Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches 1350137901, 9781350137905

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Writing Architectures

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Writing Architectures Ficto-Critical Approaches Edited by H É L È NE FRICHOT and NAOMI STEAD

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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 © Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead, 2020 Individual chapters © their authors, 2020 Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. xv–xvi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image: Curtain onto Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2010. Photography by Hélène 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 catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-3790-5 ePDF: 978-1-3501-3791-2 eBook: 978-1-3501-3792-9 Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xv

1 Prelude: The Ways in Which We Write Jane Rendell 1 2 Waking Ideas from Their Sleep: An Introduction to Ficto-critical Writing in and of Architecture Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead 11 3 From Site to Situation: Cutting Up as Fictocritical Composition Anna Gibbs

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4 Construction (and Connection) Katrina Schlunke

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5 Incompossible Constructions of an Island Paradise Hélène Frichot 47 6 Archaeologies of Exile on Trikeri Island: Listening to Stones and Speculating on Prison Matters Elke Krasny and Phoebe Giannisi 60 7 In Which Robert Smithson Visits Christchurch: Ficto-criticism and the Field Trip Jacky Bowring

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8 Hiroshima: Notes on the Expanded Field Kim Roberts 96 9 Writing Walking: Ficto-critical Routes through Eighteenth-century London Emma Cheatle 112 10 The Indelible Traces of Her Footsteps Mireille Roddier 125

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11 Sydney Letters: A to E Naomi Stead and Katrina Schlunke 141 12 Outrage on Calle de Alcalá Lars Lerup 153

Scott Colman with

13 The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse Michael Young 165 14 The Architect Who Couldn’t Write Keith Mitnick 15 Return to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after The Marriage Plot Sandra Kaji-O’Grady 187 16 The Bannister Katrina Simon

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17 Nice House, Woodland Lakes Andrew Steen 18 The Door Left Ajar: On Dissident Waiting and Collective Fiction Sepideh Karami 219 19 Postlude: Fictocriticism after Critique Stephen Muecke 232 Index 238

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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Anna Gibbs, Untitled Collage. Flying tree. Photo credit: Katrina Schlunke, 2015. The stones are remains of the platforms built for the tents in which female prisoners slept on Trikeri. Photo credit: Elke Krasny, 2019 6.2 Benjamin Brommer, supported by Valerie Bosse, Johannes Rips, Miriam Raggam and Rina Kotsaki: destroying the notions of faith, father*land and freedom. Photo credit: Phoebe Giannisi, 2019. 7.1 Approximation of Robert Smithson’s field trip to Passaic. 1. Monument – Passaic Bridge, ‘the Monument of Dislocated Directions’; 2. Monument – approximate location of pumping derrick, ‘The Great Pipes Monument’; 3. ‘Ruins in Reverse’ – highway under construction; 4. Golden Coach Diner, 11 Central Avenue, have lunch, load film; 5. ‘Sand Box Monument’ – approximate location. 7.2 Plotting Robert Smithson’s Passaic field trip onto a map of Christchurch. 1. Potential bridge monument; 2. Potential Great Pipes monument; 3. Potential Ruins in Reverse; 4. Lunch location, ‘load film’; 5. Potential sand box monument. 7.3 ‘Ruins in Reverse.’ 7.4 A sinister solar-powered surveillance device on the shady south side of a tree. 7.5 The Sacred Assembly Point. 7.6 Monument to the Melancholy of Leavings. 7.7 Monument to the Void. 7.8 Fragment Monument (also known as The Rocket). 7.9 Monument to the Infra-ordinary (for Georges Perec). 7.10 Beauty at journey’s end. 8.1 Aerial view of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park from the northwest, 31 July 1958. Image reproduced courtesy of Hiroshima Municipal Archives. 8.2 View from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial looking north towards the Cenotaph (middle ground) and the Atomic Bomb Dome (centre background), 6 August 1954. Image reproduced courtesy of the Hiroshima Municipal Archives.

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Feeding sparrows in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, August 2013. Photo credit: Kim Roberts. 8.4 Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, September 2013. Image reproduced courtesy of ‘Anita’. 10.1 Olivia Howard, Turtle on a Leash. Drawing reproduced courtesy of the artist. 10.2 Olivia Howard, Her Footsteps. Drawing reproduced courtesy of the artist. 12.1 Objects in the exhibition as shown in Lerup, Room, 1994. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 12.2 Lerup, Racer, 2014. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 12.3 Lerup, Lean-to, 1996. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 12.4 Lerup, Maus, 2014. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 12.5 Lerup, Tallboy, 1998. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 12.6 A staged portrait of the objects before the escape. Designs by Lerup. Models by William Green of Blacksburg, Virginia. Photograph by Frank White, 2018. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. 13.1 Andrew Kovacs, Proposal for Collective Living II (Homage to Sir John Soane), 2017. Image reproduced courtesy of Andrew Kovacs. 13.2 Mark Foster Gage, Guggenheim Helsinki, 2014. Image reproduced courtesy of Mark Foster Gage. 15.1 The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory viewed from across the harbor. Photo credit: Sandra Kaji-O’Grady. 15.2 The Hillside Campus (2010), designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Photo credit: Sandra Kaji-O’Grady. 15.3 The Watsons’ home, ‘Oaks at Ballybung’, designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Photo credit: Amit Indap. 16.1 An early photograph of ‘Los Angeles’, American arts and crafts style bungalow in Fendalton, Christchurch, New Zealand. Photography Steffano Webb, circa 1913. Ref: 1/1-021835-G. Reproduced with acknowledgment from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 16.2 Moss growing in a tombstone inscription in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France. Photography by author, 2013. 16.3 The extended roofs and rafters of the Gamble house extending outward. Photography by author, 2014. 16.4 The high fence on top of the river-stone wall, concealing the house from view. Photography by Schwede66, 2013. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Los_Angeles,_ Christchurch_074.JPG accessed on 16.12.2019. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence. 19.1 Photo credit: Stephen Muecke.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Dr Jacky Bowring is Professor of Landscape Architecture at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand, and is author of A Field Guide to Melancholy (2008) and Melancholy and the Landscape: Locating Sadness, Memory and Reflection in the Landscape (2016), and editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Landscape Review. Jacky’s research and teaching includes cultural landscape, history, memory and emotion, and she works through the processes of designing, critiquing and scholarly research. She teachers a Master’s course in design critique, and is involved in various critical forums including the Urban Design Panel, and provides advice for the National Memorial in Wellington and Christchurch National Earthquake Memorial. Emma Cheatle is Senior Lecturer in Architecture, University of Sheffield, UK. Her research uses feminist ethnography and creative-critical writing to explore the material, spatial and social history and theory of architecture and art. Awarded the RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis 2014, Emma’s publications include Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (2016). She is coinvestigator for the three-year AHRC funded project ‘Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of English Urban Commons’. Scott Colman is an architectural historian, theorist, critic and designer committed to these activities as implicated pursuits. Specializing in modern and contemporary architecture and urbanism, Scott’s research focuses on the epistemology of architecture, in particular the changing interrelationships between creative, theoretical, and historical production. A graduate of the communication, media, and cultural studies program at the University of Technology, Sydney, Scott has received degrees in architecture from the Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University, and the University of Sydney, where he was awarded the University Medal and completed his doctoral dissertation on mid-twentieth-century architecture’s engagement with planning, social science, and philosophy. He is currently completing a book on the theory and practice of the German-American architect Ludwig Hilberseimer and an intellectual biography of the English-American architect Colin Rowe. He is an Assistant Professor at the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas. ix

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Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. She is guest professor in Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her research examines the transdisciplinary field between architecture and philosophy with an emphasis on feminist theories and practices. She is an editor with Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting of Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (2017); with Catharina Gabrielsson and Jonathan Metzger of Deleuze and the City (2016); with Harriet Edquist and Laurene Vaughan of DeSigning Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice (2015) and with Stephen Loo of Deleuze and Architecture (2013). Hélène is the author of Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (2019): Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018): and How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool (2016). Phoebe Giannisi (http://phoebegiannisi.net/en/), born in Athens, is the author of seven books of poetry, including Ομηρικά, (2009), published in German (Homerika, trans. Dirk Uwe Hansen, 2016) and in English (Homerica, trans. Brian Sneeden 2017). Her most recent book is Χίμαιρα (Chimera, 2019). An architect, Phoebe holds a PhD in Classics (Lyon IILumière), published as Récits des Voies: Chant et Cheminement en Grèce archaïque (2008). Her work traverses the borders between poetry and performance, installation, inscription and representation, investigating the poetics of voice, body and place. She is interested in the relationship of land and poetry. Poetic Exhibitions: TETTIX, (The Cicda), Museum of National Art (2012); AIGAI_O_The Songs, Museum Angeliki Chatzimichali (2015, with Iris Lycourioti). In 2010 she was co-curator (with Zissis Kotionis) of the Greek Pavilion for the Venice Biennale of Architecture with the project ‘The Ark: Old Seeds for New Metropolitan Cultures’. In 2016 she presented the lecture performance ‘Nomos: The Land Song’ at the Antigone Festival, New York. Anna Gibbs is a professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University and writes across the fields of textual, media and cultural studies focusing on feminism, fictocriticism and affect theory. Co-editor of three collections of Australian experimental writing, she is currently completing a book on feminist theory and electronic literature (Exscryptions: Memory, Movement, and the Unfolding of Space in Digital Writing) with Maria Angel. Her experimental and cut-up writing has been widely published and internationally performed. She is currently collaborating with Elizabeth Day, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas on The Longford Project, which works with the colonial history of Longford in northern Tasmania to turn the coincidence of common ancestry into connection and reconciliation in the present through a collaborative practice in contemporary art.

