of the performance. Desperate authors, uncertain of the fate of their play, would sometimes bribe La Morlière for applause. Once his group caused the complete collapse of a play simply by yawning continuously. It became so contagious that it spread through the entire audience and, by the middle of the play, even the actors on stage were yawning.12 The decision to accommodate the entire audience on seats had a direct impact on the attitude of the spectators – some may say the mood of the place – and the usual interactions during the performance. Although the middle class could now enjoy greater comfort, this led to a form of ‘torpor’ in the theatre. Many critics of the time, including Denis Diderot, Sébastien Mercier and Jean-François Marmontel, described the changes in public behaviour. The new practice contributed to the taming – and ultimately the silencing – of the audience. In a letter to Madame Riccoboni, Diderot complained about the cold silence that already paralysed the spectators and mourned the tumultuous involvement of the audience that had characterized the theatre during the first half of the eighteenth century. Even though the play could sometimes hardly start because of the uproar, Diderot writes that this was the most favourable disposition for a poet, because when a passage of the play pleased the crowd and the excitement reached its apex, the spectators would ask for it to be repeated again and again. It was, Diderot concluded, the true ecstasy of pleasure.13 Seating the spectators in the parterre cooled down their involvement, and they began to present themselves more as façades, displaying their social status, wealth and taste in the way they dressed. In the new Comédie française, the vertical distribution of boxes inherited from the Italian tradition was replaced by a series of open and receding balconies with low partitions. This new arrangement, which allowed viewers simultaneously to see the action on stage and to be seen, was warmly applauded. The social hierarchy in the theatre was no longer based on proximity to the royal presence, but on the visibility of the stage and the vertical position

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inside the auditorium. Individuals of the same social class were grouped in sections of the theatre isolated by physical dividers reinforcing the social order. A few years after De Wailly and Peyre had introduced such hierarchical divisions, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux created a similar spatial segregation in the theatre at Besançon, although his reorganization went even further – the parterre traditionally occupied by people from the middle class was replaced by a parquet reserved for important guests, so they could be seen from everywhere. Those who traditionally had occupied the parterre were sent to a gallery located above the third tier of boxes at the top of the theatre, known as the paradis. To maintain the social order, specific prices were allocated to each category of seat. Ledoux argued that this way, the poorer class known as the ‘pedestrians’ would no longer disturb with their smell the richer class, who arrived by carriage.14 Unlike traditional theatres where a fundamental distinction between order (in the boxes) and disorder (in the pit) embodied the social distinction between the nobility and the people, at the Comédie française and in Ledoux’s theatre at Besançon, each spectator was positioned within a well-defined social order. Although the king was no longer the focal point of the architectural composition, spectators could find their place in the social hierarchy as they occupied a specific position in the built environment.

FIGURE 15.3 Section through the auditorium of the theatre in Besançon. Source: C.-N. Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation, 1804.

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The new seating arrangements and the general distribution at the Comédie française and the theatre at Besançon shook many social conventions. By exposing to view all spectators, replacing the standing parterre by a parquet with fixed seating and providing clear sight lines, the architects had influenced the social behaviour of spectators. These architectural changes to the interior of the theatre touched not only the interaction between spectators in the auditorium, they also established a new relationship between the audience and the action on stage. The proscenium, which previously was regarded as a transitional space between the two areas, became a more definitive threshold that could not be passed through without disturbing the theatrical illusion. The spectators were no longer allowed on stage – although the proscenium arch continued to contain royal boxes in Besançon – and the position of the actors was carefully controlled. An actor could not cross the implicit limit of the proscenium without symbolically changing space, as he or she could not come too close to the stage sets without interfering with the perception of scale and thus contradicting the perceptual coherence of the overall decor. The quest for greater illusion on stage during the second half of the eighteenth century was accompanied by a more definite segregation between the space of performance and the audience. A century later, in 1876, the complete darkening of the auditorium at Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth created a new kind of boundary between actors and audience inside the theatre. With its double proscenium encompassing the orchestra pit and the repetition of the colonnade all through the auditorium, Wagner’s theatre contributed to further define a physical boundary between the auditorium and the stage, what he called the ‘mystic abyss’. Gottfried Semper, the architect who developed with Wagner the architectural concept for the new theatre, defined the mystische Abgrund as a symbolic void separating the ideal from the real: ‘It makes the spectator imagine the stage is quite far away, though he sees it in all the clearness of its actual proximity; and this in turn gives rise to the illusion that the persons appearing on it are of larger, superhuman stature.’15 The double frame of the stage was repeated within the space of the auditorium, using a series of lateral walls projecting inwards that served as concealed entrances into the theatre. Architecturally, these successive ‘walls’ or frames imply that the spectators occupy an extended threshold – as if hidden within the theatrical fourth wall, the viewer could become a true ‘voyeur’. By visually isolating the public, the Festspielhaus opened the door to the private, individual, and unidirectional vantage point of mainstream contemporary theatres.16 Silenced and plunged into darkness behind the invisible fourth wall of the stage, the audience could easily be transformed into a silent witness to an action in which it took no active part. In various theatres until the beginning of the twentieth century, however, the public continued to oscillate between two different roles: the mute observer

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and the social actor. Although the scenic space may have seemed definitely separated from that of the auditorium as early as the last decades of the eighteenth century, the architectural ornaments and distribution continued to suggest that these two realms could be unified or even reversed. Like the Festspielhaus, older theatres such as the Opera of Versailles (1765–1770) by Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Ledoux’s theatre at Besançon and De Wailly and Peyre’s Comédie française all used a colonnade around the auditorium, which extended in the stage area, thus continuing the spatial organization of the theatre and suggesting a physical link between the two areas. The cross-section of the theatre at Besançon even shows in the back of the stage the mirror image of the auditorium, thus assimilating the audience’s space to that of the performance. Ledoux’s engraving entitled Coup d’oeil du théâtre de Besançon (which means either a glimpse at the theatre or a glimpse from the theatre) represents the auditorium, which is reflected in the iris and pupil of a gigantic eye. The eye becomes the first frame through which we see the world. What the all-seeing eye perceives, however, is not the stage but the auditorium, suggesting an implicit reversibility of the roles of viewer and viewed. The mirror image and the continuity of the colonnade between the auditorium and the stage puts the public simultaneously in two opposite positions – that of the observer watching the performance, and that of being observed by the actors,

FIGURE 15.4 ‘A glance at the Besançon theatre.’ Source: C.-N. Ledoux, L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des mœurs et de la législation, 1804.

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anticipating by almost two centuries the now troubling performance of Peter Handke. Since the onset of modernity, theatre designers have been dealing with conflicting conditions: on the one hand, the desire of authors, actors and directors to involve the spectators in an active form of participation in order to transform their lives; and on the other, the audience’s social instinct to respect and take refuge in the distance established by the architecture of conventional theatres. Silence has played a role in both of these impulses; at certain times it has supported an active identification with the action on stage and the inducement of a form of catharsis, while at others it has indicated a taming of the audience. More recently, silence has served as a tool of alienation to stir spectators into recognition of the entrenched passivity of the voyeur. In the end, a proper consideration might not lead to favouring one condition over another, but rather to the understanding that silence is never a neutral condition. A powerful tool for those who know how to frame its appropriate role, silence should be treated as a condition that endows dramatic action with meaning and consequence.

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16 Vessels of place: Auditory landscapes, cross-cultural echoes in south-west Victoria Paul Carter

S . . . No sound . . . No sound . . . No sound JAMES DAWSON 1

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n 2014 and 2015 I listened to the Mount Widderin Caves in south-west Victoria, Australia. To explore the sonorities of a cave is already to experience a conceptual divide – is the ‘deep country of hearing’, as Michel Leiris puts it, ‘the cartilaginous cavern that constitutes its organ’, or the ‘pockets hollowed out of the terrestrial crust whose emptiness makes them into resonating drums for the slightest of sounds’?2 These cave soundings were pursued as part of a project to build an auditorium for echoes: but here, too, the same existential abyss opened up – is the echo an architectural trick of the kind Gilbert White described, speculating that a wall built opposite ‘the centrum phonicum’, the location of the speaker, would amuse gentleman and friends with the reproduction of their own ‘prattle’3, or an attitude, a modality of hearing, a self-hollowing-out able to detect beyond narcissistic selfreinforcements a calling to come that carries us back, according to David Levin’s Heideggerian reading, to ‘the song of the elemental silence’?4 Levin hopes that, by listening well, the resonances and echoes we detect can ‘confirm the interconnectedness of all beings and already bring us into communication with all beings’5 – but, clearly, if we accept Toni Morrison’s 207

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aphorism ‘we do language. That may be the measure of our lives’,6 then, practically speaking, Levin’s human beings at least have tongues, ears and dispositions of their own. They answer back, or not, as the case may be. In south-west Victoria, the frozen echoes of their voices are preserved, for example, in the Djab Wurrung and Dhauwurd Wurrung (Gundidjmara) wordlists printed in Australian Aborigines (1881).7 From my examination of these vocabularies – admittedly unorthodox, as it takes their environmental performance into account – I conclude that the most accurate transcription of their sense is in terms of an echoic mimetic model of communication, where resonances and echoes are selected according to a kind of cross-cultural phonological feedback which, stabilized as a meeting place, might indeed be characterized as a conversational auditorium for echoes.8 But, not to get carried away with these séance-like processes, let me turn to the imagined listening solicited by ‘the place of silence’ and ask whether it perpetuates a conceptual silence of its own. In a nice incursion into Anglophone-centric discussions of different cultural experiences of sound, Sydney-based performance artist Yuji Sone commented: ‘Since John Cage, we have been taught that silence is a myth. But is it possible to detect “silence”, not as “no-sound”, but as the unhearable sound between different cultures?’ adding that ‘This type of “silence” can be found in linguistic translations’9 – but, also, I am asking, here, where the drive to normalize place around architecture suggests (at least in Australia) the marginalization of a non-architectural tradition, one not predicated on the metaphysicalized opposition of harmony (construed as proto-architectural Pythagorean proportionality) and silence (as a chaos here conceived as formless rather than creative).10 Sone’s point has remarkable resonance in our situation because, as the epigraph indicates, the Aboriginal people who worked on Dawson’s sheep property spoke languages in which the sibilant S was not marked. Here is a supremely rich instant of an ‘unhearable sound’, as one is bound to wonder what Kaawirn Kuunawarn or Yarruun Papurr Tarneen made of the question ‘What is your word for silence?’11 As Dawson’s variable orthography indicates, he and his daughter faced similar problems in trying to hear what was said to them. These unhearable sounds are cultural but may also be disciplinary. How, in a sense, will architecture hear a culture that does not cultivate what a contemporary of White’s calls the ‘centrum phonicampticum’, the object or place from which the echo is returned? In particular, how would a culture of echoes be imagined composed entirely, as it were, of hollows? The same writer explains: ‘Echo, in Architecture, is a Term applied to certain Kinds of Vaults and Arches, most commonly of elliptical and parabolical Figures, used to redouble Sounds, and produce artificial Echoes.’12 How might the overflowing that Wordsworth records be recognized as a place-making feature, as an acoustic accompaniment comparable to Keats’s sea eternally whispering – or

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(again) to Wordsworth’s fantasy of perfect harmony: ‘Thus lived he by LochLeven’s side / Still sounding with the sounding tide.’13 To advance the polemic further: among architects renowned for their interest in the points of convergence between composing with sound and designing with space, the attempt to find a shared visual and aural volumetrics has produced at best a trompe l’oreille, a centrum phonicampticum that simulates overflowing. In Spatial Sound, Edgard Varèse reflected on ‘the parabolic and hyperbolic trajectories of sound’ in scores such as Amériques and Ionisation, commenting that the impression of ‘sound masses moulded as though in space . . . was still only a trompe l’oreille, an aural illusion, so to speak’.14 Similarly, when Varèse’s Poème electronique was broadcast in the Philips Pavilion, the impression of a direct relationship between Xenakis’s ‘volumetric architecture’ and the composer’s ‘moving sound’ was only a trompe l’oeil in the sense that the physical form, while it looked like an acoustic sculpture, was not in any sense an echoic hollow with a distinctive sonic signature. W. Tak, who was in charge of the sound installation, emphasized the ‘difference between the “acoustic” environment and the real one’, or ‘the discrepancy between auditory and visual space’.15 Self-consciously audial architecture of this kind cannot produce the sound it imagines – it offers a volumetric metaphor but its architectural acoustics remain functionalist.16 Xenakis made a connection between ‘the hyperbolic paraboloids of the [Philips] pavilion and the structure of string glissandi in his composition Metastasis’, but, as Denzil Cabrera notes, the connection is conceptual, not auditory: ‘It is easy to see the pavilion as a wave frozen in its dance, but the graphical representation of the glissandi differs in that time is made a spatial dimension. In Metastasis, the lines represent movement; in the Philips Pavilion they trace static forces.’ In its banishment of echo, even this most radical of auditoria remained tied to a musical conception of sound, one that predicated ‘pure auditory experience’ on the possibility of silence.17 Le Corbusier described the pavilion as ‘a stomach, the audience surrounded by “four hundred acoustical mouths” ’, and, while digestion is occurring, ‘One does not listen to the sound, one lives it’.18 Yet, both inside the composition and at its end, this oceanic immersion had its shore – the silence which, as Cage observed, in musical discourse provided pause or punctuation or in architecture gave definition ‘to a predetermined structure or to an organically developing one’.19 ‘I admit that I perhaps have some flair for acoustics’, Le Corbusier is reported as saying.20 One of his assistants recalls: ‘to refine the acoustics for the main auditorium for his League of Nations Competition scheme Le Corbusier made a foil tray the same shape as the plan of the auditorium, filled it with water and watched the behaviour of waves generated as they moved across it.’21 More solid evidence of the architect’s flair is Flora Samuel’s experience in the church

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at La Tourette: ‘when standing in the church I sang out one note. The result was astonishing. The space completely transformed. The sound bounding and rebounding around the hard surfaces for about 12 seconds before dissolving into the quiet hum that is the church.’22 Certainly, an auditorium for echoes has been successfully devised, but the effect is like the ‘Echo upon Echo’ that Francis Bacon described three centuries earlier, whose repetition gradually dying away he compares to the multiplication of images when two mirrors face each other: ‘many such Super-reflexions, till the Images of the Objects fail, and die at last.’23 In comparison with ‘the quiet hum that is the church’, which postegological ‘just listening’ apprehends when ‘the sonorous atmosphere as a whole begins to grow’,24 Le Corbusier’s interior reinforces a sense of selfpresencing that, again, is anticipated by Bacon, observing: ‘As the Voice goes round the Person who speaks, so does the Echo; for there are many Backechoes, as well as Front ones.’25 From his ‘early Purist still-life paintings of bottles, wine glasses, guitars and other hollow concave forms’, Le Corbusier, according to Robert McCarter, ‘came to define architecture as a vessel of space for inhabitation’, and the house as ‘a bottle-like volume to contain the family’.26 Remembering John Dewey’s distinction, ‘The eye is the sense of distance . . . but sound itself is near, intimate [and] the ear is the emotional sense’,27 and recalling Le Corbusier’s paintings of ‘massive, organic, concave, hollow, spaceenclosing volumes, such as seashells, bone sections and eroded stones’,28 it would be perverse to deny that the architect appreciated the resonance architecture gave to silence, and the possibility of hearing there what Ricardo L. Castro, writing of the architecture of Rogelio Salmona, describes as ‘the resonance of the emotions’29 – but the hum, T. S. Eliot’s murmuring shell of time, or what may be intimated by calm, is a physical property of containment rather than representative of any kind of echolocative aesthetic. In contrasting this architectural tradition with a non-architectural ‘inhabitation’ of place, no essentialist binarism is intended – rather, a profound difference of inflection, between a drive to interiority and the uncontainable call of the outside. It was always widely understood that traditional Australian Aboriginal cultures built shelters as was needed; their impermanence was logically related to the seasonal circuit made of the territory.30 As it happens, in our area, to the south-west of Mount Widderin and west of the coastal town of Warrnambool, the same lava flows that produced the distinctive lava tube caves also supplied stones used to engineer the wetlands for eel production, creating ‘the economic basis for the development of a settled society with villages of stone huts’,31 but this probably does not affect the general point that the primary ‘inhabitation’ was ‘country’, the regional circuit itself created and regulated by the spirit ancestors.32 The habit of decorating the insides of bark mia-mias, or temporary shelters, with graphic novel-style depictions of cultural and environmental events is a further reminder that dwelling involved symbolic,

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as well as material, place making. The appointed custodians of an environment that seemed to shadow those who hunted and gathered across it were, presumably, responsible for looking after its spirits, whose persistence in time was registered most directly through sounds. James Dawson, author of Australian Aborigines (1881), reports another lava cave nearby at Mount Rouse, where ‘a sorceress well known in the Western district under the name of White Lady’ was said to have been born, her bones being buried there when she died.33 But whether she visited Kalor/Mount Rouse for ceremonial purposes is unknown. In understanding how local people might have conceptualized echoing places, the wordlists in Australian Aborigines offer suggestive detail. In Djabwurrung, Gnang’guyuuk/Gnawuurn nuung, the word for ‘sound’ is used for ‘echo’;34 in Gundidjmara, the equivalent term for ‘echo’, Wung, means ‘hearing’.35 However, elsewhere, the word Gnang is translated as ‘mouth’.36 In combination, the Djabwurrung words have more subtle connotations – ‘Gnang’ is also found in Gnang guutch, meaning ‘breath’; likewise, the dialectally similar word for ‘breath’ is Gnaawuurn kupa wan.37 The Gundidjmara word is also evocative in combination – the word for ‘chiefess’ is Wung’ee’heaar, meaning ‘listen to the woman’.38 According to the same principle, Warn wung yitt means ‘regent’ (as one who stands in for the king and communicates his messages).39 These lexical reveries need to be treated with some scepticism – orthographical and phonological white noise surely makes any certain conclusion difficult. But if anything can be distilled from this constellation of meanings, it is that ‘echo’ sits in the midst of a semantic clustering whose root sense is a sounding or voicing that one must heed.40 The meaning of the name of the Mount Widderin Caves is said to be unknown.41 In his study of Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1800–1900, I. D. Clark concluded: Caves and sink holes featured prominently in the lives of Aboriginal people – they were often believed to be the abode of malevolent creatures and spirits and some were associated with important ancestral heroes, and traditional harming practices [notably in the form of human abduction and imprisonment]. Some were important in the after-death movement of souls to their resting places.42 The current owner of the property where the Mount Widderin Caves lie states that the ‘Locals were told about them by Aboriginal people of the district when Skipton was founded in 1839, but the Aboriginals never went into them’.43 Perhaps this was due to religious prohibitions or perhaps the air was too foul – when the Aboriginal Protector, George Augustus Robinson, visited the caves in 1843, entering them and drawing plans, he found they provided an important ‘maternity cave’ for the endemic (and now critically endangered)

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Southern bent-wing bat. It is an intriguing fact that twenty-three years later in 1866, the bats ‘disappeared . . . and never returned’.44 I have associated this with the commencement of what seems to have been a unique regional practice, the use of the caves for concerts, but intrusive guano extraction may have been to blame. Philip Chauncy, another local resident, visiting the Tarragal Caves, located south of Byaduk in the same lava flow country, commented on ‘vast numbers of bats, whose whirring, whizzing noise was probably that which the natives attributed to some supernatural being’,45 and my sense is that the local people not only knew these caves well (the entrance to them via the so-called ‘Alice in Wonderland’ hole is concealed in a collapsed section of the lava tube formation, and but for the rumorous swarming of the bats might have gone unnoticed) but knew them to be a kind of home. On naïve onomatopoeic grounds, Widderin, the name, surely refers to the whirring of thousands of bats.46 As for the cultural significance of this, perhaps Chauncy was right – Dawson refers to a haunted cave on the south-west Victorian coast called Tarn wirring, translating the name as ‘road of the spirits’,47 but the term wirring is elsewhere translated as ‘noise’, and tarn occurs in compounds meaning respectively ‘trail’ and ‘rainbow’, both perhaps with the sense of crossing over.48 The idea of listening to Mount Widderin Caves emerged, then, from a meditation in which the place of silence was scrutinized as a conceptual foreclosing on the fact that the world is never quiet and that, in certain hollows, its eternal whisperings might be sensed not as an after-effect of human presence, but as the pre-articulate flow out of which the voice is lifted. The unique local tradition of using the caves (in particular, the second of the two hollowed-out interiors known colloquially as ‘The Ballroom’) for dances and concerts might suggest an informal awareness of this. The recordings we made in September 2015 certainly captured a diffused resonance that participants variously described as warm, supportive and animating. A configuration of twelve microphones arranged in a hemisphere approximated natural, in-the-round listening. Played back later on a similarly configured twelve-loudspeaker array, the listener in the centre who closed his or her eyes experienced a wonderful trompe l’oreille. Oddly, the Djabwurrung word for ‘cave’, Yeitchmir, is translated as ‘close the eyes’, and the name of the White Lady’s cave, Yatt mirng or ‘white eye’, may carry similar overtones.49 In another, digitally arrived-at analogue model, we conducted a laser survey of the interiors, collecting enough data to build a 3D model of the cave complex. The reconciliation of the different passes produced excellent visualizations, and we were able to 3D print a scale model of the caves – the extruded hollows, one slightly larger than the other, the two connected by a shallow archway, uncannily resembled human lungs. But these techniques of documentation, while they might formally reproduce the auditorium and its acoustic