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Sandra Kaji-O’Grady is a professor of architecture at the University of Queensland. Between 2005 and 2018 she held successive leadership roles at the University of Technology, Sydney, The University of Sydney and The University of Queensland. Concurrently she conducted research in contemporary architecture, theory and politics, and was actively engaged in architectural criticism for professional journals. Her recent publications include LabOratory: Speaking of Science and its Architecture (2019), edited with Chris L. Smith and Russell Hughes, and the anthology Laboratory Lifestyles: The Construction of Scientific Fictions (2018) co-authored with Chris L Smith. Her current research explores the ways in which animals, and pets especially, are brought into human societies as co-consumers and co-workers through architecture. She is also undertaking a collaborative project on the architecture of biocontainment. Sepideh Karami is an architect, teacher, writer and researcher with a PhD from Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm, Sweden. Her thesis focused on the idea of Interruption and Dissident architecture developed through writing practices and critical fiction understood as political practices of making architectural spaces. She completed her architecture education at Iran University of Science and Technology (MA 2002), and at Chalmers University in Sweden (MA 2010). Since completing her first degree in architecture, she has been committed to teaching, research and practice in different international contexts and has developed her work through artistic research and interdisciplinary approaches. She has presented, performed and exhibited her work in international conferences and platforms, and is published in peer reviewed journals. She has been a Lecturer at KTH School of Architecture since 2018, and is currently a Simpson Postdoctoral Fellow at The University of Edinburgh, School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, where she studies (de)colonizing potentials of infrastructure architecture. Elke Krasny, PhD, is Professor of Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her scholarship focuses on critical practices in art, curating, architecture and urbanism addressing ecology, economy, labor, memory and feminisms. Her exhibition, ‘Hands-on Urbanism: The Right to Green’, was presented at the 2012 Venice Biennale of Architecture. Edited volumes include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet with Angelika Fitz (2019), and In Reserve! The Household with Regina Bittner (2016). Selected essays include: ‘Monumental Activism. Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party in Feminist Art Making’; (2020), ‘Curating without Borders. Transnational Feminist and Queer Feminist Practices for the 21st Century’ (2019), ‘Claims for the Future: Indigenous Rights, Housing Rights, Land Rights, Women’s Rights’ (2019) and ‘Citizenship and the Museum: On Feminist Acts’ (2017).

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Lars Lerup is the Harry K. and Albert K. Smith Professor of Architecture and the Dean Emeritus at Rice School of Architecture, Houston, Texas, and Professor Emeritus of University of California at Berkeley. He was awarded Doctor honoris causa in technology by Lund University, Sweden, in 2001. He was the Harold W. Brunner Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome 2009–10. Lerup holds a teaching and research appointment at Humboldt University’s Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques in Berlin. Lerup has written several books: Villa Prima Facie (1976), Building the Unfinished: Architecture and Human Action (1977) (also published in German by Vieweg), Planned Assaults (1987) (also published in Chinese), After the City (2000) (also published in Italian 2016 by LIST Lab), One Million Acres and No Zoning (2010) and The Continuous City (2017). Currently Lerup has an exhibition of objects called ‘Parque Movil’ at Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Span. Keith Mitnick is Associate Professor of Architecture at The University of Michigan. The design work of design practice Mitnick.Roddier has received numerous awards including The Burnham Prize Fellowship to the American Academy in Rome, the Young Architects award from the Architectural League of New York, and Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard award. Mitnick’s first book, Artificial Light, was published in 2008, and he is currently working on his second book, Rainy Sea, a novel that uses fiction writing to contemplate spatial concepts and architectural ideas. His writing on architecture has appeared in such publications as LOG , Praxis, MONU , and Harvard Design Magazine. Stephen Muecke is Professor of Creative Writing in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University, South Australia, and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Recent books are Latour and the Humanities, edited with Rita Felski (2020) and The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia, co-authored with Paddy Roe (2020). Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where she was Director of Architectural Research (2008–11), Vice Dean Research (2011–13) and Director of History and Theory (2016–18). She co-initiated the MA Situated Practice and supervises doctoral work in architecture, art, urbanism and experimental writing. Jane has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002). Her co-edited collections include Reactivating the Social Condenser (2017), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination (2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999) and Strangely Familiar (1995). Working

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with Dr David Roberts, Bartlett Ethics Fellow, she currently leads the Bartlett’s Ethics Commission; and, with Research Associate, Dr Yael Padan, she is CoI for Ethics on KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality, PI Prof Caren Levy). Her new research focuses on the relationship between feminist auto-theory, ethopoiesis and architecture. Kim Roberts is an architect, heritage consultant and literary studies scholar. Her recently submitted PhD was undertaken in the School of Communication and Creative Arts, Deakin University. Her thesis attends to the ways foreign visitors navigate the physical and conceptual space of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This research is multidisciplinary, drawing on professional and academic interests in architectural cultural landscapes, memory, affect, literature and user-based production of space. Mireille Roddier is an associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan, where she teaches in both the design and history/theory curriculum, and holds a joint appointment with the department of Women’s Studies. Her research focuses on urban representation through the lens of class and gender, with an emphasis on urban photography in both Detroit and Paris. Her ongoing interest in the mechanisms and politics of representation has also fuelled her design projects. The work of her collaborative design practice, Mitnick.Roddier, has received numerous awards, including the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architects Prize and Architectural Record’s 2005 Design Vanguard. Katrina Schlunke is Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Tasmania and University of Sydney Sydney and is a co-editor of Cultural Studies Review. She researches and writes across the areas of cultural history, fictocriticism and material cultures and within diverse sites including colonial Australia and Indigenous art. Recently Katrina has published on art in the anthropocene in a special issue of Australian Humanities Review and is working with Hannah Stark on an ARC-funded project, ‘Beyond Extinction’. Katrina Simon is a designer and visual artist with a background in architecture, landscape architecture and fine art. Her research interests focus on the expression of memory and its loss in landscapes, explored through research projects, exhibitions and design competitions on cartography and landscape representation, design-research methods, the history and design of cemeteries, and the impacts of earthquakes and other disasters on sites. She is currently Associate Dean (Landscape Architecture) in the School of Architecture and Urban Design at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. Naomi Stead is Professor of Architecture and Head of the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Australia, and Adjunct Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland. Her research

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interests lie in architecture’s cultures of re/production, mediation, and reception. She is an award-winning and widely published architecture critic, having written more than sixty commissioned feature and review articles in professional magazines. She has been an architecture columnist for The Conversation and the San Francisco-based Places Journal, where she writes essays on concepts and mythologies within and without architecture. She was co-founder (with Justine Clark and others) and remains actively involved with Parlour: Women, Equity, Architecture, an activist group advocating for greater gender equity in architecture. Her most recent book, co-edited with Janina Gosseye and Deborah van der Plaat, is Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (2019). Dr Andrew P. Steen is a lecturer in Architecture & Design at the University of Tasmania. Steen researches the intellectual history of architecture and architectural theory since 1960. He is interested in the cultural construction of the personas and referents of architecture. Employing systems and frameworks developed by literary theory and semiotics, Steen performs close readings of texts focused on written form and diagrams. His interrogations of the poetic function of architecture produce academic and creative works. He is currently working on reframing relations to heritage architecture and developing a community engagement project aimed at enriching culture, enlivening society, and enlightening individuals through the medium of architecture. Michael Young is an architect and an educator practising in New York City, where he is a founding partner of the architecture and urban design practice Young & Ayata. He is an Assistant Professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. Formerly, he was a visiting assistant professor at Princeton University and visiting lecturer at SCI-Arc. In the Fall of 2016 he was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University. Michael received his Master’s of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Michael is a Registered Architect in the State of New York.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Most edited collections travel some distance before they are finally published. This collection travelled from Stockholm, in Sweden, to Brisbane, in the Australian state of Queensland, and from there to Melbourne, Victoria, and to Nuremberg, Germany; it even visited Perth, Western Australia, just prior to the manuscript being completed while summer bushfires burned on the east and west coasts of Australia. The journeys taken across the chapters here are much the same: we travel vast distances and experience many encounters – with ideas and accounts, with human and more-than-human actors; we engage both fictionally and critically with buildings, places, landscapes, colonisation, occupation, memorialization, and the narratives and aesthetics that hold all of these together. So, first and foremost we editors would like to thank all the authors who have worked with us on this collection. We have taken great joy in our editorial work and appreciated all the dialogues we have shared. A number of authors were present from the beginning when we first hosted a small symposium that was supported by the ATCH (Architecture Theory Criticism History) Research Centre in the School of Architecture at the University of Queensland (UQ), Australia, on the 4–5 August 2016. At that time Hélène was undertaking a brief visiting fellowship at ATCH, and Naomi was still employed at UQ. The symposium was a remarkable moment of congruence: of wild intellectual excitement, and an intense pleasure in the possibilities of writing otherwise, in architecture and beyond – about ficto-critical and experimental writing as a vital method in the architectural humanities, the environmental humanities, and all the fields they touch upon. As editors we would like to express our deep gratitude for the support we received from Prof John Macarthur and Dr Deborah van der Plaat in the ATCH Research Centre. We also thank the authors and participants in the original symposium who, for one reason or another, don’t feature in the book: AnnMarie Brennan; Catherine Caudwell, Natalie Collie, Shi Jie On, Rebecca McLaughlan, Hugo Moline, Tom Morgan, Alan Pert and Rosemary Willink. Hélène acknowledges the invaluable support allowed by a Swedish Riksbankens Jubileumsfond competitive sabbatical grant, which she held during 2017, and also the collegial environment in Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture KTH Stockholm. She also acknowledges the support of her partner Rochus Hinkel, and her sons Felix and Florian. xv

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Naomi acknowledges the support of her colleagues and collaborators in the Critical Practices Research Lab in the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne. She also acknowledges the forbearance and support of her wife Belinda Daw, and son Tristan – who loves stories more than anything. Finally, thanks to James Thompson, Alexander Highfield and the staff at Bloomsbury, as well as Lisa Carden our understanding copy-editor, for believing in the book, and being such a pleasure to work with, in realizing it.

CHAPTER ONE

Prelude: The Ways in Which We Write Jane Rendell

Architecture Writing Writing Architecture ‘Writing’ is both a noun and a verb, but ‘architecture’ is only a noun; it doesn’t exist as a verb. As both a noun and a verb, ‘writing’ can team up with adjectives and adverbs. Architectural Writing Writing Architecturally But as a noun, ‘architecture’ can only work with adjectives. Writerly Architecture Semantically, as well as materially, it would seem that architecture is far less flexible than writing, considered, that is, through the perspective of language. Language. Between a noun and an adjective, there is a lot at stake. In the current education system, which trains students to qualify (or not) as professional architects, architecture’s position in language as noun or as adjective indicates an important distinction. A degree in Architecture allows one to practise as an architect; a degree in Architectural Studies does not. (But of course many chose the latter precisely because it can be more interesting to study architecture through its adjectival form, and to go beyond designing buildings according to professional codes, to somewhere else entirely). 1

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Architecture Architectural Architecturally In debates around architecture and research, distinctions can be made between architecture as subject, discipline and method.1 In bringing architecture and writing together as a pair, writing’s role as verb and noun challenges architecture’s noun form to think again about its verb form – about the way that it is, about what it is that it does, and how. Between and around the thing of the noun and the way of the verb, how is power distributed? Architecture-Writing Once upon a time I came at the intersection of architecture and writing, with a hyphen in my hand, and I placed it between the two words – making architecture-writing.2 And then I met Katja Grillner and found she had placed the words the other way around – writing architecture – but left the hyphen out of it.3 What of it? And then Naomi Stead did things the same way.4 The ordering . . . the one before the other, or after, thing. And the hyphen of it, or not? And there we were tumbling along, flipping things back and forth, between us, messing about with words, and sometimes hyphens. So what. Like what. Words matter to architects? Like hell they do. But why? And how? Because playing with the ways we do things with words can expose the power systems that set the rules for those often-taken-for-granted ways that tell us how things with words are (to be) done. Words can do things, sometimes beyond language, as J. L. Austin has pointed out.5 Following conceptualism’s collapse of the distinction between theory, criticism and practice, and its interactions with art history and performance, the term art-writing emerged. David Carrier6 discussed the importance of the writerly aspects of criticism and how the formal qualities of writing were an important part of critical argumentation. In the literature of art, it is impossible to absolutely separate or entirely distinguish, the arguments of an art writer from the literary structures used to present the arguments.7 Influenced by art-writing, I was interested in the writerly qualities of architectural criticism, and in the practice of writing architecturally, in how

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one could make architecture in words. This led me to initiate site-writing as a form of situated criticism, and to explore through research and pedagogy the ways in which critics perform their interpretations of works to, for and with others, through written and other languages.8 And to find out the changes writing can make to subjects, in the world. Even hyphens. A hyphen can step in as if to banish any claim to hierarchy, and instead to say, look we are in this together, differently and equally. Get over the before and the after – it’s just that in sentences written words have to do that, line up in sequences. In architecture, chronologies are not what it is all about, words can come up against each other in all kinds of ways – spatially and materially, as well as temporally. And in fiction, outside the usual ways of the sentence, that’s where the fun of this book really begins. But have we begun? I think we need to begin again, this time with the other pair. Ficto-Criticism Critical Fiction Here, things appear a bit more straightforward. Apparently. But even if it were simply a reversal of noun and adjective, which it is not . . . Fiction Criticism Criticism Fiction Fictional Criticism Criticism Fictional Critical Fiction Fiction Critical Critical Fictional Fictional Critical Is there anything important to notice about the ways of reversing? Criticism that is fictional Rather than Fiction that is critical It might depend on whether the reader identifies with fiction or criticism as the term that they feel best describes them as writers, or their writing, or the ways in which they do their writing. On the one hand, fiction writers might imagine the ways in which the alternative worlds they offer provide critical potential, as in Philomena Mariani’s post-colonial collection titled Critical

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Fiction,9 or Saidiya Hartman’s use of ‘critical fabulation’ as a way of doing decolonial feminist history.10 On the other, the languages, styles and genres of fiction can offer new ways for reinvigorating criticism, as for example, in Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara’s edited collection, The Creative Critic, or Hélène Frichot’s engagement with the other Hélène (C.).11 Yet if we take the literary genre CNP, or Creative NonFiction, and start to consider how that has been defined, for example: It is a genre that answers to many different names, depending on how it is packaged and who is doing the defining. Some of these names are: Literary Nonfiction; Narrative Nonfiction; Literary Journalism; Imaginative Nonfiction; Lyric Essay; Personal Essay; Personal Narrative; and Literary Memoir. Creative Nonfiction is even, sometimes, thought of as another way of writing fiction, because of the way writing changes the way we know a subject.12 Things become less clear. As do the ways we do things. So coming back to those ways: Creative Nonfiction is even, sometimes, thought of as another way of writing fiction, because of the way writing changes the way we know a subject.13 Another way . . . because of the way . . . changes the way . . . she writes The simple addition of a ‘non’, a no, to fiction, (but a yes to creative?), makes me realize that fiction has at least two kinds of way: not only its waywardness, of imagining alternative worlds, of going somewhere other than the ordinary, but also its ways, as in its modes – the stylistic tropes and unfamiliar writing methods it introduces to writers trained in critical academic traditions – like me. Fiction gives access to the I, to subjectivities, to character, plot, story, narration, to point of view, and to different genres – memoirs, essays, diaries . . . And so perhaps the ficto-critic’s interest is not really in fiction’s content, as such, but in its ways, which are often considered creative, rather than critical. Though here I remember (uncomfortably) Kenneth Goldsmith’s (rather mean) dismissal of creative writing, and his preference for noncreative writing, for conceptual writing, and now for conceptual poetics.14 In brief, Conceptual writing or uncreative writing is a poetics of the moment . . . it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and

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falsification as its precepts . . . Language as junk, language as detritus. Nutritionless language, meaningless language, unloved language . . . language more concerned with quantity than quality.15 Unloved language. I find myself torn between the options Goldsmith offers. I don’t, I won’t, fit easily into that separation he suggests between creative and conceptual. I love that language of concepts, the hard-won edges of rigorous thinking, the ways in which words can be cut like diamonds – polished and sparkling. And even if I didn’t, Sara Ahmed is close by, and she whispers, gently, but firmly, ‘sweaty concepts’, reminding me of the bodily labour of thinking: Sweat is bodily; we might sweat more during strenuous and muscular activity. A sweaty concept might come out of a bodily experience that is trying. The task is to stay with the difficulty, to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty.16 Creative NonFiction Uncreative Writing Conceptual Writing Sweaty Concept Stepping out together. Always in pairs. But what of the order? Look, I don’t know. Sometimes language conventions dictate that. For example, French’s fiction théorique is English’s theoretical fiction. And maybe that is where this story really begins. Suzanne Lamy’s text underscores the changes that have been taking place in ‘fiction theory’, or as it is called in French: fiction théorique or théoretique (both terms are used in French). By the way, in French, the emphasis is on fiction, not theory. That is, the noun in French is fiction, the adjective theorique is what qualifies it. GS 17 Fiction Theory Fiction Théorique Fiction Théoretique I was on sabbatical last year with the intention of completing a book. Just before I sat down to write, my commissioning editor called to tell me that the publishing house I had worked with for a decade had been bought out by another much larger one. All my books were to be moved from geography and visual culture to an architecture list, and my book-to-be, which was still in the