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atmosphere, really told us little about the experience of listening.50 A listening that is open to what American musicologist F. Joseph Smith calls ‘the fundamental echos’ is participative. It is the attitude of attention on the edge of answering the call. Above all – and this is where the trompe l’oreille fails – it is an orientation. ‘Unless there already is a sharing of world there can be no communication nor communing’, writes Smith – sustaining the babble of everyday speech, there is what he calls the ‘a priori of silent speech’. We attend to this silent speech when we listen and ‘Without this existential hearing there can be no “communication”, no sharing of world, no communing with the other’.51 Anthropologist Roy Wagner translates Smith’s attitude into an interpersonal praxis. Meditating on the significance of bats in so-called totemic thought, he posits a ‘genuine semiotics’ in which humans would listen for themselves in conversation, by this echolocation learning about the limits of communication: ‘It is because sound is not meaning but the meaningfulness of direction that allows the bat to listen to itself as a navigational vector.’ 52 From this point of view, places exist in different states of resonance, more or less realizing their sonorous potential. Their sounding cannot be measured using a Pythagorean classification stretched between the negative of noise and the desirable ideal of perfect reproduction. On an earlier recording trip in December 2014, our group split in two. As a result, we were lucky enough to record a thunderstorm in two places: in the natural amphitheatre below the so-called Chimney Pots (Grampians/Gariwerd), and forty kilometres south at the sunken, earlike entrance to Yatt mirng, the White Lady’s cave. Naturally, the reverberations of the thunder were impressive,53 but reflecting on the experience now, I wonder whether a prejudice against the auditory picturesque prevented us grasping the meaning of what we were hearing and feeling. ‘The live word that we speak to one another every day’ is, as Smith remarks, ‘a sound word . . . it communicates sonorously’, and the environmental counterpart of this ‘fundamental echos . . . as sound, takes in everything from the tumultuous roar of the ocean and the grandeur of a summer cloudburst to the specifically musical tonos of Greek music.’54 In a way, a sonorous passage or overflow was experienced between the recording sites, which, if we could have seen it, would have looked like a gust of wind skittering across a sheet of water. What we heard was not a voice but a vibration, not speech bits a priori, and it seems that yet another expression of colonial enclosure involved the entrapment of sound in a semiotic either/or, for the Djabwurrung word Muurndall55 not only signifies ‘buzz’ but ‘thunder’, while the presumably related Gundidjmara word Muurn is explained as ‘sky’, Muurnong as ‘cloud’ or ‘sky’ and Muurnaeneung as ‘heaven’, perhaps with the sense of cover, canopy or skin.56 How does it come about that the thunder is associated with Pirnmeheeal, ‘a gigantic man, living above the clouds’, whose voice is ‘listened

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to with pleasure, as it does good to man and beast, by bringing rain, and making grass and roots grow for their benefit’, but the eponymous Muuruup is cast as the devil, visiting ‘the earth in the form of lightning’, destroying trees and killing people? Dawson suggests the answer when he writes: ‘the aborigines say that the missionaries and government protectors have given them a dread of Pirnmeheeal; and they are sorry that the young people, and many of the old, are now afraid of a being who never did any harm to their forefathers.’57 In a recapitulation of the mythical Fall, the Adamic language of Jupiter Tonans, a fundamental echos that communicated through the sympathetic vibrations it set up in the human ear and frame, yields to the vulgar language of fable and fabulous acts – semiotically enclosed, rival voices fight and die.58 In a typical strategy of psychic colonization, the indigenous harmonization of human and non-human interests is demonized, Pirnmeheeal and Muuruup lumped together. The Scottish Clearances and the English Enclosure Acts (with their proliferation of gentlemen’s parks) were not only acts of human theft, they were an attack on sonic biodiversity. They drained the swamps of sonorousness (tremulous, overflowing) and instituted environments characterized by silence or the monotone of the sheep. But the repressed comes back – in Victoria in the form of the Bunyip, this notable spirit that nineteenth-century commentators sought to trivialize but which, as Charles Mountford pointed out long ago, is a regional variant of the better-known Rainbow Serpent. In Westernport Bay, near Melbourne, ‘its groanings and bellowings were heard at certain times by all the people of a tribe when they encamped near a lagoon, or deep water-holes, or by the seashore’.59 The Ngarrindjeri people, near the mouth of the Murray, had their own spirit animal called Mulgewanke, whose sound, according to the Rev. George Taplin, resembled ‘the boom of a distant cannon, or the explosion of a blast’. ‘Sometimes, however,’ he added, ‘it is more like the sound made by the fall of a huge body into deep water’.60 Another equivalent figure is the south-west Western Australian figure Wagyl or Waakal. Nyungar people say: ‘Waakal gave us our knowledge about Nyungar and our relationships, responsibilities and obligations to one another. The Creator gave us our katitjin about the animals, plants, bush medicines, trees, rivers, waterholes, hills, gullies, the stars, moon, sun, rocks and seasons, and their interconnectedness in the web of life.’61 Nyungar people believe that ‘the Waugal dominates the earth and the sky and makes the koondarnangor (thunder), babanginy (lightning) and boroong (rain). During the Nyitting, it created the fresh waterways such as the bilya/beelier (river), pinjar (swamps, lakes) and ngamma (waterhole).’62 Obviously, these cosmic spirits of place underwrite an ontology of dwelling that has no need for additional protection. A feature of the voice of the Rainbow Serpent in all its different regional guises is its association with

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water. Typically, Waakyl, Ngalod63 or the Bunyip sound like a waterfall or a gurgling creek after rain – or even, in coastal situations, like Keats’s quiring sea-nymphs heard in the ‘Cavern’s Mouth’. As Keats intuits, whispering of this kind lies outside a sound classification pitched between ‘uproar rude’ and ‘cloying melody’.64 Its essential attribute is not to die away but through continuous repercussion to persist softly. Its human counterpart is not the singer or the orator occupying a kind of centrum phonicum, but a group of people talking among themselves, ideally around a campfire. On a more intimate scale, it is the sound we hear holding a shell to the ear. In this vein, Walt Whitman describes how the ocean breaking on the sand ‘with slowmeasured sweep, with rustle and hiss and foam, and many a thump as of low bass drums’ evokes the echo of ‘half-caught voices’ and inspires his own ‘garrulous talk’.65 I have made a case elsewhere for an even closer identification of placing with water sounding. In the indigenous toponymy of the Western District of Victoria, the Bunyip is associated with the lip of the waterhole – that is, with the topographical membrane that causes the silent water to flutter and stutter and break into sound. A place of this kind, defined as the opening of a passage, possesses fluency because of its double character: it is both a bank and a channel. Two lakes divided by a bank come to be joined when the Bunyip leaves the bank, forming a channel across the country.66 Articulation, the jointing of formerly isolated units into a kind of regional story, is due to overflow, an irregularly seasonal phenomenon that transforms the environment it knits together. Waugl or Bunyip or Mulgewanke have in Aboriginal ontology the power of home making; they are architects who, in another context, might be described as making room for space to appear. They are place makers in a primary sense, and the space thus cleared and made free, ‘namely within a boundary, Greek peras’ is, as Jeff Malpas argues, the horizon of our mortality – ‘death is the limit that opens up the “space” within which our lives can be lived’.67 And this, I suggest, gives a very different valency to the colonial sensation of those unexplained sounds always dying away inexplicably. They were, indeed, a boundary, but not one that required defensive walls. The form of them was like a bow wave and its reflection coming back from the shore. In Dawson’s anecdote ‘The Bunyip’, one of the brothers, who has taken eggs from the centre of a lake near Mount William (in the Grampians), is wading towards the shore: When returning to the shore, he heard a rush of water behind him, and saw the water-fowls in front of him hurrying along the water as if frightened. At the same time, the bottom of the marsh became so soft that he stuck in the mud and could not go forward. A great wave overtook him and carried him back to the nest, where a large bunyip caught him in its mouth.68

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Here, again, the Bunyip and his environment are characterized by a power of overflowing. Overflowing is both the lifting up into non-egological listening and the overwhelming fact of mortality. It defines human limits. In fact, many accounts from different parts of Australia might be given to show that the voice of this ancestral place maker is received as the Law. Glossing a wanampi story told by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people in the Western Desert, Klapproth observes: ‘The voice of the rainbow serpent [which emerges as a threatening roar from a hole in the ground] heard in this story is the voice of Tjukurpa. It is this same voice, too, that admonishes people of the Ernabella region to keep their cultural values strong, to adhere to their traditional beliefs and social practices.’ And, as Klapproth documents, the efficacy of the serpent’s voice is inseparable from its voicing, from its incorporation into story-telling.69 In Aboriginal cultures, places may be sung into being; the occasion of this may be a sand painting or board painting. Drawing, marking, dotting are accompanied by the low murmur of the artist saying over the story that is forming in the design. This is likely to be a group activity, and at a climactic moment the rustle of creative activity might swell and become thunderous. Geoffrey Bardon, teacher-instigator of the Western Desert art movement at Papunya in 1971–72, recalls ‘the veritable flood of brilliant paintings’ produced when a shed was made available where the men could paint together: ‘the men in groups about the darkened cave-like interior of the galvanized iron circle of a shed, singing and roaring out to their creations and attaining a confraternity of four tribes; forms irradiating into new forms, and conceptions of place and subject matters being set down definitively.’ And in a further evocation of the painting room as a cave, Bardon adds: ‘I recalled fissures of light breaking through the edges and perimeters of the high ceilinged domelike dark of where we were and paints being mixed and subjects being discussed by dozens of men.’70 Perhaps the no-longer-practised rock art was conducted in a similar way, the primary orientation to place being auditory and haptic. The reverberation of the cave and the character of the motif and its execution were, perhaps, correlated or exhibited a kind of echoic mimicry. Contemporary sonic investigations of palaeolithic art propose similar correlations. In a recent interview with Nature, archaeologist Rupert Till mentions a colleague who claims to ‘locate the paintings in complete darkness by using his voice to gauge the resonance of the spaces’.71 The premise is that in palaeolithic art ‘a significant degree of correlation’ exists ‘between the location of the reverberant spaces and the presence of paintings’. But, as David Lubman stresses, without a more systematic acoustic study that can differentiate between the sound reflection associated with any hard nonporous stone wall and the more localized phenomenon of reverberance, ‘which occurs when sound lingers long after an initiating action has been

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completed’, it is hard to know whether these artists were mapping the silence for sonic hotspots, navigating the dark aurally.72 As regards the Gundidjmara identification of breath with mouth,73 the stencilled hands formed by blowing prepared ochre pigment around the outline of the hand, common in the rock art in the Grampians/Gariwerd, are an extreme case of resonance, the human hollow and the environmental hollow fused in an image of touch.74 So much for technique, but what of the meaning of these auditoria for echoes? To return to the conceptual fissure identified at the beginning – where is the act of listening located? Is the place of silence interior or exterior? The evidence of these meditations around Mount Widderin Caves is that a fundamental echos exists that is intermediate, an overflowing – think of it as the mouth of the cave – that provides an orientation to country, in the Aboriginal sense of place of self- and collective identification. Not simply a volume, it is an echolocative vessel, a passage that assists wayfinding. I mentioned earlier the curved sheets of bark Aboriginal peoples in Victoria used as ceilings and as surfaces to prepare and etch. Although only two bark drawings have survived, their production into colonial times is reported from many parts of Victoria, as well as Tasmania.75 The best-documented bark etching, from near Lake Tyrell in Victoria’s northern Mallee country, shows many scenes of everyday life, as well as a turbulent tress of water that seems to represent an overflowing. This same motif has also been interpreted as a depiction of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.76 Like the preparation for mouth painting, the process of removing a section of bark from a tree, curing and blackening its inner surface over a fire, and then, with a sharpened bone, scoring into the carbonized surface to expose the white cambium was timeconsuming and exacting. By the time that the Lake Tyrrell etching was produced, paper was available,77 so it is likely that the bark etching was not simply an etching on bark but of bark. Christine Watson reports that, in another, possibly related, practice of making images, Kutjungka people, whose country is the Balgo area of the great Sandy Desert, understand engraving, painting and dancing as ‘Actions of beating, stamping, poking and striking the ground’ through which a ‘two-way communication’ is established between humans and ‘the conscious spiritual powers they say are present within the earth witnessing [their] actions’. Striking ‘impacts on the sentient land, setting up vibrations within it, and calls on the Ancestral presences to witness what is happening’.78 In this case, when the Lake Tyrrell artist draws an ngargee (corroboree or ceremony), with men brandishing what James Dawson refers to as ‘sticks for beating time’, a sympathetic vibration is implied, haptically amplified by the coarse, stringy texture of the inner bark. But the ground of sound is not foundational in this way; as an act of listening, it can never yield to ‘a principle supposed to be soundless’.79 Like Gilbert White’s echo, it is a measure of nearness that defines the listening self

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as on the way. Directionality in this sense is vertical as well as circumambient or, as our twelve-microphone array found, hemispherical. Presumably these drawings were made sitting on the ground. Afterwards though, they were raised into position to form a ceiling or ‘cupola’, as Brough Smyth puts it. Overroofing sleep, they suggested a dream passage to the sky, or, more exactly, they gave form to the other half of the hollow. As Mowaljarli (1928–96), a Ngarinyin elder born at Kunmunya on the Kimberley coast, north-west Australia, has explained, ‘Everything under Creation is represented in the soil and in the stars. Everything has two witnesses, one on earth and one in the sky.’ Properly conducted life conforms to the lessons drawn from the stories discerned in the order of the stars: ‘Everything is represented in the ground and in the sky.’80 The role of sacred things (places, ceremonies and objects) is to show this: ‘Mirrors of a cosmic order, they are marked with the stellar position of law identities in the Milky Way.’81 But it turns out that we have a local witness to this sense of the hollow as a hearkening to the end of the farthest echo82 – the Bunyip. Dawson provides the surprising information that ‘The coal sack of the ancient mariners – that dark space in the milky way near the constellation of the Southern Cross – is called “torong”, a fabulous animal, said to live in waterholes and lakes, known by the name of bunyip.’83 The environmental figure of overflowing is associated with the celestial, but cave-like, dark overhead. It is an architectural hollow that accompanies the traveller everywhere. Inscribed into its surface are the exact coordinates of a here and now that also flows. In this sense, the Milky Way is called simply barnk, ‘the big river’.84 So, we might speculate, the auditorium for echoes is a vessel, a kind of cosmic seashell always close to the listening ear. It is interesting in this context that torong, the word for the sky Bunyip, was also used by Gundidjmara speakers to signify ‘bark’ in the sense of ship – Dawson reported that in one Gundidjmara dialect the word was used to mean steamship.85 What thought association is at work here? Perhaps a clue is to be found in yet another application of the word, to a ‘Trough for holding water’.86 The intuition linking all these ideas is that of the hollow that conveys from one place to another. The waterhole is torong but also the creature that inhabits the waterhole; it is a hollow in the landscape where water is caught and conveyed. It is both basin and channel. Like a ship, it both moves and is stable; conveying objects from one place to another while staying unchanged, it makes a bow wave. The lip marks a movement from one kind of passage to another, a fluency of translation. The waterhole carries water across. It is a hollow in the flow, not still and reflective but streaked with current and audibly gurgling as it joins channels. Whatever the auditorium of echoes may be, it is a vessel on a river inside which is another river.

17 Attunement and silence Alberto Pérez-Gómez

G

iven the disregard with which contemporary humankind treats its environment, subjecting nature to exploitation by nation states and corporations, and urban contexts to more benevolent yet equally real indifference, it is important to emphasize the crucial role of the physical environment, of cities and their architecture, for human consciousness itself. Mistakenly identifying consciousness with inner attention, we may think that we live in our screens, that we actually are our avatars in social media, that telecommunication is truly communication. It isn’t. Human communication is primarily oral, gestural, erotic and embodied – other modes like writing and digital codes render information but can never fully reproduce such communication. We may think that all that matters is what we can represent, verbally or instrumentally. And yet this is hardly the case, for representational consciousness is like the tip of an iceberg. Eighty per cent of our consciousness when we are awake is pre-reflective – not subconscious or unconscious, but pre-reflective.1 And consciousness is enactive, never passive – even visual perception is not like the generation of a photographic image in the back of the retina: we see in high definition because our body, acting in the world, is enabled by motor and conceptual skills to contemplate such a world, which otherwise would appear sadly vague, full of holes and literally pixilated. We dwell amid an overwhelming constructed landscape and built environment that is pervasive for the majority of our world’s population. Contemporary cognitive science and neurobiology now recognize what has long been an insight of phenomenology during the twentieth century – that the environment is a constitutive part of animal and human consciousness. Just as each animal has its own world that emerges from their organic morphology, biology, and the way the setting appears through such conditions, the same is true for humans.2 The world of the fly and the world of the monkey, 219

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for example, have little in common, if anything at all. They co-emerge for each organism as it acts out its own life seeking its particular modes of homeostasis – the equilibrium that allows the organism to prevail in life and which is its own modality of meaning. In other words, our personal consciousness is not our brain – it is both embodied (the entire sensorium of our nervous system with our particular bodily morphology and orientation, bipedal, with a distinct front and back, left and right, up and down, frontal vision and the ability to contemplate the regular motions of the stars) and always ‘in place’. Despite the popular assumptions about the supposed interiority of consciousness, there is no human consciousness without place. Moods and emotions are effectively in the world, a seeming paradox that was addressed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Martin Heidegger and other twentieth-century phenomenologists, that has been more recently followed up by third-generation cognitive scientists and philosophers such as Jeff Malpas, writing on place, and Nick Crossly, writing on the primacy of the social body.3 This realization is obviously of enormous consequence for architecture.4 The internal and external components of consciousness are always interacting through bodily motility; they constitute non-representational knowledge in the form of cultural habits, for example, long before things come to our attention. Consequently, internal and external components condition each other, evolving as they deploy themselves in time, along the path that is life.5 The built environment qualifies our thoughts and feelings and either contributes to our well-being or – as I would argue in the case of most of our present dysfunctional architectural and urbanistic practices – to our collective psychopathologies. Thus in a recent book I have attempted to consider alternatives to banal formalism and to the rhetoric of sustainability in both architecture and urban design, while always recognizing the problematic conditions and responsibilities inevitable for the architectural imagination that the end of traditions – traditions, that is, as cohesive mytho-poetic cultural structures – impose on our mature modernity after the French Revolution. The primary referential frameworks for artistic symbolization, such as the cosmological pictures associated with hegemonic religions, became inoperative in early modernity. Yet abdicating the personal, embodied and linguistic imagination (in favour of rational consensus, design by committee, or even algorithmic fabrication, for example) is not an option. Modernity demands that architects ‘experiment’, enabling a productive imagination to promise a better world for future dwelling – yet, I would add, it is a mode of invention that to be significant must necessarily engage in a humble, cultured and hermeneutically open attitude to given reality and its values. Despite the seeming solidity of a world that stays put when we are not looking, matter does not have ontological precedence over consciousness – quantum mechanics provide simple if bewildering evidence of this fact.6 From

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this would follow that architectural meaning cannot simply arise from a socalled object-oriented ontology and be dependent on formal geometries imposed from the top down, whether invented a priori by ‘starchitects’ or generated by algorithmic software. Challenging assumptions that seem vindicated by historical practices going back to ancient Egyptian architecture, the understanding of this problem, particular to modernity, was the topic of my first book, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science.7 Simply put: geometry, a fabrication of the human mind, was profoundly significant for architectural practices in contexts that assumed the world of experience to be in perennial change and transformation, while the Euclidean forms and commensurate organization of buildings referenced the only modes of stability present to perception, epitomized by the geometry of the heavenly vault and the regular motions of the stars and planets given to the naked eye. These resulted, particularly after Hellenistic times, in an architecture mimetic of the cosmos. Yet as this geometry became instrumentalized in the early nineteenth century, challenging its Euclidean axioms and limits based on the priority of tactile multisensory experience to enable the modes of production common since the Industrial Revolution, it lost the meanings previously inherent to it. Identifying with other contemporary architects and writers such as Peter Zumthor and Juhani Pallasmaa, who believe that architectural meaning has more to do with the creation of atmospheres than with specific formal vocabularies, my recent work contributes to this position through an interdisciplinary approach that aims to avoid the understanding of atmosphere as a mere orchestration of effects, instead grasping its importance as the expression of moods in lived situations, occurring in habitual human action. Thus we might understand architecture, through atmosphere, as a communicative setting for human life, both cognitive and emotive – an understanding that goes beyond its common yet failed definition of architecture as decorated building issuing from the misunderstandings of eighteenthcentury aesthetics. As Gernot Böhme has explained, the concept of atmosphere has the advantage of immediately leading us to question objectivist aesthetics, the common misunderstanding of aesthetic experience as aesthetic judgement.8 Arguably, atmosphere is perceived immediately and affects us not only intellectually but also at a pre-reflective level as we act. For atmosphere to function as architectural meaning, however, there must be some degree of fixity and certainly forms, materials and details play a very important role. It is therefore crucial to grasp the roots of the concept in architectural history and its theories and – closer to us – most importantly the affinity of atmosphere with the concept of character in eighteenth-century architectural theories. Indeed, it is possible to trace the concern for properly attuned physical environments back to the historical origins of European architecture and its

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musical analogy in Greco-Roman culture. The great emphasis traditional writing placed upon this analogy is a key to the problem, and one that is often bewildering to modern architects. Music, I would like to emphasize, is a kind of sound that valorizes silence, not as the mere absence of sound but as a positive and productive element of poetic expression, as does poetry itself. Silence is the cornerstone of poetry and music, what allows its opening to the divine, to mimic the silent heavenly star dance, arguably the first musical experience for humanity. The analogy of music with architecture appears in all traditional treatises and remains today the subject of scholarly papers, student projects and competition briefs, usually evoking Goethe’s famous characterization of architecture as frozen music. The analogy, however, is commonly misunderstood, treated in formal terms, the reasoning being that since music deals with proportions and mathematics for its harmonic effects, producing beautiful sounds, this must be transposable in some way to architectural form, seeking the congruity of parts and the whole ruled by proportional ratios. In fact, a more careful study of premodern European architectural treatises reveals that the musical analogy has involved, since its inception, far more than such formal transpositions. The central issue has been the design of human situations contributing to a good life, one that is in harmony and balance, properly tempered. The spatial experience of architecture was therefore like that of music, capable of conveying cognitive, poetic moods through primary sentience. Curiously, however, the attunement thought to be brought about by an atmosphere today is generally understood as a matter of subjectivity, in stark contrast with the objectivity of mathematics evoked in the traditional literature. This analogy of music and architecture for the sake of a good life is very clear in the first text of architectural theory available to us, The Ten Books by Vitruvius.9 Architecture operates as a communicative setting for societies: its beauty is, in fact, its meaning as it contributes to human health and selfunderstanding. For Vitruvius there is no concern for innovation or efficient design. If parts of buildings must be in proportional relations according to mathematical ratios, this is not a question of mere formal composition. The same numbers were believed to govern musical and cosmic orders and work to further the harmonious and well-tempered city, an attuned environment that operates in both time and space like music, as the original foundation and necessary precondition for good architecture – the setting of a good and healthy life. In his first book, after outlining the need for the architect to have theoria, an understanding of the immutable motions of the heavens, Vitruvius believed it was imperative to use the gnomon or shadow tracer – one of the three kinds of artefacts issuing from architectural making, with buildings and well-adjusted machines being the other two. This brought the order of the