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process of being commissioned, was, well . . . well still in the process of being commissioned. And then my new commissioning editor bought me a coffee, and kindly explained that my book-to-be did not have enough to do with architecture, so it was more than likely not-to-be for quite a bit longer. (Maybe. Listen, I won’t get into that here, but I am not so sure, not about the not architecture bit, but the not-to-be bit.) For the time being I was set free from the book-to-be. It turned out that this was a book-not-to-be, because I no longer wished to write it. I had fallen out of love. The book-to-be wanted to look back on a period of exhausting activism and confrontation, that quite frankly, I didn’t. It was over. But the book-to-be wouldn’t listen. You know how it can be. So it was best for us both that things came-not-to-be, in that way. Free of my book-not-to-be’s unwanted demands. I decided to turn my attentions to books-that-most-certainly-are by other writers. Once I had finished reading Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, my appetite was up, and I began devouring. By the time I had consumed pretty much everything Maggie Nelson had ever written, I could see a beautiful future ahead where I was reading other women’s writing forever. And the best way to make that future come to be, was to write a book with the books I loved –  which turned out to be called ‘auto-theories’.18 In her writing on auto-theory Lauren Fournier covers a lot of ground, and references some really exciting ideas – like ‘ “life-thinking” (Samatar) and ‘ “theoretical fiction” (Hawkins 263)’,19 but the phrase and citation that really caught my attention was ‘ “Fiction Theory” (Godard 6)’. Fiction theory: a corrective lens which helps us see through the fiction we’ve been conditioned to take for the real . . . Fiction theory deconstructs these fictions while fiction theory, conscious of itself as fiction, offers a new angle on the ‘real’, one that looks from inside out rather than outside in (the difference between woman as subject and woman as object). DM 20 Fiction theory: a narrative, usually self-mirroring, which exposes, defamiliarizes andlor subverts the fictional and gender codes determining the re-presentation of women in literature and in this way contributes to feminist theory. BG 21 Fiction theory: Nicole Brossard uses ‘fiction’ negatively in L’Amèr to imply that fictions or constructs created by the patriarchy and compliant women in which women are made into objects. But her ‘fiction théorique’ is something else – the text as both fiction and theory . . . KM 22 DM, BG and KM make it crystal clear that they are bringing fiction and theory together for a reason, and that reason is political, to show how a power structure of domination and oppression, in this case patriarchy, operates through language structures, and that we have to find ways of working with these language structures to reveal the fact that they are not

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natural, but constructed, that they structure us, and that through language we can find other options, alternative worlds. And then comes GS’s slash . . . Fiction/theory Fiction/theory: fiction that contains within it a feminist examination, even self-consciousness, regarding the material of the text, the language. GS 23 Theory done fictionally Fiction done theoretically Fiction and theory set as a pair Sliced apart Drawn together I was fascinated by the incredible work that these four Canadian feminist literary theorists – Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott – had done in the early 1980s, published in Tessera, and their ‘fostering’ of ‘new modes of writing both creative and critical texts which was being pioneered in Quebec’, especially the work of Nicole Brossard, who had written:24 Feminist consciousness made me question reality and fiction. For example, when I was writing L’Amèr, I felt that I had to move reality into fiction because patriarchal reality made no sense and was useless to me. I also had the impression and the certainty that my fictions were reality they are full of meaning - and that from there I could start a theoretical work. That’s why I called the book ‘une fiction théorique’. Nicole Brossard25 It struck me that while these feminists involved called the critical writing they were doing ‘theory’, we were now more likely to call such writing ‘criticism’, to think of it as our practice, and as such to consider the ways in which writing is materially made – and as such its poetic and stylistic qualities. Here Emma Cocker’s recent work with ‘critical poetics’, Denise Ferreira Da Silva’s ‘black feminist poethics’26 or Joan Retallack’s earlier introduction of ‘poethics’ are striking, in experimenting with the poetics of language through play, but also – and at the same time –  recognizing the ethical qualities of such experiments. As Retallack writes, referencing the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of the transitional space between child and mother and its creative role in subject development: There, I think, is the location of the essay as wager – in the intermediate zone between self and world, in the distancing act of play. The distance engendered by a poethical recognition of reciprocal alterity stimulates curiosity and exploration.27

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In his intriguing 1983 essay, ‘Self-Writing’ Michel Foucault explains in great detail how the Stoics understood the relation between the practice of writing and self-training, in terms, not of the poethical, but the ethopoietic: As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.28 In Foucault’s late work on ethics, he is interested in rules of conduct and how one forms oneself in relation to those rules. He is concerned with what he calls the ‘determination of the ethical substance’ which for him can be found in ‘the way in which the individual has to constitute this or that part of himself as the prime material of his moral conduct’ and ‘the mode of subjection (mode d’assujettissement); that is, with the way in which the individual establishes his relation to the rule and recognizes himself as obliged to put it into practice’.29 The way in which . . . he writes A way with words Away with the fairies Finding our way with words30 A way: a method, style or manner of doing something Where there is always something (of ourselves) at stake.

Notes 1

Jane Rendell, ‘Architectural Research and Disciplinarity’, ARQ , vol. 8. no. 4 (2004): 141–7.

2

Jane Rendell, ‘Architecture-Writing’, in Jane Rendell (ed.) Critical Architecture, special issue of the Journal of Architecture vol. 10. no. 3, (June 2005): 255–64.

3

Katja Grillner, ‘The Halt at the Door of the Boot-Shop’, in 01.AKAD , ed. Katja Grillner et al. (Stockholm: AKAD and Axl Books, 2005).

4

Naomi Stead and Lee Stickells, ‘Special Issue on Writing Architecture’, in ATR (Architectural Theory Review), vol. 15 no. 3 (2010).

5

J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words: The William James Lectures delivered at Harvard University in 1955 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).

6

See David Carrier, Artwriting (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987) and David Carrier, Writing about Visual Art (New York: Allworth Press, co-published with the School of Visual Art, 2003).

7

Carrier, Writing about Visual Art, 12.

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8

Jane Rendell ‘Site-Writing’, Sharon Kivland, Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Emma Cocker (eds), Transmission: Speaking and Listening, vol. 4, (Sheffield Hallam University and Site Gallery, 2005), 169–76 and Jane Rendell, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010).

9

Essays in Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, ed. Philomena Mariani (The New Press: 1992), work at the cross-over between fact and fiction in postcolonial writing, using fiction for critical purposes.

10 Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2019). See ‘Note on Method’. See also Saidiya Hartman, ‘The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 113, no. 3 (1 July 2018): 465–90. 11 Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara (eds), The Creative Critic (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018) and Hélène Frichot, ‘Following Hélène Cixous’s Steps Towards a Writing Architecture’, in Writing Architecture, special issue of Architecture Theory Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (2010). 12 See Barrie Jean Borich, ‘What is Creative Nonfiction: An Introduction’, http:// barriejeanborich.com/what-is-creative-nonfiction-an-introduction 13 Barrie Jean Borich, ‘What is Creative Nonfiction: An Introduction’. 14 See Kenneth Goldsmith, ‘Conceptual Poetics’ (presented at Conceptual Poetry and Its Others Conference, University of Arizona, Tucson). https://www. poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/06/conceptual-poetics-kenneth-goldsmith. 15 See Goldsmith, ‘Conceptual Poetics’. 16 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 12–13. 17 Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott, ‘Theorizing Fiction Theory’, Tessera 3 Canadian Fiction Magazine, vol. 57 (1986): 6–12. 18 See Stacey Young, Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement, (London: Routledge, 1997)., especially Chapter 3 on the history of feminist autotheory and Lauren Fournier, ‘Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory: Autotheory as Contemporary Feminist Practice.’ a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 33, no. 3 (2018): 643–62. 19 As Lauren Fournier discusses, ‘Joan Hawkins describes Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick (1998) as “theoretical fiction,” meaning not simply fiction informed by theory but fiction in which “theory becomes an intrinsic part of the ‘plot,’ a mover and shaker in the fictional universe created by the author.” ’ See Fournier, ‘Sick Women, Sad Girls, and Selfie Theory’ and Joan Hawkins, ‘Afterword: Theoretical Fictions’, Chris Kraus, I Love Dick (Cambridge: Semiotext(e), 1997), 263–76. 20 Godard, Marlatt, Mezei and Scott, ‘Theorizing Fiction Theory’, 6–12. 21 Godard, Marlatt, Mezei and Scott, ‘Theorizing Fiction Theory’, 6–12. 22 Godard, Marlatt, Mezei and Scott, ‘Theorizing Fiction Theory’, 6–12. 23 Godard, Marlatt, Mezei and Scott, ‘Theorizing Fiction Theory’, 6–12. 24 ‘Tessera was founded in 1981 as result of conversations among its founding editors, Barbara Godard, Daphne Marlatt, Kathy Mezei and Gail Scott, at a York University conference on feminist literary theory in Canada. Their goal

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was to foster the development of new modes of writing both creative and critical texts which was being pioneered in Quebec. Tessera began publishing in 1984 out of Simon Fraser University and Stong College at York University. The first four issues of Tessera appeared as special issues of already established periodicals.’ See https://tessera.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/tessera/article/ view/23515/21715; https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/scl/article/ view/8139/9196 and https://www.archeion.ca/tessera-journal 25 Quoted in Barbara Godard, ‘Fiction/Theory: Editorial’, Tessera 3 Canadian Fiction Magazine, no. 57 (1986): 4–5. 26 See http://www.criticalpoetics.co.uk/. ‘Critical Poetics is an interdisciplinary research group that seeks to stimulate debate, collaboration and innovation among scholars and practitioners whose work is concerned with creative and critical theory and practice. It explores possibilities for the text that are engendered by unconventional, unexpected and cross-disciplinary approaches.’ See also Denise Ferreira Da Silva, ‘Toward a Black Feminist Poethics’, The Black Scholar, 44:2 (2014): 81–97. 27 Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 7. 28 See Michel Foucault, ‘Self Writing’, translated from Corps écrit, no. 5 (February 1983): 3–23. See https://foucault.info/documents/foucault. hypomnemata.en/, (accessed 28 September 2019). 29 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2, The Use of Pleasure, [1985] translated by Robert Hurley, (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 26. 30 Jane Rendell, ‘A Way with Words: Feminists Writing Architectural Design Research’, Murray Fraser (ed) Architectural Design Research (London: Ashgate, 2013).

CHAPTER TWO

Waking Ideas from Their Sleep: An Introduction to Ficto-critical Writing in and of Architecture Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead

Architects and fiction writers share much the same ambition: to imagine new worlds into being. Whether situated in the past, present or future, or layered as complex spatio-temporal strata, architects and writers of fiction describe and document these worlds, subsequently inviting others to occupy them. Design is common to them both, equally in the sense of design as authorial intention, and design as planning before the fact, for how a creative work will eventually be manifested. Every architectural proposition is a kind of speculative fiction before it becomes a built fact, just as every written fiction relies on a setting, the construction of a coherent milieu in which a story can take place. Where an architectural edifice requires an adequate structural system for the maintenance of stability, a reader’s suspension of disbelief is likewise supported by a structurally coherent set of narrative cues. Belief, or plausibility, has a specific gravity of its own. Things become more complex when fiction is combined with criticism; when the story that is told, spatial or otherwise, undertakes the work of critique. This is what can be called ficto-criticism, a concept and a methodology with a somewhat contested history, which fuses the genres of essay, critique and story-telling. Ficto-criticism combines the techniques of fiction and critical theory with the aim of challenging assumptions about our contemporary social and political realities. Although fiction is never obliged to be faithful to reality, when combined with the emancipatory potential of criticism it holds the power to disrupt habitual ways of seeing, acting and – why not! – building, amidst our everyday lives. Where fiction is 11

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a powerful means of speculatively propelling ourselves into other imagined worlds, criticism offers the situated capacity to ethically cope with what confronts us on the way, and once we arrive there. What we want to ask with this collection of essays is what happens when fiction and criticism are combined and then applied to architectural projects and problems, sites and situations, histories and theories? This is not architecture as allegory or metaphor for the structure of a narrative, nor is it architecture as an object or motif of fiction; rather what we seek here is a particular, spatial, place-oriented, architectural approach to fiction and criticism taken together. Demanding a critical approach to the narrative or storytelling function with which architects have become more or less familiar, this collection of essays explores the conjunctive capacity of fictocriticism as it relates to architectural critique and critical storytelling. Beyond the enjoyment of storytelling, ficto-criticism for architecture assumes the constructive, creative and critical situatedness of the thinking-designer in the midst of their problematic field, and – importantly – as being in contact with specific situations and environmental milieux. This collection demonstrates how the power of conjoining fiction and criticism as a ficto-critical practice – across the linking punctuation of the hyphen – provides opportunities for writers both within and alongside the discipline of architecture, both within and without buildings and places. To complicate things, we must hasten to add that this formulation of the fictocritical also appears without the hyphen, as fictocriticism. Rather than smooth out any implicit disagreements over the nomenclature, the reader will find both versions in this book. In this collection, ficto-criticism and sometimes fictocriticism, is aligned, in the first instance, with explorative approaches to architecture conceived as a world-making or constructive practice, and as a means of critiquing the present, where it has become oppressive. It is a method that moves beyond the terrain of any singular discipline in that it offers ways of innovatively combining architecture with philosophy, literature, and cultural studies, as well as with experimental approaches in ethnography and geography. To reflect on this array of disciplines, the authors collected here arrive from a number of areas of expertise, representing architectural theory and criticism, literary theory and creative writing, ethnography and cultural studies. *

*

*

It is important to open with a brief account of the historical emergence of ficto-criticism as a mode of expression, as a writing practice, and as an experimental methodology. The back-story of this productive concept and method, which initiates alternative approaches to writing practices particularly in the Australian and the Canadian geopolitical contexts, combines the anglophone reception of critical theory and post-structuralism, and places ethnographic techniques alongside cultural studies and literary theory. This is further inflected by the reception of French feminist theory,

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with the influence from the 1980s onwards of philosophers such as Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous, and before them, Simone de Beauvoir. These writers, all of whom share a feminist ethos, interrupt their philosophical tracts with unconventional modes of expression, or else they explicitly resort to fiction. Consider the novels of de Beauvoir and Cixous, or the experimental modes of expression of Irigaray. Productive interference patterns emerge, between fiction and criticism, chatter and noise, stirred by a creative impulse. Oft-cited names on a list of precursors who draw broadly on a tradition that has been called ‘French Theory’ usually include Roland Barthes and his pleasure of the text, Jacques Derrida’s argument for the primacy of writing over speech, Maurice Blanchot’s short ‘récits’ and dense languorous philosophical prose, Michel Leiris’s auto-biographical essays, the experimental exuberance of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and even the oeuvre of Michel Foucault, who once claimed that all his work should be read as a fiction.1 The list, as can be seen, is rather stacked with the names of men. In the tendency of ficto-criticism to use the ‘essay’ as a form, the tradition could be extended back to the sixteenth century and Michel de Montaigne’s essays, in which social observation, self-reflection, critical analysis, and auto-biography all became entwined as a kind of ‘test-site’ with the aim of disrupting both expectations and assumptions about what is deemed to be ‘proper style’, conveying both an intimacy and an immediacy extended from writer to reader. What is worthy of note is the emergence of ficto-criticism as a recognized approach in both the Australian and Canadian contexts at around the same time, a phenomenon discussed at length in Helen Flavell’s research.2 Both of these nation-states share the dubious attribute of being Commonwealth countries, which is to say, they are colonies in arguable degrees of decolonization, historically located at the periphery of Empire. Yet a compelling critical power can erupt at the periphery. Whether we read the essays of Anna Gibbs, Meaghan Morris, Katarina Schlunke, Stephen Muecke or Michael Taussig, what we discover, we propose, is less something abstract than the acknowledgement of specific, material encounters with local concerns, close observation, a ‘pleasure in the text’ that is directed at asking difficult questions – often of that colonial history itself – and, of course, an approach to writing that is taken less as a means of reporting on what has come to pass than as a site of discovery, an experiment in process. *

*

*

For one of us, ficto-criticism was first encountered in the late 1990s in Perth, Western Australia, the most geographically isolated city on the planet (assuming that a city must have at least 1 million inhabitants). Isolation can give rise to startling visions conducive to wondrous stories. In the dim recesses of the Arts Faculty at the University of Western Australia, on a university campus laid out in proximity to the wide and slow-moving Swan