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heavens to bear on the urban environment, enabling the tracing of the cardinal orientations (the cardus and decumanus, the main north–south and east–west streets of a city) and the determination of the directions of the winds, which was a fundamental knowledge in order to orient the city so it could be a healthy environment for its inhabitants. This, he thought, was the configuration of the templum of architecture, the place of foundation and also the place for the contemplation of the order itself, upon which individual buildings and public spaces could be laid out and constructed. Harmony and temperance remained the core values in architectural theory throughout the Renaissance and well until the end of the Baroque period in seventeenth-century Europe.10 An interesting example from the Renaissance is Palladio’s Basilica in Vicenza. Already within the new early-modern paradigm of architecture as drawing, and in contrast to Alberti’s planar proportional lineamenti, Palladio’s treatise I quattro libri dell’architettura expresses proportionality notated mathematically and applied in ‘three dimensions’ to architectural ideas – design drawings – for the first time in the history of Western architecture, coordinating the dimensions of rooms, their depth, length and height so that they convey a symphonic experience, following trends in the theory of musical polyphony of its time.11 He proposes a perfectly harmonic Basilica for Vicenza that nevertheless is not imposed on reality by demolishing a pre-existing medieval building. When visiting Vicenza, if unaware of the care taken by the architect, one may easily suppose that the building built is exactly as it was drawn. I certainly thought so when I first visited, with not much more than a cursory knowledge of Renaissance history. And yet it is not. The ideal music is embodied but not imposed; it qualifies everyday life to make it more temperate. The harmonic form has a transformative and quieting effect on the complex, noisy and contradictory functions that were housed by this building at the very centre of the Renaissance city, which included brothels, taverns, places for the imparting of justice and city governance. Architecture tempers the environment like a good musician must temper her instrument to produce harmonic sound. Once the meaning of architecture as a cosmic analogy through musical proportions was questioned in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most specifically in the writings of Claude Perrault, the possibilities of employing geometry as a transcendental symbol in architecture waned. In this context, architects directed a new attention to narrative language to preserve the communicative function of architecture. While still emphasizing the importance of harmony as a goal, eighteenth-century character theory adopted a linguistic analogy to take the place of the older musical one. A prime example from the last part of that century is the treatise by Nicolas Le Camus de Mezières, The Genius of Architecture. Le Camus believed that harmony could be sought in the analogy between proportions and human

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sensations, yet could not be attained by theoretical prescription or mathematical ratios, only through expressive fictions engaged through narratives. His book presented the earliest ever qualitative description of architectural ‘space’ in human dwelling – moods are characterized through literary language and metaphor, as they are deemed appropriate for the diverse spaces of the house. This development culminated in Romantic philosophy: in the formulation of Stimmung – the original German term for atmosphere and, more properly, attunement – as central to artistic expression. This is both the effect and the knowledge art provides, far more crucial for our cultural sustainability than the partial if precise truths of instrumental science. Thus the work of art allows us to recognize ourselves as complete and purposeful in order to abide in life. Emerging in view of inhospitable surroundings, Romantic attunement foregrounded its dependence on silence. Romantic philosophy as expressed in the works of authors such as Schelling, Schlegel and Novalis thought that the night could be more illuminating than the light of reason – a call not for the irrational, but for the importance of pre-reflective, embodied understanding. Stimme, as an expressive voice, must be grounded in silence, not its mere absence but a primordial experience of being. A philological analysis of Stimmung is particularly revealing for architecture. Indeed, it is crucial to observe that over and above its connotations as internal or subjective mood, Stimmung’s etymological roots in German included both ‘harmony’ and ‘temperance’, the two key terms in traditional European architectural theories. Let me emphasize that there is no aporia here, no contradiction. Romantic philosophy recognized, like Rilke much later, that ‘the inner is the outer’. Furthermore, Stimmung preserved its musical aspirations while being formulated through poetic language, in lyrical forms and novelistic narratives. As is well known, the novel became a central form of cultural expression for modernity after the end of the ancien régime, later transposed into new media forms: the telling of stories that deal with human issues, a practical philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle leading to phronesis, wisdom, and enabling a good life. Grasping the primary importance of poetic language for artistic expression thus appears as a central issue to be explored in relation to the enactment of Stimmung in modernity since the nineteenth century and up to our own times. Romantic Stimmung was aimed at the emotional heart – Gemüt was considered the true seat of consciousness. This mode of understanding is multisensory, aesthetic in the original Greek sense of the term, as real knowledge that is fundamentally sensory. This is totally at odds with that gnoseologia inferioris or inferior kind of intellectual knowledge that was believed to be the nature of aesthetic cognition by Baumgarten, becoming the norm in philosophical aesthetics from the eighteenth century onwards. This

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recovery of the original understanding of aesthésis made explicit the implicit multisensory nature of artistic meaning at work in the Western tradition that was taken for granted in architecture before the popularization of Cartesian psychology in the late seventeenth century, with its belief – still unfortunately common today – in independent mechanistic senses, its visual hegemony and its associationist explanations of meaning as if it were a conceptual construction in the brain, ultimately reducible to semiotics. For the Romantics perception is, on the contrary, meaningful at its inception. The primacy of synaesthesia in perception intuited by Romantic philosophy was clearly postulated by the phenomenological philosophers of the twentieth century, namely Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and has been recently buttressed by neuroscience and third-generation so-called ‘enactive’ cognitive theory. This is the way that architectural meanings are first given to our embodied consciousness, of which, as I have already suggested, 80 per cent is pre-reflective and in continuity with reflective attention and judgement. The famous Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has brilliantly addressed what he calls ‘Descartes’ error’ – the presumption that emotions work against cognition.12 In fact, the opposite is the case. When the emotional centres in the brain are affected pathologically, we lose also our ability to plan, to think clearly about our future. Socrates famously stated that in order to know anything at all, one first had to fall in love – emotions are a precondition for true knowledge. It is thus that architectural meaning is understood through phenomenology and we can declare that architecture cannot be reduced to pictures or merely ‘objective’ formal products. Atmosphere is given as a whole and, in a sense, at the very moment of one’s physical, embodied and multisensory encounter with a place, an architectural environment within which one’s actions gain an orientation. A poetic image – the often-identified aesthetic effect of good architecture – is a second-order meaning in continuity with the first. For enactive cognitive theory and phenomenology, perception and consciousness are not passive like biological processes such as digestion, or the impression of a photographic image; they are always an action. Only by unpacking this insight is it possible to grasp how architecture conveys its meanings both in the emotional immediacy of presence and as a cognition of order through the poetic image. Indeed, Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological studies on the nature of temporality, today vindicated by neuroscience and biology, as explained in a recent book by Evan Thompson on the intertwining of mind and life, show that the present is not merely a non-existent point between past and future. Instead, in our experience, exemplified by our perception of music, the present has a thickness or dimension, with an immediate past and future, and a mediate history and project.13 The present therefore can be said to have a structural and permanent dimensionality.

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Grasping the nature of primary, experienced temporality is crucial to understand how architecture as atmosphere can communicate meanings, and not be reduced to some inconsequential or subjective orchestration of effects. Recognizing how attuned environments become a comprehensive alternative to merely ecological and sustainable cities reveals another important historical continuity – how architecture has contributed, and indeed may yet contribute, beyond the conflicts of religious sectarianism, to further the spiritual dimensions of human existence, a genuine human brotherhood. The issue is indeed psychosomatic health. Atmós, the Greek root of atmosphere, is also in the Sanskrit word atman, the undivided universal consciousness, which is associated with air, climate and our breathing in meditation, spirit and soul – our awareness of the continuity between prereflective and reflective consciousness in dream and awakened states. Privileging this modality of architectural space, avoiding signs with denotative meanings, personal styles, and formal status symbols prone to ideology and idolatry, architecture could reveal a presence of the divine in the world, the silence which underscores and makes possible our linguistic being, which is nothing other than our self-recognition as purposeful – something which is hard-wired in our biology and yet our intellectual obsessions, aided by our selfmade nihilistic environments, easily lead us to deny. This possibility is particularly important in a world in which the traditional distinctions between sacred and profane space no longer operate and our best alternative to build a better, more compassionate global world might be to recognize, like ancient Buddhist philosophy, the primacy of co-emerging reality in consciousness – the fact that we cannot postulate the positive existence of the object, the subject or the action that links them, independently and apart from one another. Of silence, Juhani Pallasmaa has written that it is not merely an auditory experience of the absence of sound; it is a multisensory and existential experience of being, rather than of listening. It is the existential thickness and richness of silence that gives it its poetic authority. Silence reveals the essence of things, as if it were perceived by the human senses for the first time. Silence is an atmospheric and qualitative perception that fuses the percept and the perceiver. It is always an affective experience, as silence is not outside me, it is my very soul that has been silenced.14

Notes An introduction to silence 1 Max Picard, The World of Silence (Wichita: Eighth Day Press, 2002), 168. 2 ‘I entered an [anechoic chamber] at Harvard University several years ago and heard two sounds, one high and one low. [The engineer] informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, and the low one my blood in circulation.’ John Cage, ‘Experimental Music’, in Silence: Lectures and Writings (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 7–12; 8. 3 See Rebecca J. Rosen, ‘The Museum of Lost Sounds’, The Atlantic, 25 January 2013: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ the-museum-of-lost-sounds/272548/ [accessed 15 August 2018]. The Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has worked with Marconi’s idea in sound works such as You Are Not Alone, installed at the Radcliffe Observatory, Oxford, between 31 October and 3 December 2009.

1. ‘Then there was war’: John Hejduk’s Silent Witnesses as nuclear criticism 1 Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–78) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 10. 2 Ibid., 12. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 Ibid., 24, 26. 5 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works 1947–1983 (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 5. 6 Ibid., 125. 7 Ibid., 58. 8 Ibid., 129. 9 John Hejduk, ‘Silent Witnesses’, Perspecta, 19 (1982): 70–80. 10 See Daniel Libeskind’s 1978 introduction in Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 15–22; 21–2. 11 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81. 227

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12 Ibid., 91. 13 Ibid., 83. 14 Photographs of the installation are shown on pp. 333 and 337 of Mask of Medusa. An image of it also appears on the website of The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago: http://www.renaissancesociety.org/ exhibitions/308/john-hejduk-masques/ [accessed 25 April 2018]. 15 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81. 16 On the American Museum of Natural History dioramas, see Donna Haraway, ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1936’, in Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Verso: London and New York, 1992), 26–59. 17 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 96. 18 Ibid., 23, 81. 19 Ibid., 61. 20 Ibid., 26. 21 Ibid., 81. 22 Hejduk designates 1878–1908 ‘pastoral time’ and 1908–1938 ‘mechanical time’. Ibid. 23 Susan Stewart, ‘Annal and Existence: On Kawara’s Date Inscriptions’, in Jeffrey Weiss, with Anne Wheeler, On Kawara – Silence (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 2015), 171–7; 171. 24 Roberta Smith, ‘On Kawara, Artist Who Found Elegance in Every Day, Dies at 81’, The New York Times, 15 July (2014). Available at http://www.nytimes. com/2014/07/16/arts/design/on-kawara-conceptual-artist-who-found-elegancein-every-day-dies-at-81.html?_r=0 [accessed 20 June 2016]. 25 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81. 26 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, in Art and Literature: The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 235–47; 238–9. 27 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 81. 28 Ibid., 53. 29 Ibid., 76. 30 Ibid., 62. 31 Ibid., 62–3. 32 Ibid., 81. 33 Ibid., 124. 34 Jacques Derrida, ‘No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives)’, Diacritics, 14(2) (Summer 1984): 20–31; 23. 35 Barthes, The Neutral, 51.

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2. Textures of silence in Claire Denis’s Beau Travail (1999) 1 Michel Chion, ‘The Silence of the Loudspeakers, or Why with Dolby Sound it is the Film that Listens to Us’, in Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998–2001, ed. Larry Snider, Diane Freeman and Jerry Sider (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), 151. 2 Eugenie Brinkema, ‘Critique of Silence’, Differences, 22(2–3) (2011): 231. 3 Brinkema, ‘Critique of Silence’, 216. 4 Ibid., 225. 5 This collaborative dialogue has invited scholarly attention, most notably in a special issue of Film-Philosophy: Douglas Morrey, ‘Introduction: Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy’, Film-Philosophy 12(1) (2008): i–vi; Douglas Morrey, ‘Listening and Touching, Looking and Thinking: The Dialogue in Philosophy and Film between Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis’, in European Film Theory, ed. Temenuga Trifonova (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 122–33; Laura McMahon, Cinema and Contact: The Withdrawal of Touch in Nancy, Bresson, Duras and Denis (London: Legenda, 2012); Kristin Lené Hole, Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics: Claire Denis, Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016). 6 Denis contributed to Mathilde Monnier and Jean-Luc Nancy, Allitérations: Conversations sur la danse (Paris: Galilée, 2005); and Nancy appears in the documentary film by Claire Denis and Mathilde Monnier, Vers Mathilde, 2005, http://www.digitaliafilmlibrary.com/film/528/ [accessed 2 May 2018]. The European Graduate School has published online videos of joint lectures by Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis, see: European Graduate School Video Lectures, ‘Claire Denis and Jean Luc Nancy. Jean-Luc Godard: Sympathy for the Devil. 2006 1/2’, YouTube Video, 9:06, 15 March 2007, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=L6PtF_wr1VI; Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘35 Shots of Rum. 2011’, YouTube Video, 29:03, 27 November 2011 https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=PpGphB2j6uw [accessed 2 May 2018]; Claire Denis and Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘L’Intrus. The Intruder 2007 1/3’, YouTube Video, 7:21, 9 July 2007, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoTGowlhABk [accessed 2 May 2018]. 7 In haptic visuality, Marks highlights, ‘the eyes themselves function like organs of touch’. The image is configured as a vehicle for synaesthetic access: the perception of one sensation (touch) through another sensory mode (vision). Through this emphasis on touch, Marks establishes an intersubjective model of embodied spectatorship that stresses bodily proximity and contact. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 162.

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8 Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 21. 9 Ibid., 6. 10 Ibid., 3. 11 In an interview on ‘The Future of Philosophy’, Nancy claims that today’s world is undergoing a ‘crisis of sense’. Now that sense can no longer be guaranteed by something beyond the world (‘God, Man, History, Science, Law, Value’), he argues, we need to reconsider the concept as something co-extensive with it. See B. C. Hutchens, Jean-Luc Nancy and the Future of Philosophy (Chesham: Acumen, 2005), 161. 12 Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 9. 13 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 119. Emphasis mine. 14 In The Forms of the Affects, Eugenie Brinkema polemically states that the concept of affect has become ‘a placeholder for the unthought’ within film theory. Moreover, Brinkema argues, affect is theorized by negation, defined as ‘not semiosis, not meaning, not structure, not apparatus, but the felt visceral, immediate, sensed, embodied, excessive’. In other words, affect often acts a catch-all term for all that is outside (and in excess of) the realm of signification. While the relationship between affect and cognition differs depending on the philosophical framework, the way film theory tends to posit affect in opposition to signification reinforces a binary between the sensible and the intelligible. See Eugenie Brinkema, The Forms of the Affects (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 27; xiii. 15 Nancy, Listening, 8. 16 This shift towards embodied spectatorship can be traced to Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Vivian Sobchack, Carnal Thoughts Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses; Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Martine Beugnet, Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 17 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 183. 18 Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, 13. 19 Marks, The Skin of the Film, 162. 20 Ibid., 183. 21 Lisa Coulthard, ‘Haptic Aurality: Listening to the Films of Michael Haneke’, Film-Philosophy, 16(1) (2012): 18. 22 Morrey, ‘Listening and Touching, Looking and Thinking: The Dialogue in Philosophy and Film between Jean-Luc Nancy and Claire Denis’, 125. 23 Hole, Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics, 147.

NOTES

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24 Lucy Donaldson, Texture in Film (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 118. 25 Ibid., 123. 26 Phonocentrism, for Jacques Derrida, is the privileging of the voice as selfpresence, rooted in the illusory proximity between speaking and hearing, voice and meaning within the perceptual experience of hearing-oneselfspeak. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973). 27 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6. 28 Martine Beugnet, Claire Denis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 200; Ian Murphy, ‘Feeling and Form in the Films of Claire Denis’, Jump Cut, 54 (2012): 1, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc54.2012/ IanMurphyDenis/text.html [accessed 2 May 2018]. 29 Beugnet, Claire Denis, 20. 30 Ibid., 22. 31 Janet Bergstrom, ‘Opacity in the Films of Claire Denis’, in French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race, ed. Tyler Edward Stovall and Georges Van den Abbeele (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2003), 71. 32 Beugnet, Claire Denis, 28. 33 Judith Mayne, Claire Denis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 93. 34 Hole, Towards a Feminist Cinematic Ethics, 19; McMahon, Cinema and Contact, 9. 35 Beugnet, Claire Denis, 124. 36 Susan Hayward, ‘Claire Denis’ Films and the Post-colonial Body – with special reference to Beau Travail (1999)’, Studies in French Cinema, 1(3) (2001): 161. 37 Sarah Kozloff, Invisible Storytellers Voice-over Narration in American Fiction Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 41. 38 Hayward, ‘Claire Denis’ Films and the Post-colonial Body’, 161. 39 For a discussion of affect in Claire Denis’s films, see E. Ann Kaplan, ‘European Art Cinema, Affect, and Postcolonialism: Herzog, Denis, and the Dardenne Brothers’, in Global Art Cinema: New Theories and Histories, ed. Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 285–302. 40 Susan Hayward, ‘Filming the (Post-)Colonial Landscape: Claire Denis’ Chocolat (1988) and Beau Travail (1998)’, in Cinema and Landscape: Film, Nation and Cultural Geography, ed. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner (Bristol: Intellect, 2010), 174. 41 Hayward, ‘Claire Denis’ Films and the Post-colonial Body’, 161. 42 Thomas Elsaesser, ‘European Cinema and the Postheroic Narrative: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claire Denis, and Beau Travail’, New Literary History, 43(4) (8 February 2013): 719. 43 Nancy, Listening, 9.

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3. Listening to Visaginas: On the rescaling of silences and sounds in a former Soviet nuclear town 1 This text emerges from ongoing research begun in Visaginas in 2015 by the European Humanities University’s Laboratory of Critical Urbanism. A first report was published in: Felix Ackermann, Benjamin Cope and Siarhei Liubimau (eds), Mapping Visaginas: Sources of Urbanity in a Former MonoFunctional Town (Vilnius: Vilnius Art Academy Press, 2016). 2 Inga Freimane mentions the importance of Festival Street in ‘The Centrality In and Of Visaginas’, in Ackermann, Cope and Liubimau (eds), Mapping Visaginas, 41–7. 3 For a history of the nuclear industry in the USSR, see Paul Josephson, Red Atom: Russia’s Nuclear Programme from Stalin to Today (New York: Freeman and Co., 1999). 4 On the political implications of Visaginas as part of the Soviet nuclear network, see Siarhei Liubimau’s forthcoming article: ‘Post-Soviet “Nuclear” Towns as Multi-Scalar Infrastructures: Relating Sovereignty and Urbanity Through the Perspective of Visaginas’, in Post-Socialist Urban Infrastructures (Routledge: forthcoming). 5 Reaktor Bolshoy Moshchnosty Kanalny (high-power channel reactor). This reactor type, which combines water coolant with a graphite moderator, was developed in the Soviet Union in the 1970s. See: http://www.world-nuclear. org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-cycle/nuclear-power-reactors/appendices/ rbmk-reactors.aspx [accessed 2 May 2018]. 6 This drop in population is in keeping with that of other towns in Lithuania. Vytautas Vylatka and Siarhei Liubimau argue that Visaginas has positive resources for survival: Vytautas Vylatka and Siarhei Liubimau, ‘Comments on the Socio-Geographical Specificity of Visaginas in the Context of Lithuania’, in Mapping Visaginas: Sources of Urbanity in a Former Mono-Functional Town, ed. Felix Ackermann, Benjamin Cope and Siarhei Liubimau (Vilnius Art Academy Press: Vilnius, 2016), 28–32. 7 In 1988, INPP was the focus of the ‘Ring of Life’ protest against the Soviet destruction of Lithuanian nature, an event important in the rebirth of the Lithuanian nation state. See: Rasa Balocˇkaite˙, ‘Post-Soviet Transformations of the Planned Socialist Towns: Visaginas, Lithuania’, Studies of Transition States and Societies, 2(2) (2010): 63–81. The unclear political logic that led to the EU demanding the closure of the INPP is a central issue in A Green Meadow, dir. Jonas Tertelis and Kristina Werner, premiered at the National Theatre in Vilnius in 2017, http://www.teatras.lt/en/productions/a_green_meadow_a_play_ based_on_stories_told_by_workers_of_ignalina_nuclear_power_plant_and_ residents_of_visaginas/ [accessed 25 June 2018]. 8 A centrally located Chernobyl monument foregrounding bureaucratic stupidity was (mis)interpreted by locals as offensive to those who suffered or died as a result of contamination and was removed during street renovation.

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9 Conversation in Visaginas in 2015; author’s translation. 10 A Green Meadow, 2017. Butterfly City, dir. Olga Cˇernovaite˙ (2016), http:// butterflycityfilm.com [accessed 25 June 2018]. 11 The ‘Visaginas Around the World’ group uses social media as a forum for communication among the Visaginas diaspora. 12 James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 13 Mark Dorrian, ‘Adventures on the Vertical: From the New Vision to Powers of Ten’, Writing on the Image: Architecture, The City and the Politics of Representation (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 61–78. 14 Ibid., 77. 15 Michel Chion, The Voice in Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 16 Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 23–24. A range of conceptualisations of silence and listening differently have been developed in anthropology, postcolonial studies and feminism, as described in Aimee Carillo Rowe and Sheena Malhota, ‘Still the Silence: Feminist Reflections at the Edge of Sound’, in Silence, Feminism, Power: Reflections at the Edge of Sound, ed. Aimee Carillo Rowe and Sheena Malhota (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–25. 17 Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life (New York and London: Continuum, 2004). 18 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). It is possible that ‘perestroika’, alongside its primary meaning of ‘reconstruction’, could also be (mis)translated as ‘retuning’, while ‘glasnost’ also stems from the root ‘glas’, meaning voice. I suggest that a switch to a focus on listening may help to understand what is at stake in a post-socialist transformation that is still in progress. 19 The contradictory temporalities of Soviet utopia are discussed in Katerina Clarke, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981). 20 Michael Taussig, The Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997). 21 Gwenaële Rot and François Vatin, Au fil du flux: La surveillance contrôle dans les industries chimique et nucléaire (Paris: Presses des Mines, 2017). 22 Ibid., 104 (author’s translation). 23 Kristina Šliavaite˙, ‘Community at Risk: Conceptualizing, Experiencing and Resisting Unemployment’, in Globalization, European Integration and Social Development in European Postcommunist Societies, ed. Bogdan Voicu and Horat¸iu Rusu (Sibiu: Psichomedia Publishing House, 2003), 73–82. 24 Игналинской АЭС – 25 лет (25 Years of the Ignalina NPP) (Visaginas: Visagino Poligrafija, 2009). 25 Jean-Luc Nancy, On Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 5.