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River, the liberatory promise of ficto-criticism seemed to be murmured along the corridors. Writers and pedagogues like Gail Jones and Terri-ann White were offering shimmering lines of inspiration and inculcating courage to undertake experimentation. Something like what can be called ficto-criticism presented the possibility of what appeared to be a new form wherein an essay could convey its critical and creative content through a form of expression that looked and sounded like prose, had the feel of fiction, and yet held the capacity to undertake critique. The effect was that both fiction and criticism came to be transformed in the encounter. For the other of us, ficto-criticism was encountered also in the late 1990s, and also in a university context, but this time in Adelaide, South Australia – a small city teetering between the socially genteel and the culturally progressive, with an arts scene treading a line between stolid propriety and wild experimentation. Under the tutelage of Linda Marie Walker3 (herself an early proponent of rhizomatic and hypertextual writing, and a collaborator of Gregory Ulmer4 in the days when email and the internet were just emerging in the lives of ordinarily non-technical folk) it seemed that poststructural theory, experimental writing and the ficto-critical opened new worlds of meaning: a stuttering kind of writing, glancing off its subject, or perhaps brushing it, ever so lightly. Michael Tawa was also there, also writing.5 This mode of writing was not to be called poetic. It was fragmentary, it eluded fixation, and it opened a new intellectual world, both textual (reading Marguerite Duras) and material (lurking in the cool aisles of the Experimental Art Foundation bookshop, perusing everything at length, purchasing little). What we were doing was wrestling with theory, and revelling in the pleasure of the (unknowable) text: ‘since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.’6 Thus the exhilaration of the ficto-critical for those of us undergoing architectural training (we use the expression deliberately – we were under the grey eminence and obdurate weight of architecture, as a discipline and a practice, pinned beneath its history and its conservatism) was partly that ficto-criticism was deliberately non-completist: it was diffident, allusive, touching upon ideas and approaches and opening them up, and then leaving much unsaid. It could be windy and full of holes, a ruin, barely standing up, and yet – and yet. The success of the text would always be known through its aesthetic construction as much as its analytic insight, through whether the conceit worked, if the text cohered as a fiction but also a criticism. This was a mode of critique – that is, a mode of critically theorizing criticism itself – that seemed to offer something quite specific, and special, for the discipline of architecture. Ficto-critical writing seemed artificial, in the best and most emancipatory sense of that word. It revelled in its own constructedness, its own selfreflexivity. It left the seams exposed and the threads dangling; indeed it elevated to the level of ornament the expression of its own construction. Both fiction and criticism are genres, after all, and mashing them together

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offers all the wonderful hybrid oddity of any cross-genre experiment – the horror romance, the literary fairy tale. Of course there are multiple hybrid genres in fiction already – science fiction, alternate history, magic realism – since fiction is the most capacious genre, which lends itself to cross-breeding. Scott Brook, who is reserved about the benefits of ficto-criticism, remarks in a footnote that what would be beneficial is ‘a theory of how genres establish themselves, patrol their perimeters, enforce their consequences and get subverted by practitioners’.7 The exploration of genre proves a useful way of exploring ficto-critical approaches to writing, testing the limits of what architecture writing can do when playing the game of genre so as to render sensible other spatialities. Ultimately, in ficto-criticism the fulcrum between fiction and criticism seems to lean towards the critique. It is the fiction that enables criticism, that opens a critical approach to facts – where those facts might be, let’s say, the world as it has conventionally been written, by the victors more than the oppressed, by colonising powers more than the subjugated Indigenes, by the Great Men and much less the supporting cast of Others. The fiction in ficto-criticism allows us to speculate on all those other true stories that are not written, that have never been written and never will be in their primary form, those people whose accounts have not been deemed important enough to recount. Ficto-criticism enables us to retrieve and redeem those lost stories, in another way. We know they are myriad. So the task of writing them, through projection and speculation and imagination, becomes a task both empathic and ethical. The fiction, the figment, seems thus to be far from the subordinate term here – it is critical because fictional, critical in and through fiction; it is fiction with the purpose of critique. This leads to two things: the essay form, and a particular mode of criticism. Many authors have considered the essay, and written essays about essays. Brian Dillon, in his wonderful book Essayism, finds a new path around this well-trodden ground.8 Lauren Elkin, in a review of Dillon’s book, notes his suggestion that ‘we cannot define the essay, but that we might more productively gesture at some quality of essayism: a certain texture, a style, a voice, an “experiment in attention”.’ She continues, ‘The essay will – and by its nature must – always resist attempts to pin it down. It refuses to be contained by any neat summary; it is “diverse and several – it teems”.’9 While fictocriticism is not always essay, it shares some of this teeming quality – an over-abundance, a certain fecundity, of possibility and imagination – an opening up, partly due to a deliberately fragmentary and allusive approach, one which refuses completeness. And this brings us to ficto-criticism’s quite particular mode of critique: not the evaluative, judging, fault-finding, seeking-out of flaws kind – not the criticism of the pedant, but rather of the enthusiast, one which uses the scene or setting or object at hand as a point of departure, creatively, spiralling outward in arabesques. This is the kind memorably described by Michel Foucault:

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I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would not try to judge, but bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the seafoam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply, not judgments, but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes – all the better. All the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be a sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.10 Perhaps, he says, they would invent them sometimes – all the better. In this passage, it seems, we have the ambitions of ficto-criticism encapsulated – the scattered sea foam, the lightning, the ideas dragged from their sleep. *

*

*

In her account of ficto-criticism, or fictocriticism, because the hyphen can also be dispensed with, Anna Gibbs notes that it is tactical, and designed to respond to specific problems. It is performative and undertakes critique not only of its chosen site or problems, but of its own process, or what it is in the midst of doing. Ficto-criticism operates in process, it explains and demonstrates, it interrupts and troubles itself. Gibbs draws attention to how the concept and method fell out of use, or how it entered a period of forgetfulness, a moment of submersion, which means we must be alert to why its benefits seem so indispensable again today.11 One reason we propose for the value of reclaiming this methodology and denying that we merely entertain here an anachronistic gesture, is the rise of the environmental humanities, and the urgent need to tell other kinds of stories concerning our environmental imbroglios.12 Ficto-criticism is regularly defined as a hybrid of fact and fiction, yet it transforms both of these key terms, and unsettles any pre-conceptions we may have about either. Is fiction merely all that is ‘made up’ or simply a story-telling mode, a narrative, a tale? If, as the anthropologist Taussig has claimed, ‘all theory and philosophy lack a grasp of the concrete’,13 is it that a methodology like ficto-criticism can remedy this lack of attention to material details, what today we might even call (with some critical care) an attention to vibrant matter and thing power? Taussig cites his colleague Stephen Muecke as his source: both are Australian, though Taussig lives and works in New York. And Muecke cites Derrida: ‘We must invent (a name) for those “critical” inventions which belong to literature while deforming its limits,’14 and this is what Muecke calls ‘fictocriticism’. What can ficto-critical writing do? This was the question, and challenge, of a 2010 seminar at UNSW that included contributions from Stephen Muecke and Meaghan Morris: What can ficto-critical writing do? We must hear in this question the emphasis on method and practice. It facilitates the collapse of the subject into the text, and all the risks this entails; it suggests

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that where criticism is supposed to unmask, when conjoined with fiction, it instead multiplies the performative masks; where criticism constructs and conveys concepts, fiction produces percepts and affects, which means, as Muecke argues, the challenge is to combine what the reader has felt (how they have been affected, and how they affect a situation), with what they might potentially learn.15 To which we would add, how does an (architectural) writer act ethically in response to a situation? When undertaking fictocritical writing, the researcher is obliged to perform in such a way as to be ‘adequate to a situation’16, which is to say, they are obliged to respond with the greatest of tact and care. The Swedish writer Mona Livholts pays especial attention to the situation of experimental academic writing where she argues for the benefits of a ‘situated writing’,17 which acknowledges both the role of subjectivity and place in the practice of writing. We ask the question of what ficto-critical writing can do again today because of the institutional shifts we have witnessed over the last fifteen to twenty years, for instance, an increasing allowance being made for ‘creative practice’ PhDs, in architecture, art, creative writing and other disciplines with a practical leaning. This includes an acknowledgement of the design research turn in architecture.18 The importance of writing as a mode of practice in architecture has been discussed and practiced by architectural thinkers, practitioners and critics such as Naomi Stead, Jane Rendell, Katja Grillner, Catharina Gabrielsson, Linda Marie Walker and Michael Tawa. We acknowledge a considerable list of precursors in the Australian, British and Swedish contexts. Important in this domain of ‘architecture writing’ is the work undertaken in the collection Critical Architecture, where Jane Rendell introduces a section dedicated to this theme.19 Likewise other conferences have been important: Once Upon a Place: The First Annual conference on Architecture and Fiction, held in Lisbon in 2010, and the sequel to this, Writing Place: Laboratory for Architecture and Literature, at TU Delft in 2013. In our own context, Naomi Stead’s two symposia – ‘Writing Architecture: a Symposium on Architectural Criticism and the Written Representation of Architecture’, in Brisbane, Australia, in 2009, and the following year’s Writing Architecture II: A Symposium on Innovations in the textual and Visual Critique of Buildings, also in Queensland, resulted in Stead and Lee Stickell’s co-edited, special issue of ATR (Architectural Theory Review) On Writing Architecture in 2010, as well as Stead’s edited collection, Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation, and Criticism in 2012. Important work has been undertaken more recently in Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé’s 2017 edited volume Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice,20 which includes experimental approaches to writing architecture, such as the conversation between Hélène Frichot, Katja Grillner and Julieanna Preston.21 As for the promise of feminist futures, this is where experimental approaches to writing offer liberatory potential outcomes specifically the opportunity for minor voices to be heard. Flavell argues that by ‘challenging