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26 David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (New York and London: Continuum, 2010). 27 Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of thinking in What is Philosophy? considers electron leaps across spaces between nerves, while Deleuze’s exploration of cinema approaches film from the starting point of the movement of light: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 28 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Of the Refrain’, in A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 310–50. 29 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 309–42. 30 An interesting contrast with the argument developed here can be found in the video created by Ros Atom to celebrate the unity of inhabitants of atomic towns across Russia through music: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=917O0vlzVu0 [accessed 26 May 2018]. Both the video and the text of the song, the chorus of which translates as ‘It was not we who invented the world’, invite rich interpretations in the context of Russian atomic towns. 31 Jacques Attali describes noise as sound out of place. It is difficult in the context described in this chapter to imagine what could be sound in place. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985).

4. Urban silence and informational noise: A study of Athens’s invisible structures 1 Georgios Babiniotis, Dictionary of Greek Language (in Greek) (Athens: Kentro Lexikologias, 2005), 961. 2 Myrto Tsilimpounidi, ‘Athens 2012. Performances ‘in crisis’ or what happens when a city goes soft?’, City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 16(5) (2012): 546–56; 545. 3 Costas Douzinas, ‘Athens Rising’, European Urban and Regional Studies, 20(1) (2013): 134–8; 134. 4 Dina Vaiou, ‘Is the Crisis in Athens (also) Gendered? Facets of Access and (In) visibility in Everyday Public Spaces’, in Crisis Scapes: Athens and Beyond, ed. Jaya Klara Brekke, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis (Athens: Crisis-scape.net, 2014), 82–8; 86. 5 Ibid., 85. 6 Anders Hylmö and Magnus Wennerhag, ‘Does Class Matter in Anti-Austerity Protests? Social Class, Attitudes Towards Inequality, and Political Trust in European Demonstrations in a Time of Economic Crisis’, in Austerity and Protest: Popular Contention in Times of Economic Crisis, ed. Marco Giugni and Maria Grasso (London: Routledge, 2015), 109–83.

NOTES

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7 Jon Wiltshire, ‘After Syntagma: Where are the Occupiers Now?’, Open Security: Conflict and Peacebuilding, 24 May 2013, https://www. opendemocracy.net/opensecurity/jon-wiltshire/after-syntagma-where-areoccupiers-now [accessed 10 August 2018]. 8 Aristos Doxiadis and Manos Matsaganis, National Populism and Xenophobia in Greece (London: Counterpoint, 2012), 30. 9 Dina Vaiou and A. Kalandides, ‘Practices of Collective Action and Solidarity: Reconfigurations of the Public Space in Crisis-ridden Athens, Greece’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 31(3) (2016): 457–70; 460. 10 Ibid., 461. 11 Vaiou, ‘Is the Crisis in Athens (also) Gendered?’, 86. 12 Georgios Kandylis, ‘The Space and Time of Migrants’ Rejection in the Centre of Athens’, in The Centre of Athens as a Political Stake, ed. Thomas Maloutas, Georgios Kandylis, Michalis Petrou and Nikos Souliotis (in Greek) (Athens: National Centre of Social Research, 2013), 257–74; 259. 13 Vaiou, ‘Is the Crisis in Athens (also) Gendered?’, 86. 14 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198. 15 William J. T. Mitchell, ‘Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation’, Critical Inquiry, 39(1) (Autumn 2012): 8–32, 18. 16 Ibid. 17 Steven Connor, ‘Writing the White Voice’, talk given in Sound, Silence and the Arts symposium, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, 28 February 2009, http://stevenconnor.com/whitevoice.html [accessed 2 May 2018]. 18 Ibid. 19 Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 7. 20 Ibid., 13. 21 Jacques Attali, Noise: An Essay on the Political Economy of Music (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 27. 22 Ibid., 33. 23 Ibid., 34. 24 Crisis-Scape, ‘Strange Encounters’, in Crisis Scapes: Athens and Beyond, ed. Jaya Klara Brekke, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis and Antonis Vradis (Athens: Crisis-scape.net, 2014), 51–4, 51. 25 Eva Cossé and Judith Sunderland, Hate on the Streets: Xenophobic Violence in Greece. Human Rights Watch (2012). 26 The Banoptikon is an experiment designed by Personal Cinema (http://www. personalcinema.org [accessed 10 July 2014]) as part of the wider EU project MIG@NET (http://www.mignetproject.eu [accessed 10 July 2014]). 27 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 132. 28 James Pritchett, ‘What Silence Taught John Cage: The Story of 4ʹ33” ’, in The Anarchy of Silence: John Cage and Experimental Art, ed. Julia Robinson and

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Henie-Onstad Kunstsenter (Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani, 2009), 166–87. 29 Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 10–11. 30 Jonathan D. Katz, ‘Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse’, in Writings Through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, ed. David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 41–60; 57. 31 Ibid., 78. 32 Connor, ‘Writing the White Voice’.

5. The silent present: The contemporary atmosphere of architectural historiography 1 Don DeLillo, Falling Man (New York: Scribner, 2011), 3. 2 Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 128. 3 Ibid., 164. 4 DeLillo, Falling Man, 3. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Susan Sontag, ‘Tuesday, And After’ The New Yorker (24 September 2001). https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/09/24/tuesday-and-after-talk-ofthe-town [accessed 25 June 2018]. 7 Lawrence F. Kaplan, ‘No Choice: Foreign Policy After September 11’, The New Republic (1 October 2001), https://newrepublic.com/article/64059/no-choice [accessed 25 June 2018]. 8 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 9. 9 DeLillo, Falling Man, 4. 10 Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Picador, 1966), 11. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 16. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid., 17. 15 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1985), 9. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid., 10. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 17.

NOTES

237

20 Ibid., 10. 21 Ibid., 151. 22 Ibid. 23 Sylvia Lavin, ‘The Temporary Contemporary’, Perspecta, 34 (2003): 130. 24 DeLillo, Falling Man, 4. 25 Ibid., 5. 26 Ibid., 106. 27 Ibid., 232. 28 Steven Conner, ‘Pulverulence’, Cabinet Magazine, 35, ‘Dust’ (Fall 2009): http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/35/connor.php [accessed 25 June 2018]. 29 DeLillo, Falling Man, 88. 30 Ibid., 28. 31 Ibid., 103. 32 Conner, ‘Pulverulence’. 33 DeLillo, Falling Man, 105. 34 Ibid., 26–7. 35 Ibid., 225. 36 DeLillo, Falling Man, 246. 37 Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, 20.

6. Between the lines 1 Kintsugi is said to have originated in the late fourteenth century, when the then shogun of Japan, Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, broke his favourite tea bowl and commissioned Japanese craftsmen to devise a more satisfactory solution than the crude metal staples used by craftsmen in China, where the shogun had sent the bowl to be repaired. 2 A notable irony is at play here, however. By introducing a plain bowl made from the plainest of ordinary materials, Rikyu deliberately shattered the vanity surrounding the heavily adorned Chinese receptacles that had become social status symbols for their owners. Yet, nowadays, an authenticated Raku bowl changes hands for no less than ¥3 million – quite a departure from the sabi spirit of living humbly and cherishing the everyday. 3 Thomas Yu¯ho¯ Kirchner (trans.), ‘Introduction’ to his Muso¯ Soseki: Dialogues in a Dream: The Life and Zen Teachings of Muso¯ Soseki (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2015), unpaginated. See also Victor So¯gen Hori, Zen Sand: The Book of Capping Phrases for Ko¯an Practice (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2003). 4 The Blue Cliff Record (in Japanese, Hekiganroku) and The Record of Equanimity contain 100 koan cases each and were compiled in the twelfth century. The most recent of the ancient koan collections, titled Entangling

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Vines (in Japanese, Shu¯mon Katto¯shu¯), dates from the late seventeenth century and contains 272 cases. It is the only major koan text to have been compiled in Japan rather than in China. 5 The appellation of ‘paradox’ for a koan is generally repudiated by commentators. See, for instance, Michel Mohr: ‘Interpretations that emphasize paradox seem to overlook the cardinal purpose of this verbal device . . . as a specific tool for communication between teacher and student’, ‘Emerging from Nonduality: Ko¯an Practice in the Rinzai Tradition since Hakuin’, in The Ko¯an: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, ed. Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 244–79; 246. 6 Shizuteru Ueda, Introduction to Entangling Vines: A Classic Collection of Zen Koans, trans. and annot. Kirchner (Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2013), 11. Mohr likens it to ‘a quest for one’s fundamental identity’, The Ko¯an, 246. 7 Ueda, Entangling Vines, 13. 8 Thomas Cleary (trans.), The Blue Cliff Record (Berkeley, CA: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 1998), 4. 9 The reader will understand that this is, on the one hand, not only a reductive oversimplification of a process of great subtlety but also, on the other hand, an apparent contradiction in terms, not unlike that of speaking about silence. 10 Mumon’s Commentary to Case no. 1, ‘Zhaozhou’s Dog’, in Cleary (trans.), No Barrier: Unlocking the Zen Koan (London: Aquarian Press, 1993), 2. 11 Robert A. F. Thurman (trans.), The Holy Teaching of Vimalak¯ırti: A Mahayana Scripture (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 77. 12 This and subsequent translations from the Mumonkan are from Cleary’s No Barrier. 13 Kirchner, Entangling Vines, 84–5. 14 Jean-François Lyotard, article 22 in Le Différend (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1983), 29. Translation mine. 15 Editor’s Introduction, vol. 17 in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 24. 16 Eric Voegelin, Order and History (vol. IV), reprinted as vol. 17 in Collected Works, 245. 17 Ibid., 245–6. 18 Differentiation made by Hori, ‘Ko¯an and Kensho¯ in the Rinzai Zen Curriculum’, in The Ko¯an, 280–315; 303 et passim. 19 Both citations from Hee-Jin Kim, Dogen Kigen: Mystical Realist, as quoted in Hori, The Ko¯an, 301. 20 Ueda, Entangling Vines, 12. Emphases in original. 21 Ibid., 13. Emphases in original. 22 Voegelin, Collected Works 17, 291. 23 In his comprehensive hermeneutical study, James Rhodes denotes Socrates’ and Plato’s reluctance to speak of the serious things as ‘silence’. See James M. Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 26 ff.

NOTES

239

24 In Japanese, “Kyo¯ge betsuden / Furyu¯ monji”, cf. Hori, The Ko¯an, 294, 296; Cleary, Blue Cliff, 3. The verses are attributed to Bodhidharma (mid-sixth century), who is said to have brought Zen from India to China and is therefore considered to be its first patriarch (cf. Kirchner, Entangling Vines, 218). For a detailed discussion on the concept of mind-to-mind transmission in Zen, including its presumed roots in Chinese literary practices of such refinement as to virtually bypass language, see Hori, ‘Zen Ko¯an Capping Phrase Books: Literary Study and the Insight “Not Founded on Words or Letters” ’, in Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History of Zen Buddhism, ed. Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 171–214. 25 Lines 341c5–d1 of Plato’s Seventh Letter, as translated by Rhodes, Eros, 168. 26 Rhodes, Eros, 168–72. See also the extensive analysis given by Voegelin to the Seventh Letter in his Order and History (vol. III) reprinted as vol. 16 in Collected Works, 69–74. 27 Rhodes, Eros, 27. 28 Frequently invoked exhortation from The Diamond Sutra, one of the key Mahayana Buddhist texts and the oldest known dated printed book in the world, first translated from Sanskrit into Chinese in 401. 29 For Cage’s profound insight that ‘silence, channelled through chance, was capable of producing endless content of amazing variety’, see James Pritchett, ‘What Silence Taught John Cage: The Story of 4ʹ33ʺ (2009)’, for exhibition catalogue John Cage and Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona www.rosewhitemusic.com/piano/ writings/silence-taught-john-cage/ [accessed 27 September 2017]. 30 WikiArt, Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, Robert Morris https://www. wikiart.org/en/robert-morris/box-with-the-sound-of-its-own-making-1961 [accessed 1 May 2016]. 31 Robert Morris, “Looking for Silence” in Critical Inquiry: In the Moment, 23 September 2011 https://critinq.wordpress.com/2011/09/23/robert-morris-onsilence/ [accessed 1 May 2016]. 32 Christopher Howard, “Conversation with the Sound of Its Own Unraveling”, New York Public Library, Artist Dialogue Series Event, 16 April 2014; posted 21 May 2014 on In Terms Of http://www.in-terms-of.com/conversation-withthe-sound-of-its-own-unraveling/ [accessed 1 May 2016]. 33 Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Mind/Body Problem: Robert Morris in Series’, in Robert Morris: The Mind/Body Problem, exhibition catalogue, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1994, 2–17. 34 Tintinnabuli refers primarily to Pärt’s compositional style; the correct Latin plural of this neutral noun of the second declension, though, is tintinnabula. 35 Coming from an engineering perspective, Marconi seems to have had a similar preoccupation. As he was confronting his own mortality, he became convinced that sound never dies, and that therefore it would be just a matter of the right instrumentation to capture it. See https://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2013/01/the-museum-of-lost-sounds/272548/ [accessed 20 May 2018]. I am grateful to Mark Dorrian for this observation.

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36 Kirchner, Entangling Vines, 237. Hakuin introduced the ‘Sound of One Hand’ koan towards the end of his life, in a sermon entitled ‘The Dozer’s Awakening’; see Gishin Tokiwa, ‘Hakuin Ekaku’s Insight into “The Deep Secret of Hen (Pian)-Sho (Zheng) Reciprocity” and His Koan “The Sound of a Single Hand” ’, in Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies, 39(2) March (1991): 989–983 [sic]. 37 Katto¯shu¯, Case no. 228; cf. Kirchner, Entangling Vines, 183. 38 Ibid., Case no. 26, 49. 39 Ibid., Case no. 271, 207. 40 Voegelin held that, akin to revelation, philosophy as shaped by Plato represented a ‘leap in being’, Collected Works 16, 3. 41 R. Klibansky and C. Labowsky (trans.), quoted in Raoul Mortley, From Word to Silence, 2: The Way of Negation, Christian and Greek, Paper 7, Chapter VI: Proclus and positive negation (Bond University ePublications, 1986), 97–118; 116–17. 42 Michel de Certeau, La Fable mystique: XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1982), 208. Translation mine. 43 Dale S. Wright, ‘Ko¯an History: Transformative Language in Chinese Buddhist Thought’, in The Ko¯an, 200–12; 211.

7. The silence of Michelangelo’s hammer 1 This episode is recounted in Giorgio Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori (Firenze, 1906), VII, 244f, along with Michelangelo’s specific reply: ‘Rispose esserne cagione la importunità di Urbino suo servidote, che ogni dì lo sollecitava a finirla . . .’ 2 Vasari, Le vite, 244f: ‘. . . o fusse pure che il giudizio di quello uomo fussi tanto grande che non si contentava mai di cosa che c’ facessi . . .’ Leo Steinberg’s commonly cited interpretation offers an iconographic explanation that completely discounts Michelangelo’s own reasoning. See Leo Steinberg, ‘Michelangelo’s Florentine Pietà: The Missing Leg’, Art Bulletin, 50 (1968): 343–59. 3 A similar sentiment was demonstrated by Michelangelo as a young boy in the Medici garden at San Marco, where – as recounted by Vasari – he wantonly hammered off a tooth of his marble faun replica following a jesting comment by Lorenzo about the appropriateness of rendering an old man with all his teeth. In this sense, Michelangelo learned early that the hammer has the power to silence the critique of others. See episode in Vasari, Le vite, VII, 142. 4 See analysis on this question in Robert S. Liebert, ‘Michelangelo’s Mutilation of the Florence Pietà: A Psychoanalytic Inquiry’, Art Bulletin, 57 (1977): 47–54. 5 See, for example: ‘Lo moto e la virtù d’i santi giri, / come dal fabbro l’arte del martello, / da’ beati motor convein che spiri’, in Dante, Paradiso, 2: 127–32.

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The image of the demiurge as a divine blacksmith existed already in Euripides, when Hippolytus stated: ‘[t]his is the punishment wrought by the Demiurgos who works like the blacksmith who transforms the iron and plunges it from fire into water’, cited in Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word ‘Stimmung’ (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1963), 66; also Petrarch, Canzoniere, no. 42: ‘le braccia a la fucina indarno move / l’antiquissimo fabbro ciciliano’, Francesco Petrarca, Il Canzoniere, ed. Giancarlo Contini (Einaudi: Torino, 1964), 70. 6 Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, trans. Carol V. Kaske and John R. Caske (Tempe, Arizona: Renaissance Society of America, 2002), 343. 7 Horace, Ars Poetica, 291–4, as quoted in Armand D’Angour, ‘Ad Unguem’, American Journal of Philology, 120(3) (Autumn 1999): 411–27; 411. Ad unguem entered the classical lexicon as a metaphor for refinement and was invoked on several occasions by L. B. Alberti in his description of a well-fitting architecture, De re aedificatoria, III, 6, 41v; VI, 10, 106r; VII, 9, 122v; VII, 15, 132v. 8 Gaston Bachelard, Earth and the Reveries of Will; an Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002), 27–47. 9 The Filarete medal (ca. 1465) is in the care of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, no. 194-1866. 10 See analysis of this episode in Daniel Heller-Rozen, The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (New York: Zone Books, 2011), 11–13. 11 By one account, twenty-four of Michelangelo’s forty-two marble pieces are unfinished. See J. Schultz, ‘Michelangelo’s Unfinished Works’, Art Bulletin, 57 (1975): 366–73. 12 Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. Giovanni Nencioni (Florence, 1998), 8f. See also William Wallace, ‘Michelangelo’s Wet Nurse’, Arion, 17(2) (Fall 2009): 51–5. 13 For commentary on this woodcut, see catalogue entry in Il Volto di Michelangelo, ed. Pina Ragionieri (Firenze: Mandragora, 2008), 104f. 14 Transcription quoted from Irving Lavin, ‘David’s Sling and Michelangelo’s Bow: A Sign of Freedom’, in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 36–51; 44. 15 ‘. . . io non fu’ mai pictore né scultore come chi ne fa boctega’, in Il carteggio di Michelangelo, ed. Paola Barocchi and Renzo Ristori, IV (Firenze: S.P.E.S., 1967), 299. See also Carteggio, IV, 150, for a related assertion: ‘. . . si dipinge col ciervello et non con le mani; et chi non può avere il ciervello seco, si vitupera: però fin che la cosa mia non si acconcia, non fo cosa buona.’ 16 ‘Se ‘l mie rozzo martello i duri sassi / forma d’uman aspetto or questo o quello,/ dal ministor che ‘l guida, iscorge e tiello, / prendendo il moto, va con gli altrui passi. / Ma quel divin che in cielo alberga e stassi, / altri, e sé più, col proprio andar fa bello; / e se nessun martel senza martello / si può far, da quel vivo ogni altro fassi. / E perché ‘l colpo è di valor più pieno / quant’alza più se stesso alla fucina, / sopra ‘l mie questo al ciel n’è gito a volo. / Onde a me non

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finito verrà meno, / s’or non gli dà la fabbrica divina / aiuto a farlo, c’al mondo era solo’, in E. N. Girardi, Rime (Bari: G. Laterza, 1960), no. 46; translation in J. M. Saslow, The Poetry of Michelangelo: An Annotated Translation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 128f. 17 Quoted in Robert Clements, Michelangelo’s Theory of Art (New York University Press, 1961), 35; and related from Vasari, ‘Si conosce che, quando e’ voleva cavar Minerva dalla testa di Giove, ci bisognava il martello di Vulcano’, in Vasari, Le Vite VII, 270. 18 A strong resemblance may be observed in Vasari’s own woodblock portrait of Michelangelo in his 1568 version of Le Vite. Most sixteenth-century portraits of Michelangelo have a resemblance to Marcello Venusti’s or Jacopino del Conte’s portraits of the artist, ca. 1535, painted shortly after he arrived in Rome. See Ragionieri, Il Volto, 104. 19 See, for example, Michelangelo’s dire mental and physical state in a letter sent to his brother from Bologna, Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 55. 20 The author has written elsewhere on the relationship of the via di levare to architecture, in Jonathan Foote, ‘Extracting Desire: Michelangelo and Forza di Levare as an Architectural Premise’, in Matthew Mindrup (ed.), The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 29–46. 21 This was written into a 1532 play by Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, when Michelangelo was 57 years old. 22 The anecdote does not appear in any sixteenth-century sources and was first recorded only in 1839: ‘È fama, e si ha per tradizione che lo stesso Michelangelo, dopo di averla finita, si compiacesse tanto di questa statua, come già Pigmalion della sua, che rivolta alla medesima, col martello che in man tenea, vuolsi che le scagliasse un colpo sul ginocchio, dicendole: perché non parli? [. . .]’, in Il Mosè a S. Pietro in Vincoli: capo d’opera in iscultura di Michelangelo Buonarruoti (Roma, 1839), 28. This passage and the Pygmalion topos are discussed at length in Giorgio Masi, ‘ “Perché non parli?” Michelangelo e il silenzio’, in Harald Hendrix and Paolo Procaccioli (eds), Officine del Nuovo (Roma: Vecchiarelli, 2008), 427–44. 23 On the generative power of knees, see Richard Onians, The Origins of European Thought: About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 175–8; on knees as ‘generative members’ in Euripides, see Euripides, Electra 1208–15 and Troades 1305–7. On Pliny the Elder, see Natural History, Book XI.ci: ‘For the actual joint of each knee, right and left, on the front side there is a sort of twin hollow cavity, the piercing of which, as of the throat, causes the breath to flow away [qua perfossa ceu spiritus fluit]’, Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, volume III), 588–91. 24 Douglas Lanska, ‘The History of Reflex Hammers’, Neurology, 39 (1989): 1542–9. 25 Ficino, Three Books of Life, 343. 26 Ovid, Metamorphosis, X, 243–97; and Masi, ‘Perché non parli?’, 428f. 27 Vasari, Le vite, II, 405.

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28 Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio I, 235 and I, 245f., respectively. 29 ‘. . . exequiate la fantasia vostra [. . .] e non abbiate respetto né a Baccio né alchun altro’, in Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 252. The reference is to the architect-sculptor Baccio d’Angelo, Michelangelo’s appointed partner on the San Lorenzo façade, who was repeatedly marginalised by Michelangelo in his effort for full control over the project. 30 Letters arrived from Iacopo D’Antonio and Bernardo Niccolini. See Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 254f. 31 Letter from Buoninsegni to Michelangelo’s brother. See Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 256. 32 ‘El Papa et el Chardinale si disperono che si peni tanto a mandarlo.’ See Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 260. 33 Michelangelo adds in the 20 March 1517: ‘Duolmi questa cosa . . . non posso fare altro.’ Barocchi and Ristori, Carteggio, I, 267. 34 That Vasari thought of Michelangelo’s prolonged periods in the quarries as a waste of time increases the probability that the artist sought refuge there. See episode in Vasari, Le Vite, VII, 189–91. 35 Tóth lived most of his life in Australia and claimed, to the scepticism of the Vatican authorities, that he did not understand Italian. Contemporary accounts taken from Corriere della Sera, 22 May 1972, 1–2. 36 Tóth’s statement from the Regina Coeli prison in Rome are from Corriere della Sera, 15 June 1972, 19. 37 Tóth was quite precise about where he hammered. No blows at all were rendered on the Christ figure. Focused specifically on Mary, ‘perché siete [mankind] sordi, ed io ho rotto l’orecchio, ciechi ed io ho rotto l’occhio, senza compassione per l’uomo ed io ho rotto la mano’. Ibid. 38 See discussion of the iconoclastic dimension of this episode in Dario Gamboni, The Destruction of Art: Iconoclasm and Vandalism Since the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 202; and John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, ‘The Attack on the Pietà: An Archetypal Analysis’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 33(1) (Fall 1974): 43–50. 39 ‘La pietà di Michelangelo e il suo restauro – Deoclecio Redig de Campos’, Atti della pontifica accademica Romana di Archeologia, XLVIII (1975/76), 419–41. The attacker is never mentioned by name, but simply ‘un pazzo’ (419) or ‘un giovane demente’ (422). While hammering, Tóth was heard ‘urlando parole incomprensibili’ (419), with no mention of his invocation of the name of Jesus Christ.

8. Making silence: Modes of emptiness in Iberian art and architecture My thanks to Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul for her tireless and inspired editorial support, to Jeff Malpas for leading me into a more exacting and fruitful

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reading of Heidegger, to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Emilio Garcia for monitoring my Spanish. All errors are my own alone. 1 John Lobell, Between Silence and Light: Spirit in the Architecture of Louis I. Kahn (Boulder, CO: Shambhala, 1979), 3. 2 José Àngel Valente, ‘Cinco fragmentos para Antoni Tàpies’, in Comunicación sobre el muro, ed. Antoni Tàpies and José Àngel Valente (Barcelona: Ediciones de la Rosa Cúbica, 2004), 33–4. See also Manuel Luca de Tena Navarro, ‘La presencia de lo ausente: el concepto y la expresión del vacío en los textos de los pintores contemporáneos occidentales a la luz del pensamiento extremo-oriental’ (Universidad de Salamanca, 2008), 347. 3 Valente, ‘Cinco fragmentos para Antoni Tàpies’, 34. 4 Octavio Paz, ‘Lectura de John Cage’, in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz 1957–1987 (New York: New Directions, 1987), 236–7. 5 Darla M. Crispin, ‘Some Noisy Ruminations on Susan Sontag’s “Aesthetics of Silence” ’, in Silence, Music, Silent Music, ed. Nicky Losseff and Jenny Doctor (Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 127–40; 133. Claude Debussy is held to have remarked in 1910 that the music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them. 6 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 8. 7 Susan Sontag, ‘Aesthetics of Silence’, in Styles of Radical Will (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), 3–34; 11. 8 Tulio H. Demicheli, ‘Eduardo Chillida: la material es un espacio lente: Valente y Calvo Serraller dialogaron con el escultor’, ABC (Madrid), 11 August (1995): 45. 9 Manuel de Prada, ‘Componer Con Vacío: Notas sobre la configuración del vacío en el arte y la arquitectura’, Cuaderno de notas, 9 (2002): 57–84; 74. 10 Cornelis van de Ven, Space in Architecture: The Evolution of a New Idea in the Theory and History of the Modern Movements (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum Assen, 1978), 3. 11 ‘We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.’ Lao Tzu, Tao te ching, English version by Arthur Waley, The Way and its Power: A Study of the Tao Te Ching and its Place in Chinese Thought, 1934 https://terebess.hu/english/tao/waley.html [accessed 16 August 2018]. 12 Naum Gabo, ‘Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space’, in Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, ed. Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1971), 103–11; 106. See also Joseph Masheck, Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture (London and New York: I.B. Tauris. 2013), 237–8. 13 See Prada, ‘Componer Con Vacío’, 74. 14 Alberto Campo Baeza, La idea construida (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Nobuko, 2009), 61. 15 Ibid., 62.

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16 Guillermo Solana, ‘Versiones del vacío Eduardo Chillida, 1924–2002’, Arquitectura viva, 85 (2002): 82–3. See also Beatriz Matos Castaño, Chillida arquitecto, https://issuu.com/beatrizmatoscastano/docs/tesis_doctoral eduardo_chillida__ar/99 [accessed 15 August 2018]. 17 The Tindaya project remains unrealized; nevertheless, there have been ongoing attempts to construct it, some involving Arups. It has given rise to great dispute, being opposed by campaigners on both environmental and cultural grounds. The mountain is a site sacred to the Guanches, the pre-colonial inhabitants, with 217 prehistoric rock drawings nearby. An image of the work may be found at https://www.pinterest.nz/ pin/272045633717750215/ 18 On the forms of poché, see Steven Kent Peterson, ‘Space and Anti-Space’, The Harvard Architecture Review, 1, Spring (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980): 89–114; Jacques Lucan, ‘Généalogie du poché: de l’espace au vide’, Matières 7 (2005): 41–54; Spence R. Kass, ‘The Voluminous Wall’, The Cornell Journal of Architecture, 3 (1987): 44–55; Francesco Cacciatore, Il muro come contenitore di luogi: forme strutturali cave nell’ opera di Louis Kahn (Siracusa: Lettera Ventidue Edizioni, 2011); Raúl Castellanos Gómez, Plan Poché 36 (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2012), 17–27. 19 See Joseph Masheck, ‘Abstraction and Apathy: Crystaline Form in Expressionism and in the Minimalism of Tony Smith’, in Invisible Cathedrals: The Expressionist Art History of Wilhelm Worringer, ed. Neil H. Donahue (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), 41–68; 44–5. 20 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Les Éditions du Minuit 1992), 66–9. 21 Gene Baro, ‘Tony Smith: Toward Speculation in Pure Form’, Art International (Summer 1967): 27–31; 29. 22 Carl Andre in Bradford College Symposium in 1968; cited in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 40. 23 Ina Busch, ‘Eduardo Chillida, Arquitecto del vacío sobre la síntesis entre arquitectura y escultura/Eduardo Chillida, architect of the void on the synthesis of architecture and sculpture’, in Chillida, 1948–1998, ed. Kosme María de Barañano Letamendía (Bilbao: Guggenheim Museoa Bilbao, 1999), 61–73; 67. See also Mario Algarín Comino, Arquitecturas excavadas : el proyecto frente a la construcción de espacio (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2006), 271. 24 Esengreni notes that the rhythm of making which is ‘at the foundation of the works – be it in paper, stone, wood, clay, iron or concrete, in the alternation of solids and voids, recalls the movement made by lungs in their inhaling and exhaling’. Stefano Esengrini, ‘Heidegger e Chillida – un dialogo sullo spazio’, Aisthesis Pratiche, linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico, 3(1) (2010): 111–27; 120. 25 See R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time and Fate (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 35.

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26 See Francesco Cacciatore, ‘L’animale e la conchiglia. L’architettura di Manuel e Francisco Aires Mateus come dimora del voto’, in L’architettura di Aires Mateus, ed. Carlotta Tonon (Milan: Electa, 2011), 10–27; José Ángel Valente and Francesco Calvo Serraller, ‘El arte como vacío: conversación con Eduardo Chillida’, Revista de Occidente, 181, June (1996): 99–117; 111. 27 On the notion of excavation and void in architecture, see Fernando Espuelas, El claro en el bosque: reflexiones sobre el vacio en architectura (Barcelona: Caja de Arquitectos, 1999); Manuel de Prada, Arte y vacío: sobre la configuración del vacío en el arte y la arquitectura (Buenos Aires: Nobuko, 2009) and ‘Componer Con Vacío’; Mario Comino Algarín, Arquitecturas excavadas: el proyecto frente a la construcción de espacio (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 2006); Cacciatore, Il muro come contenitore di luogi; Gianpaola Spirito, Forme del vuoto: cavità, concavità e fori nell’architettura contemporanea (Rome: Cangemi Editore, 2011). 28 Martin Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, Man and World, 6 (1973): 3–8; 5. Räumen: this means to clear away, to rid, to free from wilderness (‘Dies meint: roden, die Wildnis freimachen’). On the Chillida–Heidegger conjunction, see Peter Selz, Eduardo Chillida 1924–2002 (New York: Abrams, 1986), 113–17; Martín de Ugalde, Hablando con Chillida: vida y obra (1924–1975) (San Sebastian: Editorial Txertoa, 2002), 98–108; Kosme Barañano, ‘Concepciones espaciales: de Heidegger a Chillida’, Armitano arte, 12 (1987): 7–22; Juan Carlos Sancho Osinga and Sol Madridejos, ‘La paradoja del vacío’, Circo, 06 (1993): 1–8; Prada, ‘Componer Con Vacío’; Ricardo Pinilla, ‘Los espacios logrados y habitados: escultura y arquitectura a la luz de la obra de Eduardo Chillida y del pensamiento de Martin Heidegger’, Arte, Individuo y Sociedad, 14 (2002): 261–82; Iskandar Rementería Arnaiz, ‘Consideraciones sobre el arte y el espacio en la obra de Chillida y Heidegger’, Ondare, 25 (2006): 367–75; José Antonio de Ory, ‘Chillida, el desocupador del espacio (Esbozo)’, Circo: La casa del aire, 151 (2008): 1–8; Esengrini, ‘Heidegger e Chillida’, 111–27; Prada, Arte y vacío, 14, 16, 29, 52; A. J. Mitchell, Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space and the Art of Dwelling (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 66–91; Mar Garrido Román, ‘Aproximación al estudio del vacío como espacio negativo y sus aportaciones en el campo de la creación’, Bellas Artes, 9, April (2011): 87–106; Lis Helena Aschermann Keuchegerian, O Lugar no espaço: De Martin Heidegger para Eduardo Chillida (Saarbrücken, Germany: Novas Edições Acadêmicas, 2015). 29 Of Chillida, Valente observes: ‘The emptiness in his world is very important and what is being generated there is an empty space, the void space of which Heidegger speaks in the text he wrote about space and art. It is the place of manifestation, where you can make something manifest.’ Valente and Calvo Serraller, ‘El arte como vacío’, 111. 30 Octavio Paz, ‘From iron to light’, in Chillida (London, UK: Banco Bilbao Vizcaya, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, 1990), 55–65; 58. 31 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, 6. Raum and Ort (place) are mutualy dependent. Space is ungraspable without a sense of ‘a where’, place is gathered opening/openness. 32 Eduardo Chillida, Escritos (Madrid: La Fabrica Editorial, 2005), 52.

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33 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, 3. 34 Ibid., 5. 35 Ugalde, Hablando con Chillida, 102–3. 36 Valente and Calvo Serraller, ‘El arte como vacío’,109. See also Miguel de Beistegui, Éloge de Chillida: Poétique de la matière (Montreuil, France: Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2011), 35. 37 Candelas Gala, Creative Cognition and the Cultural Panorama of TwentiethCentury Spain (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 141. 38 ‘To construct is to build in space. This is sculpture, and generally speaking sculpture and architecture’; Chillida, cited in Busch, ‘Eduardo Chillida, Arquitecto del vacío’, 62. Of Chillida, Valente writes further: ‘he is master of emptiness, a builder or “architect of the empty”, in which the form surrounds a space. The structure of the material becomes a support for its terrible weight. A gravitation of emptiness, in the gravity of the flight of a bird stripped bare. Air: the comb of the wind. Combing the invisible and humid root or mane of the wind that grips with a timeless patience at something that may never be fully retained. Jagged materials that always leave open the possibility of their never accomplished adjustment. Copulation and the world are only possible within this interstitial void. A void engendered by the powerful impetus of solid forms which, paradoxically, cause the intensity of non-presence to blossom forth from them.’ José Ángel Valente, ‘Ut Pictura’, in La Palabra e la súa sombra. José Ángel Valente: O poeta e las artes (Santiago De Compostela, Spain: Xunta De Galicia, 2003), 253–8; 255–6. 39 Alejandro de la Sota, ‘Sobre Chillida’, Revista Nacional de Arquitectura, December (1956): 180. See Juan Antonio Cortés, Gobierno Civil De Tarragona 1957–1964: Alejandro de la Sota (Almeria, Spain: Colegio de Arquitectos de Almería, 2006) and De la Sota, ‘Comentarios Sobre Concursos’, Arquitectura, 128, August (1969): 17. Later, De la Sota wrote: ‘we follow the example of Chillida . . . If in other arts . . . we were able to imitate Chillida in his sculptures, we would have made good art.’ De la Sota, Nueva Forma, December (1974 ): 107. 40 Juan Navarro Baldeweg, ‘Una laboriosa abstraccion’, Arquitectura Viva, 3, November (1988): 29–31. See also Orsina Simona Pierini, Passaggio in Iberia: Percorsi del moderno nell’architettura spagnola contemporanea (Milan, Italy: Christian Marinotti Edizioni, 2008), 154–79. 41 De la Sota, ‘Sobre Chillida’, 180. See St John of the Cross, A Spiritual Canticle of the Soul and the Bridegroom Christ, Stanza XV (Grand Rapids, MI: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1909). 42 Paz, ‘From iron to light’, 65. 43 Ugalde, Hablando con Chillida, 102. 44 For a reading of Heidegger’s antinomial understanding of Lichtung, see Leonardo Amoroso, ‘La Lichtung di Heidegger come lucus a (non) lucendo’, in Il Pensiero Debole, ed. Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti (Milan, Italy: Feltrinelli, 1988): 137–63.

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45 Gillermor Zuaznaba, Lo Spazio nella forma: la sculptura di Oteiza e l’estetica basca, ed. Orsina Simona Pierini (Milan, Italy: Christian Marinotti, 2011), 9. See also Jorge de Oteiza, ‘The Basque Cromlech as Empty Statue’, in Oteiza’s Selected Writings, ed. Joseba Zulaika (Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada, 2003), 323–30 and Oteiza, Quousque Tandem. . .! Ensayo de interpretación estética del alma vasca, ed. Amador Vega Alzuza (Navarra, Spain: Fundación Jorge Oteiza, 2007), 119–203. On the Oteiza-Chillida conjunction, see Juan Daniel Fullaondo, Oteiza y Chillida en la moderna historiografía del arte, (Bilbao, Spain: Gran Enciclopedia Vasca, 1976) and Maria Soledad Alvarez Martinez, ‘Oteiza y Chillida: la escultura vasca entre el proyecto moderno y la impronta del pasado’, RIEV, 42(1) (1997): 13–26. 46 Oteiza, Oteiza’s Selected Writings, 221. 47 Jon Echeverria-Plazaola, ‘Creating Empty Spaces Through Disoccupation: The Aesthetic Proposal of Jorge Oteiza’, Space and Place: Exploring Critical Issues, 5 (Oxford, UK: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2013): 25–41. 48 Carlos Martí Arís, Silenzi eloquenti: Borges, Mies van der Rohe, Ozu, Rothko, Oteiza (Milan, Italy: Christian Marinotti, 2012), 105. 49 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, 3. 50 Ibid., 5. ‘Dieser Charakter·des Räumens wird allzu leicht übersehen. Und wenn er gesehen ist, bleibt er immer noch schwer zu bestimmen. . .’ Heidegger, ‘Die Kunst und Der Raum’, in Gesamtausgabe, Band 13 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Klosterman, 1983), 207. 51 Heidegger, ‘Art and Space’, 4. 52 Ibid., 4. 53 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute Publications, Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2011), 241. 54 Tena Navarro, ‘La presencia de lo ausente’, 34. 55 Gala, Creative Cognition, 144. 56 Clara Janés, La Indetenible quietud: En torno a Eduardo Chillida (Madrid, Spain: Ediciones Siruela, 2008), 38. 57 Gala, Creative Cognition, 13. 58 Paz, ‘From iron to light’, 65. 59 Valente, ‘Ut Pictura’, 256. 60 Demicheli, ‘Eduardo Chillida: la material es un espacio lente’: 45. 61 Walter Skeat, An Etymological Dictionary of the English Langage (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1888), 228. 62 Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 194. 63 Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, ed. and trans. A.-Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2017), 176.

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9. On becoming petrified: The erotic gaze in architectural conception 1 Barbara Johnson, Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 20. 2 Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns and Homerica, trans. Hugh G. Evelyn-White, Loeb Classical Library 57 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1914). Available online, Perseus Digital Library: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/ hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0020,001:276 [accessed 11 June 2018]. 3 Jean-Pierre Vernant notes: ‘From the late fifth century, at the moment itself when the motif of the mirror arises, the turning point begins that will lead to representing Medusa as a young woman of marvelous beauty. In certain versions of the myth recounted by Apollodorus, Pausanias, and Ovid, it is the excess of this beauty and its radiance that constitutes the dynamic element of the drama, whether because it unleashes the jealousy of Athena and impels the goddess to slaughter her rival, or because it leads Perseus, dazzled by the perfection of Medusa’s face, to cut off her head after having killed her so he will never have to separate himself from this resplendent visage.’ Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘In the Mirror of Medusa’, in Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 141–50; 149–50. 4 Pindar, the Greek poet, describes how ‘the head of the beautiful-cheeked Medusa was carried off by the son of Danaë, who, we assert, came into being because of a shower of gold’. Miriam Robbins Dexter, ‘The Ferocious and the Erotic: “Beautiful” Medusa and the Neolithic Bird and Snake’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 26(1), Special Introduction from the Religion and Politics Editor (Spring 2010): 25–41; 28. 5 Ibid., 31. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid., 29. A further association is with wisdom and protection. See, for example, the emblem titled ‘Stupor Admirationis, Ex Armorum, & Literarum Praestantia’ in Barthélemy Aneau, Picta Poesis (Lyon, France: Macé Bonhomme, 1552) http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FANa091 [accessed 11 August 2018]. Minerva carries a depiction of Medusa’s face on her shield. Becoming ‘seized by rapt admiration’ and ‘rooted stiff with awe’, men are stupefied as if they were stones at Medusa’s wise presence. 8 Dexter, ‘The Ferocious and the Erotic’, 30. 9 Vitruvius, On Architecture, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 21. 10 ‘For the sight follows gracious contours; and unless we flatter its pleasure, by proportionate alterations of the modules, an uncouth and ungracious aspect will be presented to the spectators.’ Vitruvius, On Architecture, 179. 11 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Vintage, 1974), 227. 12 Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream (London, UK: Thames & Hudson, 1999).

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13 Liane Lefaivre, Leon Battista Alberti’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: Re-Cognizing the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 234–5. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Pliny the Elder, The Natural History (Somerville, MA: Perseus Digital Library, 2006). Available online: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perse us:abo:tlg,0020,001:276 [accessed 11 August 2018]. 17 E. A. Andrews, William Freund, Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews’ Edition of Freund’s Latin Dictionary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 18 Alberto Pérez Gómez elucidates a connection between erotic delirium and the poet’s madness through Plato’s Phaedrus. The philosopher, Pérez-Gómez recounts, ‘describes erotic delirium as a form of divine madness: possession by a supernatural power, mystic initiation with successive stages, and a final epiphany of beauty. This, it was believed, was the same delirium that took hold of the poet and enabled him to craft better works than a sane man.’ Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built Upon Love (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 14. 19 ‘The architect/magus/physician must lovingly transform the prima materia of the world to reveal a hidden order with restorative powers.’ Pérez-Gómez, Built Upon Love, 18. 20 Paul Klee, Notebooks of Paul Klee, vol. 1 (London, UK: Lund Humphries, 1961), 78. 21 Franca Semi, A lezione con Carlo Scarpa (Venice, Italy: Cicero Editore, 2010), 225. 22 Cited in Edoardo Gellner, Franco Mancuso, Carlo Scarpa e Edoardo Gellner: La chiesa di Corte di Cadore (Milan: Electa, 2000), 38. 23 Interview with Guido Pietropoli by author, July 2013. 24 The parallels between women and architecture that take place in Scarpa’s work date from an older Western tradition of gendered architecture rooted in embodiment. While it is clear that the architect was not concerned with canons, it is evident that his will to apprehend qualities of architecture through the appreciation of the body were significant to his way of working. Scarpa’s fascination with women as carnal personifications of architecture should be comprehended within the lineage of such a historical project. 25 Interview with Guido Pietropoli. 26 Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 13. 27 Marco Frascari, ‘The Body and Architecture in the Drawings of Carlo Scarpa’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 14 (Autumn, 1987): 123–42. 28 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013). 29 Paul Valéry, Manet, Morisot (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), 36.

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30 Nancy, The Pleasure in Drawing, 51. 31 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2013), 297. 32 Francesco Dal Co, ‘Il corpo e il disegno: I Modi di Giulio Romano e i modi di Carlo Scarpa e Álvaro Siza / Body and Drawing: I Modi of Giulio Romano and the “modi” of Carlo Scarpa and Álvaro Siza’, Casabella, December (2015): 53–79; 60. 33 Ibid., 61. 34 Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter (Dallas, TX: Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, 2002), 166. 35 Ivan Illich, ‘The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perception’ (1998) http://www.davidtinapple.com/ illich/1998_scopic_past.PDF [accessed 11 November 2017].

10. Silence, paradox and religious topography 1 A ‘statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense’. See Matthew Bagger, The Uses of Paradox (Religion, Self-Transformation and the Absurd) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 1. 2 Ibid., 8–9. 3 Ibid., Ch. 2: ‘Credo Quia Absurdum: Cognitive Asceticism and Kierkegaard’, 15–30, 9. 4 On this, see George Kalamaras, Reclaiming the Tacit Dimension: Symbolic Form in the Rhetoric of Silence (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994); Geoffrey Parrinder, Mysticism in the World”s Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 15. 5 On the relation between silence and sound in the work of Martin Heidegger, see David Nowell-Smith, Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger and the Limits of Poetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 19–60; Stefan Vla¯dutescu, ‘Communication of Silence at Martin Heidegger: Sygetics – Logics of Thinking Silence’, International Letters of Social and Humanistic Sciences, 6 (2014): 49–54, http://www.ilshs.pl/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/ ILSHS-6-2014-49-54.pdf [accessed 20 November 2014]. 6 Bernard P. Dauenhauer, Silence: The Phenomenon and its Ontological Significance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980). 7 Susan Sontag, ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, in Susan Sontag, Studies of Radical Will, Ch. 1 (New York: Anchor Books, 2002), 3–34. 8 Nowell-Smith, Sounding/Silence, 75–81. 9 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. I. Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York, 1996), 153–4. On Heidegger and hearing, see also Jennifer L. Heuson, ‘Heidegger’s Ears: Hearing, Attunement, and the Acoustic Shaping of Being and Time’, Contemporary Music Review, 31(5–6) (2012): 411–23.