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the voice of normative academic writing positioned “on high” from its subject it is argued that ficto-criticism draws attention to the arbitrary nature of objective knowledge thus reflecting on – and contributing to – the critical re-evaluation of academic writing as a way of knowing and representing the world.’22 In this way, we argue, ficto-critical approaches to writing architecture engage a queer and a feminist ethos, allowing subjectivities to multiply, to quiver, to challenge what otherwise becomes sedimented in normative structures, or cemented in a status quo. With a little luck, the relationship between subjectivities under construction and their local environment-worlds can be witnessed entering into forms of reciprocal embrace, and withdrawal, in the framing of critical stories yet to be told. With this collection, we test how well the discipline of architecture and this literary adventure in ficto-criticism might work together. At the same time, we are wary of making bold claims, for it is a great challenge to contravene the decorum of academic discourse and the perceived obligation to maintain an objective stance as though from nowhere, or to perform what Donna Haraway calls the ‘god trick’.23 Even though the conceit of objectivity is now less prevalent than previously, what is nonetheless required is a tireless vigilance when it comes to acknowledging one’s situated position as writer, as researcher, as creative practitioner. Habits easily return to reinstall themselves, and by placing an emphasis on the potentialities of ficto-critical discourse we argue that concerted efforts of self-reflexivity, as well as an attuned consciousness to the unstable location of the writing subject are works in perpetual progress. There is, we understand, a certain ‘effect’ produced in calling on the category of ficto-criticism with its specific history. In the Australian context Muecke and Noel King tend to be cited as the key progenitors of ficto-criticism, and yet we understand from reading Helen Flavell that we ought to be wary here, because we do not want to set up an argument about who coined the term first. We also want to acknowledge the careful history work that researchers such as Flavell have undertaken, returning ficto-criticism to what she claims is its Canadian source, specifically in relation to the work of Jeanne Randolph.24 Any concept reveals a history of territorializations and reterritorializations. Here, we seek not to territorialize ficto-criticism, but rather to offer it up again as an invitation to future experimentation. We are not afraid to tread ground that has already been trodden, and even to risk an anachronistic turn if this allows us something, that is, if this still enables another point of view on contemporary matters of concern. Certainly, when we track the emergence of ficto-criticism in the Australian and Canadian contexts, we discover its marginal location in small journals, online publications, unpublished papers. Rather than setting ficto-criticism in opposition to academic writing, we believe it can expand the range and possibility of academic writing, bringing more to the disciplines that circulate through

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these essays. Despite occasional territorial skirmishes, ficto-criticism remains a marginal experiment, and all the more powerful for this, maintaining a certain mobility at the margin. Rather than supporting any territorial ambitions, what we would prefer to participate in is making the concept and method of ficto-criticism a form of commons. At least, these would be some of our ambitions for the current collection. *

*

*

Architectural criticism and theory predominates in our collection because that is our own disciplinary expertise, but it is crucial to place discourse in architecture alongside cultural and literary studies, and ethnography. To reflect this spectrum of concerns we open this collection with a prologue from Jane Rendell, who has been an important influence in developing writing as a mode of critical and creative practice in architecture, drawing on auto-biographical methods as well as psychoanalytical theory. We close with an afterword by Stephen Muecke, an ethnographer frequently associated with the emergence of ficto-criticism in Australia, initially influenced by Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson and also Rosalyn Krauss’s paraliterary techniques. Originally, we had constructed a highly structured scaffold for the book’s contents, dividing the seventeen chapters into sections according to clear thematics. But then, as is often the case, the categories did not fit the essays as they eventually assembled; they became more of a constraint than a support. So we abandoned our careful construction and sequenced the contributions in a more impressionistic way, one that allows you, the reader, to drift through this series of essay experiments. We open with Anna Gibbs, who guides us into the constructive capacity of ficto-criticism, locating us immediately amidst laughter, familial encounter and postcolonial struggle. Katrina Schlunke continues the constructive theme, alerting us to environmental dislocations and the hints of violence that can be witnessed just beyond our windows. Hélène Frichot explores how constructions of subjectivities and spaces multiply and defract, demonstrating the complexities of colonial pasts on an island holiday resort off the coast of Queensland, Australia. Elke Krasny and Phoebe Giannisi invite us to listen to the stories held in stones on yet another island, Trikeri, Greece, an island of exile for women whose stories risk being buried and lost. A field trip approach is developed by Jacky Bowring, who speculates on what may have happened had the land artist Robert Smithson visited Christchurch, New Zealand. From New Zealand we track in a northwesterly direction to Japan, where we visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park with Kim Roberts and discover snippets of a fictional voice mixed with reflections on the expanded field that the peace park becomes, always something more than mere memorial. Emma Cheatle takes us walking in eighteenth-century London, following in the footsteps of an unnamed

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woman whom we gradually come to understand is Mary Wollstonecraft. Here temporal registers are enfolded, and the present and the past mingle in the gait of a daily perambulation. Mirielle Roddier continues the walk, and now we are in Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, where the cliché of the insouciant flâneur must be undone, and other points of view offered from minority positions. Naomi Stead and Katrina Schlunke’s epistolary email correspondence has an urban stride and humour of its own, and addresses a series of encounters with daily objects and spaces in Sydney, from A to E, from Air Conditioning Ducts to Escalators. And then a mad processional erupts, as with Scott Colman and Lars Lerup’s contribution we find ourselves chasing an animist parade of architectural maquettes down a street in Madrid. Architecture is cut loose and on the run in the shape of furniture-like pieces that have taken on a life of their own. Michael Young likewise looks to the secret life of things, when he discusses the role of ‘entourage’, defined as that clustering of objects habitually and sometimes thoughtlessly used by architects and designers to set up their rendered images. Here another kind of fiction unfolds in the stories we tell ourselves through our image-making practices. Keith Mitnick stops us in our architectural tracks, asking us to listen in to his cautionary tale of the architect who has forgotten how to write. As storytelling begins to engulf essay, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady supplements a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot, supporting her speculations on the aftermath of the novel with her own site research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, where Eudenides’ novel is set. Katrina Simon plays on the genre of the ghost story, because every collective experiment in writing architectures must surely include its own haunted house. Andrew P. Steen works up the spatial logics of the hard-boiled detective fiction, here incongruously located in the manicured yet banal suburbs of an unnamed, strangely everyplace, non-place. And where do we conclude? In the bureau of marriages and divorces, Tehran, with Sepideh Karami, wondering whether to laugh or to cry. *

*

*

Architects and fiction writers carve out milieus for the ins and outs of daily life, and imagine how relations between peoples, places and things might be otherwise. And yet, once a spatial story is released, neither the writer nor the architect can fully anticipate how it will be occupied, read or received. This becomes our open invitation to you, to make of these stories and essays what you will, ideally to be inspired to experiment yourself. Stories escape their progenitors. Contrariwise, stories produce the subjects who attempt to tell them. A stuttering, a disrupting, a slowing-down: writing architectures is agrammatical. A writing architecture is something that is apt to go awry. ‘A writing’, she’ll go ‘a-writing’, expresses a wilful stupidity in the face of assertive disciplinary and epistemological claims. A writing

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architecture chases a life, something indefinite, as in the indefinite article, but also indefinite as in not clearly defined, blurry around the edges. It is a processual experiment, not a judgement.25 We must ask when encountering such essay-stories, whether composed in text or bricks and mortar: who is included, who is excluded, who remains to be represented, and who is violently erased? Our ambition for the fictocritical approach in architecture and its surrounding fields, as encapsulated in this book, is that it be mobilised in such a way as to remain alert to the fissures and cracks in our spatial story-telling practices. As Haraway insists, ‘it matters what stories tell stories’,26 whose stories are told, whose stories are heard and passed on, and what troubled environmental relations they speak of. It is the story, here delivered via a series of essayistic experiments, around which we can gather to voice our cares and concerns.

Notes 1

Michel Foucault, ‘The History of Sexuality’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 183–93: 193.

2

Helen Flavell, ‘The Investigation: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism’, in Antithesis, vol. 10 (1999): 104–16. Also by the same author, ‘Who Killed Jeanne Randolph? King, Muecke, or “fictocriticism?” ’, in Outskirts: Feminism Along the Edge, vol. 20: 209. http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/ volume-20/flavell (Accessed 5 March 2018.)

3

Linda Marie Walker is an Adelaide-based artist, writer and curator. A selection of her notable works include: Linda Marie Walker, “On having no style,” 8 September 2018, Realtime: Australian and international exploratory performance and media arts, https://www.realtime.org.au/on-having-no-style/; Linda Marie Walker, “Messages of the wind,” in Semi-detached: writing, representation and criticism in architecture, ed, Naomi Stead, (Uro: Melbourne, 2012): 285–89; Linda Marie Walker. “Writing, a little machine,” Architectural Theory Review, vol. 17, no. 1, (2012): 40–51.