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10 Gernot Böhme, ‘Acoustic Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Study of Ecological Aesthetics’, Soundscape: The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, 1(1) (2000): 14–18. 11 Ibid., 18. 12 Martin Heidegger, ‘Why do I stay in the provinces’, in T. Sheehan (ed.), Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction), 28. My emphasis. 13 Chanting and musical sounds are connected here to the idea of ‘dust’, an aural quality that combines everything and at the same time highlights the limits of everything. Free chanting and the so-called ‘pure land’ chanting are combined during a process of purification of mind and body from mundane thoughts. Free chanters perform according to their own way, creating their own style and trying to harmonize with each other. The tempo of this chanting is gradually accelerated and improvisations are allowed. Hence, variation and adjustment are expressed through the performative qualities of free-chanting technique. Moreover, the ‘pure land’ relates to the recitation of the name of Buddha, followed by a ‘celestial music’ based on the sounds of nature (wind, birds, water etc). On this, see Chen Pi-yen, ‘Sound and Emptiness: Music, Philosophy and the Monastic Practice of Buddhist Doctrine’, History of Religions, 41(1) (August) (2001): 24–48. 14 D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (London and New York: Routledge, 2003, first published in 1957), 23. This is also connected to the teachings of Nagarjuna, a second-century CE Buddhist thinker, according to whom the emptiness involves on the simultaneous co-dependence of different entities that are seemingly antithetical. On this, see K. Vladimir, ‘The Zen Teaching of Nagarjuna’, Creative Commons (June 2004): 5. 15 Emptiness has been used to express silence also in more secular contexts, such as theatre. Characteristically Samuel Beckett uses the physical emptiness of the stage or the metaphorical emptiness of the human body to transmit messages of silence. On this, see Christos Kakalis, ‘Narrating the Spatiality of Silence: Drawing from the Silence of Samuel Beckett and Andrei Tarkovsky’, in Proceedings of the International Conference: Dramatic Architectures. Places for Drama – Drama for Places, (Porto, 3–5 November 2014), 466–77. 16 Dionysius the Areopagite, Works, trans. John Parker (London, UK: James Parker and Co., 1897), 130. My emphasis. 17 Kallistos Ware, ‘Identity and Difference in the Spiritual Life: Hesychasts, Yogis and Sufis’, The Athens Dialogues, 2012, http://athensdialogues.chs.harvard. edu/cgi-bin/WebObjects/athensdialogues.woa/wa/dist?dis=71 [accessed 18 December 2014]. The writer describes in a detailed way the commonalities and differences between hesychasm, Hindu yoga and Sufism. 18 On the distinction between ‘strenuous’ and ‘self-impelled’ recitation of the prayer, see Kallistos Ware, ‘Introduction, Igumen Chariton of Valamo’, in The Art of Prayer: An Orthodoxy Anthology (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1966), 22–6. Also Fr Joseph Wong, ‘The Jesus Prayer and Inner Stillness’, Religion: East and West, 10 (October 2010): 45. A characteristic example of the way

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silent meditation is expressed through art is Byzantine iconography in which the lack of depth, focus on the gaze of the represented saint(s) and the reversed perspective aim at the expression of this physical-spiritual transformation through the prayer of the heart (the perspective being directed to the viewer’s heart). 19 Martin Heidegger, ‘Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking’, in Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M Anderson and E. Hans Freund (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 58–90. 20 David Levin, The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and Closure of Metaphysics (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 228. 21 Ibid., 225–35. 22 The term ‘Gelassenheit’ was initially used by the German mystic Meister Eckhart to depict the emptying of the individual’s inner self, a process of spiritual purification as preparation for the reception of God. Heidegger clearly indicates that he was inspired by Eckhart’s approach, though the two attitudes have a number of differences. On this, see Reiner Schürman, ‘Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement’, in Hubert Dreyfus and Mark Wrathall (eds), Heidegger Reexamined (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), 295–319, and Barbara Dalle Pezze, Martin Heidegger and Meister Eckhart: A Path Towards Gelassenheit (Edwin Mellen Press, 2009), especially Ch. 6, ‘Heidegger and Eckhart on Gelassenheit’, 161–88. 23 On silence and architectural experience, see Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture of the Senses (Sussex, UK: Academy Press, 2005), 40–58. 24 Silvia Montiglio, Silence in the Land of Logos (Princeton, NJ: University Press, 2012), 11. 25 Ibid., 17–23. 26 Diarmaid MacCulloch, Silence: A Christian History (London, UK: Penguin Books, 2013), 11–29. 27 Ibid., 53–79. 28 Ware, ‘Identity and Reference in the Spiritual Life’. 29 Saint Gregory Palamas, Triads I (§2, §12) and II (§22). 30 Ware, ‘Identity and Reference in the Spiritual Life’. 31 Kallistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom, Collected Works 1 (New York: St. Vladimir”s Seminary Press, 2000), 89–98. 32 Hierotheos Vlachos, A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain: Discussion with a Hermit on the Jesus Prayer (Levadia, Greece: Birth of Theotokos Monastery, 1991), 168, as translated and quoted in Wong, ‘The Jesus Prayer and Inner Stillness’, 36–7. 33 See also Philip Sherrard, Athos. The Mountain of Silence (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1960), 92. 34 Interview with Monk L. Fieldwork at Mount Athos, August–September 2013.

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35 Nowadays this intense atmospheric silence may be interrupted by the voice of someone talking on his mobile phone or a group of people talking to each other loudly. 36 See also Patrick J. Quinn, ‘Drawing on Mount Athos: The Thousand Year Lesson’, Places, 2(1) (1985): ‘The monks’ cells illustrate the possibility of personalization of one’s own space/world within the larger world of an impersonal, communal life-style’ (40). See also Svetlana Popovic, ‘Dividing the Indivisible: The Monastery Space – Secular and Sacred’, Recueil des travaux d’études byzantines XLIV (2007): ‘individual cells may become a path to Heaven and thus acquire a higher status in the hierarchy of sacredness . . .’ (47). See also John Chryssavgis, John Climacus – From the Egyptian Desert to the Sinaite Mountain (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 159.

11. Silences generating space 1 Carl Te Hira Mika, ‘Worlded Object and its Presentation: A Ma¯ori Philosophy of Language’, AlterNative: An International Journal of Indigenous Peoples, 12(2) (2016): 165–76. 2 Wolfgang Walter Fuchs, Phenomenology and the Metaphysics of Presence: An Essay in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). 3 Marcia H. Browne, Wairua and the Relationship it has with Learning te reo Ma¯ori within Te Ataarangi (Palmerston North, NZ: Massey University); R. R. Pere, Ako: Concepts and Learning in the Ma¯ori Tradition (Hamilton, NZ: University of Waikato, 1982). 4 Mika, ‘Worlded Object and its Presentation’. 5 Mario Perniola, Enigmas: the Egyptian Moment in Society and Art (London and New York: Verso, 1995), 12. 6 Jakob Böhme, Signatura Rerum, or the Signature of All Things: Shewing the Sign, and Signification of the Severall Forms and Shapes in the Creation, trans. J. Ellistone (London, UK: John Macock, 1651). Available at http:// commons.ptsem.edu/id/signaturarerumor00bhme [accessed 28 April 2018]. 7 Hermann Schmitz, System der Philosophie. Bd. III.5 Die Wahrnehmung (Bonn, Germany: Bouvier, 1978), 229. 8 Jens Soentgen, ‘Stuff: A Phenomenological Definition’, in Stuff: The Nature of Chemical Substances, ed. K. Ruthenberg and J. v. Brakel (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008): 71–92. 9 Daniel Rosenblatt, Houses and Hopes: Urban Marae and the Indigenization of Modernity in New Zealand, PhD thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA (2003). Regarding the intricate and by no means stable relationships between things and concepts, immateriality and materiality in the context of Ma¯ori and Samoan ritual occasions, see Serge Tcherkézoff, ‘More on Polynesian Gift-Giving: The Samoan Sau and the Fine Mats (Toonga), the Maori Hau and the Treasures (Taonga)’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2(2) (2012): 313–24.

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10 Gernot Böhme, Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, ed. and trans. A. -Chr. Engels-Schwarzpaul (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2017), 175. 11 Ibid., 174. 12 Ibid., 176. 13 Gernot Böhme, Aisthetik: Vorlesungen über Ästhetik als allgemeine Wahrnehmungslehre (Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2001), 54. 14 D. Harper, Online Etymology Dictionary (2001–2017). Available at https:// www.etymonline.com/word/still [accessed 28 April 2018]. 15 English Oxford Living Dictionaries (2017). Available at https:// en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/still [accessed 28 April 2018]. 16 Christian Cay Lorenz Hirschfeld, Theorie der Gartenkunst, 5 vols. (Leipzig, Germany: M. G. Weidmann Erben und Reich, 1779–85). 17 Andrew Bowie, Aesthetics and Subjectivity from Kant to Nietzsche (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 5. 18 Ben Anderson, ‘Time-stilled Space-slowed: How Boredom Matters’, Geoforum, 35 (6 November) (2004): 739–54; Ben Anderson, ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2) (2009): 77–81; Friedlind Riedel, ‘Music as Atmosphere: Lines of Becoming in Congregational Worship’, Lebenswelt: Aesthetics and Philosophy of Experience, 6 (2015): 80–111. 19 Daniel Rosenblatt’s is an unusually detailed, atmospheric description of a po¯whiri. Starting in 1990, Rosenblatt was involved for some years with Hoani Waititi marae in West Auckland, while he conducted research under the direction of Dr Pita Sharples for a Doctor of Philosophy degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Rosenblatt’s familiarity with the day-to-day as well as ceremonial operations at the marae grew over the time of his involvement, and this description seems like an early account of a po¯whiri he observed at Hoani Waititi. This description combines the ethnographer’s professional interest with personal engagement. Rosenblatt is, of course, a non-Ma¯ori observer, and there may well be an aspect of idealisation of indigenous experience in his account. 20 All quotations from Daniel Rosenblatt, Houses and Hopes: Urban Marae and the Indigenization of Modernity in New Zealand, PhD thesis (University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology, 2003), 40–5. 21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991), 251. 22 Mika, ‘Worlded Object and its Presentation’, 171. 23 Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: Harvard University Press, 2003), 390. 24 Mika, ‘Worlded Object and its Presentation’, 166 25 Anne Salmond, ‘Ontological Quarrels: Indigeneity, Exclusion and Citizenship in a Relational World’, Anthropological Theory, 12(2) (2012): 115141; Tcherkézoff, ‘More on Polynesian Gift-Giving’.

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12. Silence in the middle ground: Aesthetic immersion in the geologic 1 Jane Pavitt, ‘The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce’, in Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticy, and Postwar Architecture, ed. Robin Schuldenfrei (New York: Routledge, 2002), 33. 2 Frank Stevenson, ‘Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise: Serres and Deleuze in Kafka’s “Burrow” ’, Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies (2004): 3–36. I use the notion ‘rhizomatic writing machine’, as opposed to the term ‘rhizomic writing machine’ mentioned by the author. My preference for the former – rhizomatic – is related to its proximity to the Deleuzoguattarian philosophical vocabulary when explaining the concept of the ‘rhizome’. 3 For a more complete explanation of the exhibition, see Pavitt, The Future is Possibly Past, 26–33. 4 Gaetano Pesce, Architecture on Film: Italy – The New Domestic Landscape, interview by Peter Lang, (London, UK: The Architecture Foundation, 2013). Available online: http://www.architecturefoundation.org.uk/programme/2009/ architecture-on-film/new-domestic-landscape [accessed 2 May 2018]. Pesce proposed a performance to happen for the entire duration of the exhibition, during which he would dwell inside his installation together with his wife. Although this proposal was rejected, the video piece produced to accompany the manifesto-like installation reveals two performers using the space as if they were alone and could not interact with one another. The only element which allowed them to communicate was a symbolic cross in the centre; however, the designer avoids deeper explanation as to what the symbol might mean, preferring to add that the intervention forced a direct contact with the audience and asked the beholders to find their own answers. 5 Pavitt, ‘The Future is Possibly Past’, 31. 6 Ibid., 35. 7 Tehran – Projects, Pesce’s Monumental Prison. Available online: http://www. tehranprojects.com/Pesces-Monumental-Prison [accessed 23 April 2016]. 8 Pavitt, ‘The Future is Possibly Past’, 35. 9 Beatriz Colomina, ‘Unbreathed Air 1956’, Grey Room, 15 (2004): 4–48. 10 Ibid. Beatriz Colomina, and Peter Smithson, ‘Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson’, The Independent Group, 94 (2000): 3–30. In a previous interview Colomina conducted with Peter Smithson about the H.O.F., she tried to understand the reasons behind their interpretation of a cave. Although Smithson explained that the house had been inspired by their prior visit to the Caves Les Baux de Provence in the south of France, in 1953, he also admitted how the experience of having been a student in architecture during the Second World War had influenced him profoundly. 11 Pesce, Architecture on Film: Italy. 12 Franz Kafka, ‘The Burrow’, in The Complete Stories by Franz Kafka (New York: Schocken Books, 1995 [1971]), 354–86. 13 Stevenson, ‘Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise’, 4.

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14 Ibid., 17. 15 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 3–25. 16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 3. 17 Ibid., 36–8. 18 Stevenson, ‘Becoming Mole(cular), Becoming Noise’, 4. 19 Jane Bennet, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 20–4. 20 For a more complete definition of ‘thing-power’, see Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 1–19. 21 Bennet, Vibrant Matter, 24. 22 Ibid. 23 Tiago Torres-Campos, ‘Manhattan’s Geologic Delineations’, Ground Up: Journal of Landscape Architecture, 5 (2016): 58–63. Drawing from Lebbeus Woods’s Lower Manhattan and Epilogue to Lower Manhattan, I argue that, when considering the vast scales of deep time in the tectonic movements of the entire planet, ‘cities may become rafts adrift in an underground sea of semi-liquid rock’. 24 Pavitt, ‘The Future is Possibly Past’, 36–7. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Kirsty Robertson, ‘Plastiglomerate’, e-flux 78 (2016). Available online: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/78/82878/plastiglomerate/ [accessed 2 May 2018], 5. 28 Ibid. 29 For a more complete definition of ‘hyperobject’, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 30 Robertson, ‘Plastiglomerate’, 6. 31 Ibid., 10–11. 32 Ibid., 11. 33 Elisabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, New York City is a Geologic Force (New York: Friends of the Pleistocene, 2011), site #17, 38–9. 34 Roland Barthes, ‘Plastic’, in Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1972 [1957]), 97–8. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid. 37 Pavitt, ‘The Future is Possibly Past’, 24. 38 Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse, ‘Introduction’, in Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, ed. Elisabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse (New York: Punctum Books, 2013), 6–7.

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39 I am grateful to Mark Dorrian for referring me to Roland Barthes’s article on plastic and for his suggestion that the implications of Pesce’s work be discussed in terms of the future anterior.

13. John Hejduk and Samuel Beckett: Going on, in silence and lateness 1 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, in Prisms (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press, 1981), 34. 2 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Notes to Literature, Vol 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 88. 3 Samuel Beckett, Dream of Fair to Middling Women: A Novel, ed. Eoin O’Brien and Edith Fournier (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2012), 138–9. 4 Samuel Beckett, ‘German Letter of 1937’, in Disjecta : Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, ed. Ruby Cohn (London, UK: John Calder, 1963), 53. 5 Samuel Beckett, Endgame, and Act Without Words – A Mime (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1958), 12. 6 The reasons posited are that the piece was critical of both prospective listeners and attitudes in Ireland more broadly, and that it might have been seen as directly opposing the neutrality of the Irish State during the Second World War. See William Davies, ‘A Text Become Provisional: Revisiting The Capital of the Ruins’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 26(2) (2017): 169–87. 7 Samuel Beckett, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, in Samuel Beckett : The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York: Grove Press, 1995), 278. 8 James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (London, UK: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1996), 351. 9 Beckett, Endgame, and Act Without Words – A Mime, 13. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 15–16, 35, 38–9, 41, 43–4, 46, 49. 13 Beckett, Endgame, 17. 14 Ibid., 13. 15 Ibid., 12. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 26 (1982): 123. 18 Ibid. 19 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, Vol 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 249.

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20 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 122. 21 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London, UK: Pimlico, 1999), 249. 22 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 122. 23 Ibid., 128. 24 Ibid. 25 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notes on Beckett’, trans. Dirk Van Hulle and Shane Weller, Journal of Beckett Studies, 19(2) (2010): 162. 26 Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? : A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf. Tiedemann, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 258. 27 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 128. 28 Beckett, Endgame, 23. 29 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, in Notes to Literature, 245. 30 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 367. 31 Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn (London, UK: Grove Press, 1975), 28. 32 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?’, in Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 122. 33 Adorno, ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’, New German Critique, 127. 34 John Hejduk, Mask of Medusa: Works, 1947–1983, ed. Kim Shkapich (New York: Rizzoli, 1985), 83. 35 Ibid., 384. 36 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, ed. Giulio Einaudi, trans. William Weaver (London, UK: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1972). Quoted in Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 385. 37 John Hejduk, Such Places as Memory: Poems, 1953–1996 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 58. 38 John Hejduk and David Shapiro, ‘John Hejduk or The Architect Who Drew Angels’, A+U, 471(12) (2009): 76. 39 Raoul Bunschoten, ‘OTOTEMan, or “He Is My Relative”: John Hejduk: VICTIMS / The Collapse of Time’, AA Files 13 (1986): 74. 40 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 137. 41 Hejduk and Shapiro, ‘John Hejduk or The Architect Who Drew Angels’, 77. 42 See Mark Dorrian, ‘Clouds of Architecture’, in Writing on the Image: Architecture, the City and the Politics of Representation (London, UK: I.B. Tauris, 2015): 112–13. 43 John Hejduk, Victims: A Work (Architectural Association, 1986), n.p. 44 Hejduk, Mask of Medusa, 388.

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45 Hejduk and Shapiro, ‘John Hejduk or The Architect Who Drew Angels’, 73. 46 David Shapiro, ‘An Introduction to John Hejduk’s Works Surgical Architecture’, A+U, 471(12) (2009): 20. 47 Ibid., 21. 48 David Shapiro, ‘John Hejduk: Poetry as Architecture, Architecture as Poetry’, in Such Places as Memory: Poems, 1953–1996 (Cambridge, MA and London, UK: MIT Press, 1998), xv. 49 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 320.

14. Quiet places – silent space: Towards a phenomenology of silence 1 On how silence is viewed as a female virtue, see Claudia Benthin, Barockes Schweigen: Rhetorik und Performativität des Sprachlosen im 17. Jh. (Munich, Germany: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006). 2 The translation here is by Holger Saarmann, see http://www.holger-saarmann. de/texte_abendlied.htm [accessed 2 May 2018]. Later I follow the translation of Bertram Kottmann, see http://myweb.dal.ca/waue/Trans/ClaudiusAbendlied-Bertram.html [accessed 11 April 2016]. 3 John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings (London, UK: Marion Boyars, 1978). 4 Gernot Böhme, ‘Schweigen als moralisches Problem’, Scheidewege 39, Jg. 2009/2010 (Stuttgart Germany: Hirzel, 2009), 279–87. 5 Peter Handke, Versuch über den stillen Ort, 3. Auflage (Frankfurt, Germany: M. Suhrkamp, 2012), 8 ff. The translation is mine – it seems that there is no English translation so far. 6 Ibid., 21. 7 Ibid., 76. 8 Ibid., 72. 9 Ibid., 9. 10 Jun’ichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1977), 3. 11 Ibid., 4. 12 Ibid. 13 Handke, Versuch über den stillen Ort, 47. 14 According to German penal law – Strafgesetzbuch, §168 ‘Störung der Totenruhe’ (‘Disturbance of the death-peace’). See https://dejure.org/gesetze/ StGB/168.html [accessed 7 June 2018]. 15 Juhani Pallasmaa and Leonhard Lapin, Architecture du Silence (Helsinki, Finland: Musée finlandais de l’architecture, 1994). 16 Here is the full quotation: ‘Going into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, I expected to hear no sound at all, because it was a room made as

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silent as possible. But in that room I heard two sounds. And I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge . . . and said, there’s something wrong, there’re two sounds in that room, and he said describe them, and I did, one was high and one was low, and he said, the high one was my nervous system . . . and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that . . . I was making music unintentionally continuously.’ https:// disquiet.com/2003/08/26/quotes-of-the-week-john-cage-tom-phillips/ [accessed 9 April 2016]. 17 Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows, 4.

15. Silence please! A brief history of silence at the theatre 1 This topic was first developed in an article written in French under the title ‘Prière de garder le silence!’ Architecture du spectacle (Quebec, Canada: Les Publications du Québec, 2011), 6–13. 2 The complainant, Evelyn Amato, sued actor David Hibbart, the co-producer and the composer as well as the owner of the theatre, for 12 million dollars. The case was eventually settled out of court and the terms of the settlement were never made public. Edwin Unsworth, ‘No curtain calls expected for theater suit’, Business Insurance (Monday, 10 February 1997). 3 Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London, UK: Moonraker Press, 1978), 73. 4 Ibid. 5 Simon Tidworth, Theatres: An Illustrated History (London, UK: Pall Mall Press, 1973), 9. 6 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, ‘Chora: The Space of Architectural Representation’, in Chora: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture 1, ed. Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Stephen Parnell (Montreal and Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 1–34; 13. 7 Elie Konigson, L’espace théâtral médiéval (Paris, France: Éditions du Centre national de recherche, 1975), 328. 8 The details of the staging from the historical reconstruction of the Castle of Perseverance are presented in Richard Southern, The Medieval Theatre in the Round: A Study of the Staging of The Castle of Perseverance and Related Matters (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1975), 264. 9 The earliest structure to be built for such purpose was probably erected in Shoreditch at the edge of the City of London for the company of James Burbage in 1576 and was named The Theatre, which was significant since these kinds of place were then called playhouses, while the word ‘theatre’ referred specifically to the Greco-Latin terminology (θέατρον-theatrum). In her book Theatre of the World, Frances Yates emphasizes the cosmological significance of Elizabethan theatre. See Frances Yates, Theatre of the World (London, UK: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 125.

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10 Donald Charles Mullin, The Development of the Playhouse: A Survey of Theatre Architecture from the Renaissance to the Present (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1970), 26. 11 This is the central argument of the book: Louise Pellietier, Architecture in Words: Theatre, Language and the Sensuous Space of Architecture (London and New York: Routledge, 2006). 12 Augustus John’s introduction to the English translation of Chevalier CharlesJacques-Louis-Auguste Rochette de la Morlière, Angola: An Eastern Tale (London, UK: Chapman & Hall, 1926), XII. 13 Denis Diderot, Diderot’s Writings on the Theatre, ed. F. C. Green (London, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 216. 14 From a letter to the intendant of Franche-Comté, dated 24 August 1775, quoted by Jacques Rittaud-Hutinet, La vision du futur: Ledoux et ses théâtres (Lyon, France: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 1982), 14. 15 Quoted in Tidworth, Theatres, 172. 16 Karsten Harries looks at this important transition in his article ‘Theatricality and Representation’, Perspecta, 26 (1990): 21–40.

16. Vessels of place: Auditory landscapes, crosscultural echoes in south-west Victoria 1 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines (Melbourne, Australia: George Robertson, 1881), 167. 2 Quoted by David Michael Levin, The Listening Self (London, UK: Routledge, 1989), 300, note 21. 3 Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1951), Letter XXXVIII, 220. 4 Levin, The Listening Self, 238. 5 Ibid., 272. 6 Eugene Robinson, ‘Toni Morrison’s Measured Words’, Washington Post, 8 December 1993. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ lifestyle/1993/12/08/toni-morrisons-measured-words/e6e752a1-ee58-4c4d8c4f-34ee9fb7d0df/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.01a0ee28096c [accessed 14 May 2016]. 7 James Dawson, Australian Aborigines (Melbourne, Australia: George Robertson, 1881). The majority of the lexical items were collected in the 1860s on Dawson’s Kangatong property, located about seventy kilometres south-west of Mount Widderin Caves. Clark collects evidence that the traditional owners of the caves were the Pakeheneek Balug, a clan of the Wada wurrung people. Ian D. Clark, Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1800– 1900 (Clayton, Victoria: Monash Publications in Geography, 1990), 326. According to Barry J. Blake (Dialects of Western Kulin: Yartwatjali, Tjapwurrung, Djadjawurrung [Melbourne: La Trobe University, 2011], 8) the

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‘languages’ mentioned here can be considered ‘dialects of Western Kulin’. The critical point for this chapter is that cultural values recovered from adjacent areas and communities would have been applicable to a distinctive regional feature such as the Mount Widderin lava caves, even if these fell outside the language catchment of Dawson’s book. Clark recognises as much when, in his brief but useful article ‘The Abode of Malevolent Spirits and Creatures – Caves in Victorian Aboriginal Social Organisation’, Helictite, 40(1) (2007): 3–10, he assumes the validity of his generalisations for Western and Eastern Kulin-speaking people as a whole. 8 See Paul Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space: Imaginary Places in James Dawson’s Australian Aborigines (1881)’, in Spatiality and Symbolic Expression: On the Links Between Place and Culture, ed. Bill Richardson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 105–29. 9 Yuji Sone, ‘Silence: “Unhearable” Sound Between Us’, in Essays in Sound 3 (Sydney, Australia: Contemporary Sound Arts, 1996): 54–60; 56. 10 A reflection stimulated by one of The Place of Silence’s assessors, who expressed a wish that the movement between architecture and silence should be more firmly biased towards architecture. The reference for this opposition is Gianfranco Salvatore, Isole Sonanti, Scenari Archetipici della Musica del Mediterraneo (Rome, Italy: ISMEZ, 1989), 14–15, and its twinning with chaos occurs in the rapture of Timarchus of Chaeronia (Plutarch, ‘On the Genius of Socrates’, in Selected Essays of Plutarch, trans. A. O. Prickard, vol. 1 [Oxford, UK: Clarendon, 1918], 36). 11 I am not suggesting a Whorfian imprisonment. Clearly, periphrases could be employed. Hence, Dawson’s Djabwuurung word tittarik (xxxvi) is evidently the same as titcherik kuma (vi), translated as ‘calm’. In other dialects ‘silence’ was interpreted as ‘not speaking.’ Blake, Dialects of Western Kulin, 155. 12 William Henry Toms, The Builder’s Dictionary or Gentleman and Architect’s Companion, 2 vols (London, UK: A. Bettesworth & C. Hitch, 1734, unnumbered), see vol. 1, entry for ‘Echo’. 13 ‘O listen! For the Vale profound / Is overflowing with the sound.’ William Wordsworth, ‘The Solitary Reaper’, in Poetical Works, ed. T. Hutchinson (London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1969), 230; John Keats, ‘To the Sea’, in Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Garrod (London, UK: Oxford: University Press, 1970); Wordsworth, ‘The Blind Highland Boy’, in Poetical Works, 234. A useful survey of this period is Susan J. Wolfson, ‘Sounding Romantic: The Sound of Sound’, in S. J. Wolfson (ed,), ‘Soundings of Things Done’: The Poetry and Poetics of Sound in the Romantic Ear and Era, 2008 https://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/soundings/wolfson/wolfson.html [accessed 2 December 2014]. 14 Edgard Varèse, ‘Spatial Music’ (1959), quoted in E. Schwartz and B. Childs (eds), Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 204–7; 205. 15 W. Tak, ‘Electronic Poem: The Sound Effects’, Philips Technical Review, 20(2–3) (1958/59): 43. 16 ‘To allow complete freedom for creating a wide variety of spatial impressions with the aid of loudspeakers, the aim was to avoid as far as possible the

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uncontrolled acoustic contributions due to reflections from the walls and which are audible either as isolated echoes or as reverberation. It is known that parallel walls are dangerous in this respect, because of repeated reflections; parts of the spherical surfaces are equally inappropriate, since they can give rise to localised echoes.’ Iannis Xenakis, ‘The Architectural Design of Le Corbusier and Xenakis’, Philips Technical Review, 20(1) (1958/59): 3. 17 Denzil Cabrera, Sound Space and Edgard Varèse’s Poème Electronique, MA thesis, University of Technology, Sydney (1994), 111. Available at http://densil. tripod.com/MAThesis.pdf [accessed 14 March 2009]. 18 Ibid., 78. 19 John Cage, ‘Composition as Process’ (1958), in Silence (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), 18–36; 22. 20 J. Petit, Un couvent de Le Corbusier (Paris, France: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961), 29, cited in Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier in Detail (Oxford, UK: Architectural Press, 2007), 65. 21 Flora Samuel, Le Corbusier in Detail, 65–6, quoting R. A. Moore, Le Corbusier and the mécanique spirituelle: An investigation into Le Corbusier’s architectural symbolism and its background in Beaux Arts design (D.Phil thesis, University of Maryland, 1979), 183–4. 22 Samuel, Le Corbusier in Detail, 65. 23 Francis Bacon, Philosophical Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis and D. D. Heath, vol. 2 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [1857]), 427. 24 Levin, The Listening Self, 233. 25 Bacon, Philosophical Works, vol. 2, 427. 26 Robert McCarter, The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture (London, UK: Reaktion, 2016), 13. 27 Quoted in Ibid. 28 Ibid. 29 Ricardo L. Castro, ‘Syncretism, Wonder, and Memory in the Work of Rogelio Salmona’ http://www.oocities.org/rlcstr/transarch/paper.html [accessed 12 June 2017]. In contrast with the pure forms of Le Corbusier, Castro associates the silence with the residue of selfless, and perhaps incomplete, work, preferring buildings ‘that allow a glimpse of the trembling hand that builds them and constructs them, with its doubts, its mistakes and attempts as silent notes in the final result’. 30 Robert Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1 (Melbourne, Australia: Government Printer, 1876), 125–9. 31 Bill Jordan and Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners Aboriginal Corporation, ‘Engineering Works of the Gunditjmara at Lake Condah (Tae Rak) and Trendarra’, Nomination under Heritage Recognition Program of Engineering Heritage Australia (Newcastle: Engineering Heritage Australia, 2011), 1–118 10. https://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/portal/system/files/engineeringheritage-australia/nomination-title/Budj%20Bim%20Lake%20Condah%20 Nomination.pdf [accessed 14 August 2012].

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32 Again, as discussed below, this does imply mere utilitarianism. 33 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 55 34 Ibid., xi. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., vi. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., vii. 39 Ibid., xxxiii. 40 It may be interesting that the words given for ‘silence’ are not resonant in this way. On the other hand, Dawson reports no word signifying ‘voice’.’ 41 From local Wada wurrung people who provided the caves’ name (Weeteering, in Robinson’s orthography), Robinson learned that ‘Kanung made the caves at Anderson’s’. Clark comments that ‘The identity of “Kanung” is not known’ (Clark, ‘The Abode of Malevolent Spirits and Creatures’: 3). Elsewhere Clark reports a Jardwadjali word ‘Kurnung’ which means ‘a hill or impediment of any kind’ as well as ‘river’, and comments: ‘Kurnung may be an example of Schebeck’s “general name” classification, where a general term may function as a placename.’ (Ian D. Clark, ‘Multiple Aboriginal Place Names in Western and Central Victoria’, in I. D. Clark, L. Hercus and L. Kostanski, Indigenous and Minority Placenames: Australian and International Perspectives [Canberra, Australia: ANU Press, 2014], 239–49). A local resident later recorded another generic Aboriginal name for the caves: ‘Larnook’ or ‘larng.uk’, ‘uk being the possessive suffix, translated “his/her”, and larng meaning “home”, “camp”, “nest”, “habitation”, “resort or resting place” ’ (Clark, ‘The Abode of Malevolent Spirits and Creatures’, 3). 42 Clark, ‘The Abode of Malevolent Spirits and Creatures’, 10. 43 Geoff Notman, http://www.skiptonaustralia.org/292551455 [accessed 3 June 2014] 44 http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_ id=76606 [accessed 28 September 213]. 45 Philip Chauncy in Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 2, 268–9. 46 Dawson argues strongly for the importance of onomatopoeic formations in the local languages. See Australian Aborigines, lvi. 47 Ibid., 51. 48 Ibid., xxxii, xliii. 49 But again the conceptual analogy is obscure: this same name is also cited for a ‘Crater in Tower Hill Island’ (near the coastal town of Warrnambool). 50 To reproduce The Ballroom at a 1:1 scale would be prohibitively expensive: the First Chamber measures approximately 58 by 19 metres with a maximum 9 metre height and The Ballroom has a similar length, but is somewhat narrower and lower. If, in the spirit of Le Corbusier, we decided to study the cave’s distinctive sound signature using a model – it has been suggested that a shell one-tenth the size of the cave would yield useful information – the contraction of the volume and the distance between surfaces would pre-

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emptively eliminate the possibility of hearing echoes. It is likely that the sound of the place would simply resemble seashell resonance. 51 F. Joseph Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1979), 36. 52 Roy Wagner, An Anthropology of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 137. 53 See Christopher Williams, ‘Soundings: Soundscape Installations’, Praxis Artspace, Adelaide, 16 February 2016 http://praxisartspace.com.au/ christopher-williams-soundings/ [accessed 14 Ocrtober 2016]. 54 Smith, The Experiencing of Musical Sound, 168. 55 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, xlii. 56 Ibid., xxxvi. 57 Ibid., 49. 58 The allusion is to Giambattista Vico’s La Nuova Scienza. See Donald Phillip Verene, Vico’s ‘New Science’: A Philosophical Commentary (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 131. 59 Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 435. 60 Ibid., 439. 61 S. Harben, R. van den Berg, L. Collard, Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonookurt Nyininy: A Nyungar interpretive history of the use of boodjar (country) in the vicinity of Murdoch University (Perth: Murdoch University, 2004), 57 http:// researchrepository.murdoch.edu.au/id/eprint/21353 [accessed 2 February 2014]. 62 Elder Joe Walley’s version at www.mandurahcommunitymuseum.org/ downloads%5CIndigenous%20Creation%20Story(1).pdf [accessed 4 February 2014] 63 ‘Responsible for the plants that grow in and near the water, Ngalyod’s voice is heard in the roar of the waterfalls and her path is seen along riverbanks’ (Lena Yarinkura) https://www.mca.com.au/collection/work/2016.33/ [accessed 12 August 2015]. 64 John Keats, ‘On the Sea’, in Poetical Works, 365. 65 Walt Whitman, ‘A Backward Glance o’er Travel’d Roads’, in Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. E. Holloway (London, UK: Nonesuch Press, 1967), 858–74; 874. 66 Paul Carter, ‘Lips in Language and Space’, 111. 67 See review of Jeff Malpas, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place at http://ndpr. nd.edu/news/heidegger-and-the-thinking-of-place-explorations-in-the-topologyof-being/ [accessed 14 May 2016]. 68 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 108. The story is structurally similar to one another white settler, W. E. Stanbridge, told about the origin of Totyarguil, the constellation of Aquila (see Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 1, 439). 69 Danièle M. Klapproth, Narrative as Social Practice: Anglo-Western and Australian Aboriginal Oral Traditions (Berlin, Germany: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 76.

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70 Geoffrey Bardon and James Bardon, Papunya: A Place Made After the Story: The Beginnings of the Western Desert Painting Movement (Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2004), 29. 71 Jasche Hoffmann, ‘Q&A: Acoustic Archaeologist”, Nature, 506, 13 February (2014): 158. Available at: http://www.nature.com/articles/506158a [accessed 14 March 2016]. 72 ‘Acoustic scientist sounds off about the location of cave paintings’, Science Daily, 29 June (2017). Available at https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2017/06/170629175551.htm [accessed 14 August 2017]. In relation to the ceremonial significance of different acoustic situations, including the possible liturgical import of Le Corbusier’s auditorium for echoes at La Tourette, see Braxton B. Boren, ‘A Generalised Version of the Lubman-Kiser Theory of Historical Acoustics and Worship Spaces’, Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141(3774) (2017). Available at https://doi. org/10.1121/1.4988292 [accessed 14 August 2017]. 73 Through the word gnang. (Dawson, Australian Aborigines, vi, xxvii.) 74 In an article called ‘Red Handed: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Prehistoric Red Ochre Handprints’ (http://www.kikworldart.info/readred.pdf [accessed 14 March 2016]), Kathleen Kimball asks the obvious (but usually unasked) question: ‘Surely making a paint and blowing it from the mouth is more trouble than simply picking up a piece of red ochre and drawing with it, as Michelangelo did, so what is the significance of processing it, making a paint, and blowing it on the walls?’ She speculates: ‘Is the “breath of life” being invoked? Is there a sonorous relationship between these ideas and the early bone flutes that have been found . . .?’ (7). Kimball speculates that the mouth-blown hand stencils were kinds of sound recording: ‘If you were living 50,000 years ago, how would you capture and record a sound? How would you leave a permanent visual echo of your presence?’ (22). But Kimball also cites Steven Waller’s claim that rock paintings are located at points of resonance, ‘painted images recalling animals are echoed in the sounds’ (22). Kimball may have the relation of voice to echo the wrong way about. The ancient mouth artist was not a modern egotist keen to leave their mark; they were more like sonic acupuncturists, tapping into the primary silence for its evidence of reverberation. Dwelling was the location of the echo. 75 See Aboriginal Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, 1981, 39; George Augustus Robinson’s Journey into South-Eastern Australia – 1844, ed. G. Mackaness, Australian Historical Monographs, XIX, 1941, 18; also Paul Carter, Ground Truthing, Explorations in a Creative Region (Perth, Australia: UWA Publishing, 2015), 95–109. 76 Through its identification with Lake Tyrrell, whose name has the double sense of space above and below (Carter, Ground Truthing, 70–83). For the inspiration of this doubled place in a public space design, see Paul Carter, Mythform, the Making of Nearamnew at Federation Square, Melbourne (Carlton, Australia: Miegunyah Press, 2005), 20. 77 And used, notably by Tommy McCrae and ‘Tommy Barnes’. Brough Smyth, The Aborigines of Victoria, vol. 2, 252–6.

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78 Christine Watson, Piercing the Ground (Fremantle, Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2003), 55. 79 Levin, The Listening Self, 235. 80 Mowaljarli and Jutta Malnic, Yorro Yorro, Everything Standing Up Alive (Broome, Australia: Magabala Books, 2001), 5. 81 Ibid., 150. 82 Levin, The Listening Self, 35, quoting Rilke: ‘I hearken . . . Slowly I listen . . . and let it die away to the farthest echo.’ 83 Dawson, Australian Aborigines, 99. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid., xxxv, xxxix. 86 Ibid., xliii.

17. Attunement and silence 1 See Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, Biology, Phenomenology and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 2 See Louise Barrett, Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 3 For a recent characterization of the issues, see Nick Crossley, The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire (London, UK: Sage, 2001) and Jeff E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 This is a central topic in my recent book Attunement: Architecture after the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 5 For the connections to evolutionary biology, see Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rauch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) and Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 6 The now classic book on the subject is Richard Feynman, QED – The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 7 Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987). 8 This issue has been discussed by contemporary philosophers, most importantly among them Gernot Böhme and Tonino Griffero. Both have numerous publications but few available in English. See Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (London, UK: Routledge, 2016) and Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces (London, UK: Bloomsbury, 2017); Tonino Griffero Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014). 9 Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture, trans. Ingrid D. Rowland, ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas N. Howe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

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10 For greater detail about the history of premodern attuned space, see PérezGómez, Attunement, Chs 2 and 3. 11 Andrea Palladio, I Quattro libri dell’architettura (Venice, 1570). The most recent English translation is The Four Books of Architecture, trans. R. Tavernor (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 12 Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error (Toronto, Canada: Penguin, 2005). 13 Evan Thompson, Mind in Life, 318–22. 14 Juhani Pallasmaa, ‘Voices of Tranquility’, in Architecture’s Appeal: How Theory Informs Architectural Praxis (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), 197.

270

Index A Green Meadow (Rekašiute) 36 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze/ Guattari) 43–4, 154 Aboriginal Languages and Clans (Clark) 211 Aboriginal people 208, 210–11, 214–17 see also Australia; Australian Aboriginals Accademia del Disegno 92 acqua alta 83 Adorno, Theodor W. 163, 167–70, 172, 174–5 ‘Adventures on the Vertical’(Dorrian) 37 Aeschylus 195 aesthésis 224–5 aesthetics 23, 25, 64, 154, 181, 221, 224–5, 268n.8 Aesthetics (Hegel) 85 Aesthetics of Silence, The (Sontag) 61 affects 23, 109–11, 230n.14 Agios Panteleimon, Athens 51 Aires Mateus 102–4, 245n.24 Alabaster 110 Alexanderschlacht (Altdorfer) 64 Alexandria, Battle of 262 ‘Alice in Wonderland’ hole, Byaduk 212 Altdorfer, Albrecht 64–5, 73 Amato, Evelyn 193, 261n.2 Ambasz, Emilio 151 ‘An Outsider Questions Buddha’ (case no. 32) 80 Andre, Carl 103 anechoic chambers 2, 186, 227n.1 ‘Angel of History’ 169 angels 173–4 Angelus Novus (Klee) 168

angioplasty (Scarpa) 83–4 Anthropocene epoch 3, 150, 156–7, 159, 161–2 anthropogenic plastiglomerate 159 Antoniu, Manuela 3 Antonopoulou, Aikaterini 2–3 Aotearoa, New Zealand 139 Aphrodite 88, 94 Arab spring (2011) 49 Architectural Association (AA) 9, 16 architecture 67–8, 186–9, 208, 209, 220–3, 226, 263–4nn.10, 16 Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (Pérez-Gómez) 221 Architecture du Silence (Pallasmaa) 186 ‘Architecture of Pessimism’ (Hejduk) 10 Architettura Civile (Bibiena) 200 Areopagite 132 Arís, Carlos Martí 109 Aristotle 109, 189, 196 ‘Art and Space’ (Heidegger) 105 ARTE (tv channel) 26 Athens 2–3, 47–58 Atmós 226 atomic bombs 15, 20 Attali, Jacques 54 Auschwitz 163, 170, 172, 174 Aussegnungshalle Treptow, Berlin (Schultes) 184, 186 Australia 207–8, 210–11, 216, 218 Australian Aborigines (Dawson) 208, 211, 262–3n.7 Averlino, Antonio see Filarete Bachelard, Gaston 89, 110, 125 Bacon, Francis 210 Baeza, Alberto Campo 100–1 271

272

Bagger, Matthew 130 Baldeweg, Juan Navarro 107 Balgo area, great Sandy Desert 217 ‘Bamboo Stick, The’ (Mumonkan) 81 Banga (Wave) concert hall, Visaginas 44 Banoptikon Videogame Project 55–7 Bardon, Geoffrey 216 Barthes, Roland 2, 7–8, 10, 20, 160–1 Basilica, Vicenza (Palladio) 223 Basilique, La Sainte-Baume 153 Battle of Alexandria 73 Battle of Issus 64 Baumgarten, A. G. 224 Beau Travail (Denis) 2, 22–31, 229n.5 Beckett, Samuel 4, 163–71, 174, 258n.6 Beethoven, Ludwig van 164 Benjamin, Walter 39, 146, 168–9 Bennett, Jane 156–7 ‘Berlin Looms’ (Hejduk) 173 Berlin Masque (Hejduk) 9, 171 Berlin wall 66 Besançon theatre 202–4 Beugnet, Martine 25–6 Bibiena, Ferdinando Galli 200 Billy Budd (Melville) 26 Böhme, Gernot 4, 111, 131, 141–2, 145, 147, 221, 268n.8 Böhme, Jakob 7–8, 141 Bosch, Hieronymus 20 bottega 90 Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (Morris) 84–5 Boyarsky, Alvin 9 Brasilia 36 Brejos de Azeitão 102 Brinkema, Eugenie 21 Brion cemetery chapel 199 broken silence 64–5 Buck-Morss, Susan 39–40, 233n.18 Buddhism 80, 130, 132–3, 148, 226 Built Upon Love (Pérez-Gómez) 116 Bunschoten, Raoul 172 Bunyip (spirit) 214–16, 218 Buoninsegni, Domenico 96 Burrow, The (Kafka) 150, 154–6 Bush, George W. 60 Butterfly City (Rekašiute) 36

INDEX

Cabrera, Denzil 209 cacophony 59–61 Cage, John 2, 57–8, 84, 99–100, 180–1, 186, 190, 208–9, 239n.29 Calatrava, Santiago 85 Calvino, Italo 171 Carrara quarries 96 Carter, Paul 4 Case no. 5 (Mumonkan) 81, 83 Case no. 24 (Mumonkan) 80–1 Case no. 32 (Mumonkan) 80 Case no. 36 (Mumonkan) 80 Case no. 43 (Mumonkan) 81 Case no. 81 (Shu¯mon Katto¯shu¯) 80–1 Case no. 84 (Blue Cliff Record) 80 caskets 16–17 Castle of Perseverance, The 197 Castro, Ricardo L. 210, 264n.29 cemeteries 184 Cemetery for the Ashes of Thought (Hejduk) 10 centrum phonicampticum 208–9, 215 Certeau, Michel de 86 Chaplin, Charlie 41 Chauncy, Philip 212 Chernobyl nuclear power plant 34 Chillida, Eduardo 3, 100–1, 104–8, 110–11, 246n.29, 247n.38 Chimney Pots (Grampians/Gariwerd) 213 China 77 Chion, Michel 21, 25, 38 Chocolat (Denis) 25 Christianity 134, 186–8, 196 Chupachenko, Vasilij 39 Church of Sainte Bernardette du Banlay (Parent/Virilio) 153 Church of Solitude 149–53, 155–8, 160–1 Claire Denis (Beugnet) 26 Clark, I. D. 211 Claudius, Matthias 180, 190 clearing-away 105–9 Cleary, Thomas 79 closets 182–3 Co, Francesco Dal 123 coenobitic monasteries 136 Cologne Cathedral 141–2, 146

INDEX

Colomina, Beatriz 149, 152–3, 161, 256n.10 Comédie française theatre, Paris 199–204 ‘Comtesse d‘Haussonville (Ingres) 10 concrete 39–40, 71, 122 Condivi, Ascanio 89–90 Connor, Steven 52–3, 58, 70–2 consciousness 79–80, 133, 167, 219–20, 224–6 ‘Conversation on a Country Path About Thinking’ (Heidegger) 133 Cooper Union 8–9 Cope, Ben 2 Corcoran, Patricia 159 Coulthard, Lisa 24 Coup d’oeil du théâtre de Besançon (Ledoux) 204 ‘Critique of Silence’ (Brinkema) 21 cromlech 109 da Vinci, Leonardo 125 Damasio, Antonio 225 d’Angelo, Baccio 96, 243n.29 Darwin, Charles 111 Dauenhauer, Bernard P. 130 Dawson, James 208, 211–12, 214–15, 217–18, 262–3nn.7, 11 Dayer, Carolina 3 De Architectura (Vitruvius) 196 de Balzac, Honoré 171 de la Sota, Alejandro 100, 107, 247, 247n.39 De Stijl 17 de Wailly, Charles 200, 202, 204 deafening silence 61–2, 64 death 102, 114, 116, 134, 159–60, 183–4, 186 Debussy, Claude 99, 244n.5 Deleuze, Gilles 42–4, 154–5, 161, 234n.27 DeLillo, Don 3, 59–61, 64, 68–70, 72–4 demiurge (Plato) 88, 240–1n.5 Denis, Claire 2, 22, 25–6, 229n.5–6 ‘Der Mond ist aufgegangen’ (Claudius) 180 der Stille Ort or der ruhige Ort 181–2

273

‘Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget’ 180 Derrida, Jacques 18, 20, 25, 231n.26 Descartes, René 86, 105, 225 deterritorializing 43 Dewey, John 210 Dhauwurd Wurrung wordlist 208 Diderot, Denis 201 die Ruhe bewahren 181 Die (Smith) 102 Dionysus 195 Diotima 81 dithyramb (initiatory dance) 195 Djab Wurrung wordlist 208 Djibouti 26–30 Donaldson, Lucy Fife 24–5 Donatello 94–5 Dorrian, Mark 2, 37–8, 44 Dream of Fair to Middling Women (Beckett) 164 dualism 82 Dürer, Albrecht 102 dust 71–2 Eames, Ray and Charles 37 Earth and Reveries of Will (Bachelard) 125 Eavesdropper, The (Maes) 42 ‘echo’ 211 Edgerton, Harold 20 Education of an Architect: A Point of View (Museum of Modern Art) 9 El Buen Retiro (summer palace) 198 Elijah (prophet) 135 Eliot, T. S. 210 Elizabeth I, Queen 197 Elizabethan theatre see English Renaissance theatre Ellsworth, Elizabeth 160 embodied gaze 119, 122–3, 125 emptiness 132, 252n.15 Empty Boxes (Oteiza) 109 Endgame (Beckett) 164–70 Energetik (newspaper) 40 Engels-Schwarzpaul, Tina 3 England 197 English Enclosure Act 214

274

English Renaissance theatre 197–8, 261n.9 er ist die Ruhe selbst 181 erasure 117–19 erotic drawings 117–19 Erotic Phenomenon, The (Marion) 118 Esengrini, Stefano 104, 245n.24 Euripides 195 European Union 35, 44, 50 Failing Distance, The (Fellows) 17 Falling Man (DeLillo) 3, 59, 68–74 Fanti, Sigismondo 90 Faulkner, William 183 Fellows, Jay 17 Festivalio gatve˙ (Festival Street) 33 Festspielhaus theatre, Bayreuth 203–4 Ficino, Marsilio 88, 94 Filarete 89, 241n.9 Foote, Jonathan 3 Four Elements (Semper) 100 4’33” (Cage) 84 France 26–7, 197–201 Frascari, Marco 118, 123 French Foreign Legion 26–30 Freshkills Park 160 Freud, Sigmund 16, 39 Fucina di Vulcano (Vasari) 92 Fuller, Buckminster 153 ‘Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce’ (Pavitt) 150 Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Koselleck) 64 Gabo, Naum 100 Gabriel, Ange-Jacques 204 Gala, Candelas 110 Garden of Earthly Delights, The (Bosch) 20 Gehry, Frank 85 Gelassenheit 133, 253n.22 Gemüt 224 Genius of Architecture, The (Le Camus de Mezières) 223 geodesic domes (Fuller) 153 Germany 179–82, 188 Gesta Romanorum 16

INDEX

Gnang guutch (breath) 211 Gnang (mouth) 211 Gobierno Civil de Tarragona (Sota) 107 God 7, 130, 132–5, 186 Goethe 109–10, 222 Golden Dawn (neo-Nazi group) 51 Gorgon 114 Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt (Nietzsche) 89 Grampians/Gariwerd 217, 267n.74 Grand Egyptian Museum, Cairo (Aires Mateus) 104 Great Contaminations (Pesce) 151–3, 158–9, 161 Greater Magellanic Cloud 217, 267n.76 Greece 48, 50, 50–1, 55, 129, 134 Gregoriou monastery see Mount Athos grisaille 17 Guattari, Félix 42–4, 154–5, 161, 234n.27 Guillén, Jorge 106 Gundidjmara 211, 217–18 Hakuin (Zen master) 86, 240n.36 Hamann, Johann Georg 143 Handke, Peter 182–3, 189, 193, 205 Haneke, Michael 24 haptic aurality 24 Hartog, François 65–7 Hayward, Susan 27, 30 hearing 22–4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm 85, 175 Heidegger, Martin 105–6, 108–9, 111, 131, 133, 182, 220 Hejduk, John 2, 4, 7–10, 12–18, 20, 171–5 Hephaestus 88 hesychasm 3, 129, 133–6 Highgate Cemetery, London 184 Hindu yoga 132 Hinduism 130 Hiroshima 15 Hirschfeld, Christian Cay Lorenz 142–3 Hole, Kristin Lené 24, 26 Holocaust 170–2, 174 Homage to Goethe (Chillida) 110

INDEX

Homage to Mallarmé (Oteiza) 109 Homage to the Sea II (Chillida) 110 Home for the Elderly (Aires Mateus) 102 hongi 147 Horace 89, 241n.7 House of the Future (H.O.F.) (Smithsons) 152–3 Husserl, Edmund 225 Hyatt Park Hotel project (Aires Mateus) 105 Hylmö, Anders 49 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Colonna) 115 I quattro libri dell’architettura (Palladio) 223 Ignalina Nuclear Power Plant (INPP) 33–6, 44, 232n.7 ‘Image, Space, Revolution: The Arts of Occupation’ (Mitchell) 52 In the Course of Flows (Rot/Vatin) 41 In Praise of Shadows (Tanizaki) 191 Inability to Mourn, The (Mitscherlich) 170 indignants 49 informational noise 53–7 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 10 inner space 53, 110–11 International Monetary Fund 50 Iraq 60 Issus, Battle of 64 Italy 197–8 Janés, Clara 110 Japan 77–8, 182 Jazvac, Kelly 159 Jencks, Charles 61 Jenner, Ross 3 Jesus 134 Julius II (Michelangelo) 92 Kafka, Franz 150, 154, 156, 161 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze/Guattari) 154 Kahn, Louis 99 Kakalis, Christos 3 Kampii Chapel, Helsinki 187–8 Kaplan, Lawrence F. 60–1

275

kata symbebekos (Aristotle) 189 Katz, Jonathan David 57–8 Kawara, On 15 Keats, John 208–9, 215 Kimball, Kathleen 217, 267n.74 kintsugi 3, 237n.1 architectural 83–5 ceramic 77–9 mental 79–83 repair 85 Kirchner, Thomas Yu¯ho¯ 81 Klapproth, Danièle M. 216 Klee, Paul 44, 168 knees 92, 94, 242n.23 Knowlson, James 164 kore 146 korekore 146 Koselleck, Reinhart 64–5 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett) 164 Krauss, Rosalind 85 krísis 48 Kruse, Jamie 160 Kulper, Amy 3 Kutjungka people 217 Kuunawarn, Kaawirn 208 la claque 201 La indetenible quietud (Janés) 110 La Morlière, a Casanova, Chevalier de 201 La Tourette church 209–10 labour 40–1 Lacan, Jacques 18 Lake Tyrell, Victoria 217, 267n.76 Lao Tzu 100 ‘lateral’ unit system 9 Latin 197 lauschen 4, 188–9, 191 Lavin, Sylvia 67 Le Camus de Mezières, Nicolas 223–4 Le Corbusier 10, 15, 36, 153, 209–10 Le Futur estpeut-être passé (exhibition) 159, 161 ‘Lecture on Something’ (Cage) 57 Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas 202, 204 leeren 105 Lefaivre, Liane 115 Lefebvre, Henri 38–9, 146

276

INDEX

Leiris, Michel 207 Les Halles, Paris 152 Letter to Monsieur D’Alembert (Rousseau) 200 Levin, David 133, 207–8 Levinas, Emmanuel 125 libraries 1–2, 17, 134 lineamenti (Alberti) 223 L’Intrus (Denis) 22 L’Intrus (Nancy) 22 Lisbon Central Library and Municipal Archive project (Aires Mateus) 104 listening 22–3, 131 Listening (Nancy) 21–2, 24 Lithuania 35 logos opticos 115 Lotti, Cosimo 198 Lubman, David 216–17, 266n.72 Lucian 114 Lyotard, Jean-François 81 Machado, Antonio 99 Maes, Nicolaes 42 Maison La Roche (Le Corbusier) 10, 17 Mallarmé, Stéphane 99 Malpas, Jeff 215, 220 Manhattan 149, 153 Ma¯ori culture 3, 139–48 Map.crisis-scape. net 54–6 marae a¯tea 141, 143–7 Marconi, Guglielmo 2, 239n.35 Marion, Jean-Luc 118 Marks, Laura U. 22, 24, 229n.7 Marmontel, Jean-François 201 Masheck, Joseph 102 Mask of Medusa (Hejduk) 9–10, 18, 171, 173, 228n.14 Matta-Clark, Gordon 84 mauri 147 McCarter, Robert 210 McMahon, Laura 26 media noise 47–9 ‘medieval’ 16 meditation 130, 132–3, 135, 253n.18 Medusa 113–18, 125, 249n.3–5 ‘Meeting Adepts on the Road’ (Case no.36) 80 Melville, Herman 26

Mendi Huts (Chillida) 101, 245n.17 Mendini, Alessandro 159 Merchant of Venice, The (Shakespeare) 16 Mercier, Sébastien 201 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 220, 225 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 113–14 Metaphysical Boxes (Oteiza) 109 ‘Metastasis’ (Xenakis) 209 metaxy 81 Michelangelo 3, 87–92, 94–8, 240nn.1–3,11, 241–2nn.15–16, 19,21–2 Michelet, Jules 52 Mika, Carl 3 Milky Way (barnk) 218 Ministerstvo Srednogo Mashinostroenia 36 MinSredMash, Moscow 36 Mirny Atom (newspaper) 40 Mitchell, W. J. T. 52 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete 170 Modern Times (Chaplin) 41 modernity 174, 194, 220 Monnier, Mathilde 22 Monte Altissimo quarry 96 Montesquieu 200–1 Montiglio, Silvia 134 Moore, Charles 159 Morrey, Douglas 24 Morris, Robert 3, 84–5 Morrison, Toni 207–8 Moses 92, 94–5, 98 Motta, Fabrizio Carini 198–9 Mount Athos, Greece 3, 129, 131, 133–8, 254n.35–6 Mount Rouse lava cave 211 Mount Widderin Caves, Australia 207, 211–12, 217, 265n.41 Mount William, the Grampians 215 Mountford, Charles 214 Mowaljarli (Ngarinyin elder) 218 Mulgewanke (spirit animal) 214 Mumon 80–1 Mumonkan 79–80 Mystery plays 196 mystische Abgrund (void) 203 Mythologies (Barthes) 160

INDEX

Nagasaki 15 Nancy, Jean-Luc 2, 21–4, 26–7, 29, 31, 42, 118–19, 230nn.11, 16 Natural History (Pliny the Elder) 116 Negative Dialectics (Adorno) 170 Nénette and Boni (Denis) 25 neurology 94 Neutral 2, 7, 20 New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems of Italian Design (exhibition) 151 New York 149, 151 New York City is a Geologic Force (Ellsworth/Kruse) 160 ‘Newest New Criticism, The’ (Lavin) 67 Newman, Oscar 153 Ngarrindjeri people 214 Nietzsche 89 Nikiphoros the Hesychast 135 9/11 attack 3, 64, 68–70, 72 Noise: Essay on the Political Economy of Music (Attali) 54 North West United Power System (USSR) 33 Nuclear Kadaver Festival (2008) 45 nuclear plants 41–2 nuclear submarines 15 Nyungar people 214 Occupy movement (US) 49 Occupy Syntagma movement 50, 52 Offending the Audience (Handke) 193 ‘On the Elevation of Temples’ (Vitruvius) 115 Ong, Walter 59 Opera theatre (Versailles) 204 Ortega y Gasset, José 15 oscillation 103–5 O’Shaughnessy, Jason 3–4 Oteiza, Jorge de 100, 105–9 Ottaggio, Marco 97 Ovid 94 Pahlavi National Library (Pesce) 152 palaeolithic art 216 Pallasmaa, Juhani 186, 221, 226 Papatu¯a¯nuku (Earth Mother) 140, 147 paradis 202 paradox 130, 251n.1

277

Parent, Claude 153 Parmenides (Plato) 86 parquet 202–3 Pärt, Arvo 85–6, 239n.34 parterre 200–3 Paul IV, Pope 98 Paveck, Hannah 2 Pavitt, Jane 149–50, 152, 157 Paz, Octavio 99, 105, 107–8, 110 ‘pedestrians’ 202 Pelletier, Louise 4 Pérez-Gómez, Alberto 4, 116, 250n.18 periaktoi 196 Perniola, Mario 141 Perrault, Claude 223 Persian Letters (Montesquieu) 200 Pesce, Gaetano 3, 149–53, 155–7, 159–62, 256n.4, 257n.23 petrification 113–14 Peyre, Marie-Joseph 200, 202, 204 Philip IV, King 198 Physics (Aristotle) 109 Picard, Max 1 Pietà (Michelangelo) 3, 87–8, 92, 97–8, 240n.1–2 Pietropoli, Guido 123 Pitjantjatjara people 216 plastic 158–61 ‘Plastiglomerate’ (Robertson) 159–60 Plato 78, 81–3, 86, 88, 111, 238n.23 Pliny the Elder 94, 116 Poème electronique (Varèse) 209 polarities 130, 132 Pontius Pilate 134 Poseidon 113 Powers of Ten (R. and C. Eames) 37–8, 44 po¯whiri 3, 143–7, 255n.19 Prada, Manuel de 101 presentism 73 Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, Berlin 171 Proclus 86 proscenium 203 Pruitt-Igoe project 61 Pygmalion (sculptor) 94–5 Pythagoras 89 Querini Stampalia building, Venice 83 ‘Quiet Place, The’ (Handke) 182

278

Rainbow Serpent 214–15 Raku bowls 78, 237n.2 räumen (Heidegger) 105, 111 RBMK reactors 34–5, 232n.5 Rekašiu¯te, Neringa 36 Republic (Plato) 83 res cogitans (Xingjiao) 86 res extensa (Xingjiao) 86 resonance 23, 31 rhizomatic writing machine 150, 256n.2 rhizomes 154–5 Rhodes, James 83 rhythmanalysis 39 Rilke, Rainer Maria 224 ritournelle 43 Robertson, Kirsty 159 Robinson, George Augustus 211–12 Rondanini Pietà (Michelangelo) 89 Rosenblatt, Daniel 144–5, 255n.19 Rossi, Aldo 10 Rot, Gwenaële 41 Rough Sketch (film) 37 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 200 Rubenstein, Mary-Jane 111 Ruhe 181 Ruhe bitte! 181 sabi 77–8 sado (tea ceremony) 77–8 St. Gregory of Sinai 135 St. Ignatios Xanthopoulos 135 St. John of the Cross 107 St. Kallistos 135 ‘Salambo’ (Flaubert) 173 Salmona, Rogelio 210 Samuel, Flora 209–10 San Sebastián 101 Sasso Alto quarry 96 scarico (drainage) 119 Scarpa, Carlo 3, 83–4, 117–19, 122–5, 250n.24 Schlegel, Friedrich 65 Schultes, Axel 186 Schweigen 179–81 ‘scintillations’ 7 Scott, James C. 36 Scottish Clearances Act 214 Sedulino gatve˙ 34

INDEX

Semper, Gottfried 100, 203 Sen no Rikyu 78 Sepulchre of the Resurrection 196 Serres, Michel 54 ‘Seventh Letter’ (Plato) 82–3 Shakespeare, William 16 Shapiro, David 171–4 Shizuteru Ueda 82 Signatura Rerum: or the Signature of All Things (Böhme) 141 Silence (Cage) 99, 180 Silence in the Land of Logos (Montiglio) 134 Silent Witnesses (Hejduk) 2, 7–8, 10–12, 14, 16, 18, 20 silentio conclusit 86 Sisters of Notre Dame order 142 skenes 195–6 Šliavaite˙, Kristina 41 Smith, F. Joseph 213 Smith, Tony 102–3 Smithson, Peter and Alison 152 Smyth, Brough 218 Sniecˇkus see Visaginas, Lithuania Socrates 78, 82–3, 225, 238n.23 solitude 52, 109, 130–1, 131, 134–7 Sone, Yuji 208 Sontag, Susan 57, 60–2, 64, 67, 73–4, 130 Sophocles 195 Sorge 182, 189 Sosnovy Bor 36 Southern Cross 218 Soviet Union 33–42, 44–5 Space in Architecture (Ven) 100 Spatial Sound (Varèse) 209 ‘Speech and Silence’ (Shumon Kattoshu) 80–1 Splitting (Matta-Clark) 84 Stations of the Cross 196 stereotomic ‘extraction’ 3 stereotomy 100–2 Stewart, Susan 15 Stille 142, 180–1 Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht 181 Stille Orte 181 Stimmung (attunement) 4, 224 stupefied bodies 115–16

INDEX

Sturm und Drang movement (Hamann) 143 styrofoam 159 su¯nyata¯ 132 Suzuki, D. T. 132, 252n.14 Symposion 81 Syntagma Square occupation (2011) 48

Trattato sopra struttura de’teatri e scene (Motta) 198–9 Triompho di Fortuna (Fanti) 90 Trouble Every Day (Nancy) 22 Trouin, Éduoard 153 Tsing, Anna 38, 233n.16 ‘Tuesday, and After’ (Sontag) 60 Twittering Machine, The (Klee) 44

Tak, W. 209 Tanizaki, Jun‘ichiro 183, 191 Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) 100 Tàpies, Antoni 99 Taplin, George 214 Tarneen, Yarruun Papurr 208 Tarragal Caves, Byaduk 212 Tasmania 217 Taussig, Michael 39 tea 77–8 ‘Temporary Contemporary, The’ (Lavin) 67 Ten Books, The (Vitruvius) 222 territorializing 43 Texture in Film (Donaldson) 24 theatre 193–205 ‘Theme of the Three Caskets, The’ (Freud) 16 Theogony (Hesiod) 113 theosis 136 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin) 169 Thirteen Watchtowers of Cannaregio (Hejduk) 10, 12 Thompson, Evan 225 ‘Thoughts of an Architect’ (Hejduk) 173 Thurman, Robert 80 Till, Rupert 216 Tindaya project (Chillida) 101, 111 tintinnabulation 85 tintinnabulum 86 tonal silence 25–30 Toop, David 42 ‘torong’ (fabulous animal) 218 Torres-Campos, Tiago 3 Tóth, László 3, 96–8, 243nn.35–9 ‘Toward an Even Newer Architecture’ (Lavin) 67 toy soldiers 14–15

Ugalde, Martín de 106 Un coup de dès (Mallarmé) 99 United States 44 ‘Up in a Tree’ (Mumonkan) 81 urban silence 49–53 Urbino (servant) 87–9 USSR see Soviet Union

279

Vaiou, Dina 51 Valente, José Àngel 99–100, 105, 246n.29 Valéry, Paul 118 Varchi, Benedetto 91 Varèse, Edgard 209 Vasari, Giorgio 87, 91–2, 95, 240n.1, 242n.18, 243n.34 Vatin, François 41 Ven, Cornelis van de 100, 244n.11 Vendredi soir (Denis) 24 Vers Nancy (Denis) 22 Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Bennett) 156 Victims (Hejduk) 171–4 Vigenère, Blaise de 90 Vimalak¯ırti 80 Virilio, Paul 153 Visaginas, Lithuania 2, 32–46, 232nn.1, 4, 6, 8 Visagino gatve˙ 34 Vitruvius 115, 196, 249n.10 Vlachos, Ierotheos 135 vococentrism 25 Voegelin, Eric 81–2 void 102–3 ‘volumetric architecture’ (Xenakis) 209 wa 147 wabi 77 wabi sabi 78, 237n.2

280

INDEX

Wagner, Richard 203 Wagner, Roy 213 Wagyl (Waakal) 214 Wall, Don 9–10, 17–18 Ware, Kallistos 135 Watson, Christine 217 Wennerhag, Magnus 49 Western Desert art movement (1971–2) 216 ‘What Color is it Now?’ (Lavin) 67 What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean? (Adorno) 170 White, Gilbert 207–8, 218 White Lady’s cave 211–13, 265n.50 white voice 58 Whitman, Walt 215 ‘Wie ist die Welt so stille’ (Claudius) 180 women 51, 118 Wordsworth, William 209

World Trade Center 61 ‘Writing the White Voice’ (Connor) 52 Wumenguan see Mumonkan Wung (echo) 211 ‘X-ray, The’ (Hejduk) 173 Xiangyan 86 Xingjiao 86 Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 186 Yamasaki, Minoru 61 Yankunytjatjara people 216 Yeitchmir (cave) 212 Zen Buddhism 3, 78–86, 132–3, 239n.24, 252n.13 Zen koans 79–82, 237–8nn.4–6,9, 238n.28 Zuccone (Donatello) 94–5 Zumthor, Peter 221

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