4

See Gregory Ulmer & Linda Marie Walker, ‘Wishing’, ALT-X Online Network, Not dated, http://www.altx.com/au2/lmw.html.

5

See Michael Tawa, ‘Entr’acte: Interval: A Review of Adrian Snodgrass’ “Thinking Through the Gap” and Linda Marie Walker’s “And so on, and”,’ Architectural Theory Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (2011): 124–35.

6

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1988): 3.

7

Scott Brook, ‘Does Anyone Know What Happened to “Fictocriticism”?’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 8, no. 2 (2002): 117, fn 17.

8

Brian Dillon, Essayism (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017).

9

Lauren Elkin, ‘Essayism by Brian Dillon review – pure creativity on the page’, The Guardian, 23 June 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/

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jun/23/essayism-brian-dillon-review-essays-michel-de-montaigne-georgesperec-joan-didion 10 Michel Foucault, ‘The Masked Philosopher’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, Volume One, ed. J. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley and others (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Allen Lane, 1997 [1980]), 323. 11 Ann Gibbs, ‘Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism – Explanation and Demonstration’, Text, vol. 1, no. 2 (1997). 12 Ursula K. Heise, ‘Introduction: Planet, Species, Justice – and the stories we tell about them’, The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, ed. Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017), 1–10. See also Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 13 Michael Taussig, ‘Fictocriticism’, European Graduate School, 2010. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkzrxvDhDak. (Accessed 3 June 2016.) 14 Stephen Muecke, ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing’, Parallax, vol. 8, no. 4 (October–December, 2002): 108–112. 15 Stephen Muecke, ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing’, 111. 16 Taussig, ‘Fictocriticism’. 17 Mona Livholts, Situated Writing as Theory and Method: The Untimely Academic Novella (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. 18 Hélène Frichot, ‘Five lessons in a Ficto-Critical Approach to Design Practice Research’, in Drawing On 01, 2012. http://drawingon.org/uploads/papers/ IS01_01.pdf (Accessed 5 March 2018.) 19 Jane Rendell, ‘Introduction: Architecture-Writing’ in Critical Architecture, ed. Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Nurray Fraser and Mark Dorrian (London: Routledge, 2007): 87–91. 20 Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson, Ramia Mazé (eds), Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, (Baunach: AADR, 2017_. 21 Hélène Frichot, Katja Grillner and Julieanna Preston, ‘Feminist Practices: Writing Around the Kitchen Table’, in Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, ed. Meike Schalk, Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé, Ramia (Baunach: AADR , 2017): 171–98. 22 Helen Flavell, ‘Who Killed Jeanne Randolph? King, Muecke, or “fictocriticism”?’. 23 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. 581–2. 24 Helen Flavell, ‘Who Killed Jeanne Randolph? King, Muecke, or “fictocriticism”?’. 25 Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007): 1.

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26 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

Bibliography Brook, Scott. ‘Does Anyone Know What Happened to “Fictocriticism”?’ Cultural Studies Review, vol. 8, no. 2 (2002). Doucet, Isabelle and Hélène Frichot, eds. ‘Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City’, special edition ATR (Architectural Theory Review), vol. 22, no. 1 (2018). Flavell, Helen. ‘Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-criticism’. PhD. Dissertation, Murdoch University, Perth, 2004. Flavell, Helen. ‘The Investigation: Australian and Canadian Fictocriticism’. Antithesis, 10 (1999): 104–16. Flavell, Helen. ‘Who Killed Jeanne Randolph? King, Muecke, or “fictocriticism”?’ Outskirts: Feminism Along the Edge, vol. 20 (2009). Available online: http:// www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-20/flavell (accessed 5 March 2018). Foucault, Michel. ‘The History of Sexuality’. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 183–193, New York: Pantheon Books, 1980. Frichot, Hélène. ‘Five lessons in a Ficto-Critical Approach to Design Practice Research’. Drawing On, no. 01 (2012). Available online: http://drawingon.org/ uploads/papers/IS01_01.pdf (accessed 5 March 2018). Gabrielsson, Catharina. ‘Staying with the Trouble on the Flats’. In ‘Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City’, edited by Isabelle Doucet and Hélène Frichot, special edition ATR (Architectural Theory Review) vol. 22, no. 1, 2018: 83–99. Gibbs, Anna. ‘Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism – explanation and demonstration’. Text, vol. 1, no. 2 (1997). Available online: http://www. textjournal.com.au/oct97/gibbs.htm (accessed 6 April 2013). Gibbs, Anna. ‘Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences’. TEXT , vol. 9, no. 1 (April 2005). Available online: http://www.textjournal.com.au/april05/ gibbs.htm (accessed 6 April 2013). Grafe, Christoph, Madeleine Maaskant and Klaske Havik, eds. Architecture and Literature, OASE 70, 2006. Grillner, Katja. ‘Fluttering Butterflies, a Dusty Road, and a Muddy Stone: Criticality in Distraction (Haga Park, Stockholm 2004)’. In Critical Architecture, edited by Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser and Mark Dorrian. London: Routledge, 2007. Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books, 1991. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2016.

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Heise, Ursula K. ‘Introduction: Planet, Species, Justice – and the stories we tell about them’. In The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities, edited by Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann, 1–10. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017. Hilevaara, K. and O. Orley, eds. The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. Morris, Meaghan. The Pirate’s Fiancée: Feminism, Reading, Postmodernism. London; New York: Verso, 1988. Livholts, Mona. Situated Writing as Theory and Method: The Untimely Academic Novella. Abingdon: Routledge, 2020. Muecke, Stephen. No Road: Bitumen All the Way. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997. Muecke, Stephen. ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing’. Parallax, vol. 8, no. 4 (October– December 2002): 108–12. Muecke, Stephen and Noel King. ‘On Fictocriticism’. Australian Book Review, 135 (1991): 13–14. Petrescu, Doina, ed. Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space. London: Routledge, 2007. Rawes, Peg, Timothy Matthews and Stephen Loo, eds. Poetic Biopolitics: Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts. London: I. B. Tauris, 2015. Rendell, Jane. ‘Architecture-Writing’. Journal of Architecture, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005): 255–64. Rendell, Jane. ‘Introduction: Architecture-Writing. In Critical Architecture, edited by Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Nurray Fraser and Mark Dorrian, 87–91. London: Routledge, 2007. Rendell, Jane. Site-Writing. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. Schalk, Meike, Thérèse Kristiansson, and Ramia Mazé, eds. Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice. Baunach: AADR , 2017. Schlunke, Katrina. Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2005. Stead, Naomi. Semi-Detached: Writing, Representation, and Criticism. New York: ORO Publications, 2012. Stead, Naomi and Lee Stickells. ‘Special Issue on Writing Architecture’. ATR (Architectural Theory Review), vol 15, no. 3 (2010): 233–41. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2007. Taussig, Michael. Walter Benjamin’s Grave. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Taussig, Michael. ‘Fictocriticism’. Lecture for European Graduate School, 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkzrxvDhDak (accessed 3 June 2016). Tsing, Anna, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan and Nils Bubandt, eds. Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Webb, Jen and Donna Lee Brien. ‘Addressing the “ancient quarrel”: Creative Writing as Research’ in The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts, edited by Michael Biggs and Henrik Karlsson. London: Routledge, 2012.

CHAPTER THREE

From Site to Situation: Cutting Up as Fictocritical Composition Anna Gibbs

If in the use of the term ‘fictocriticism’ the often dispensed-with hyphen attempts to join the ‘ficto’ with the ‘critical’, it also inevitably severs them and holds them apart. Here, the typographic device creates a complex conceptual space and a space of potentiality, that is to say, a space for both thought and action. In this tense and quivering gap arises the possibility of a writing otherwise: a writing in which the confident authority of argument gives way to hesitation and doubt, and the house of fiction begins to fall apart, perhaps into a chasm. Here the plot is uncertain; place is displaced; setting becomes unstable; site gives way to constantly shifting situation. We are in the middle of something, immersed in the materiality of writing as doing and making, a thinking taking shape in action, and then shifting that shape again at the very moment it forms. It is in this process that we could say that ‘writing takes place’.1 In this case, it begins with a house, that apparently innocuous emblem of what Europeans too often euphemistically call ‘settlement’. As safe as houses, we like to say. I’m standing in front of it, on the side of the road, the passenger side front and rear doors of the car still open, the engine running and the driver still behind the wheel as if we might decide to cut and run. There are two of us on the verge. We are both laughing crazily. Partly at the prospect of being spotted from inside the house, behaving weirdly right outside it. Partly out of nervousness with each other, and me at what I imagine she might be feeling at this point, perhaps not simple, a kind of tearing into the warring factions of her indigenous and European ancestors, maybe; she – well, I don’t know, do I? 25

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Uncertainty and anxiety quiver between us, like a little sparking charge, backwards and forwards. There’s electricity in the air. This is fieldwork for ‘The Longford Project’, an ongoing contemporary art collaboration with Elizabeth Day, Julie Gough and Noelene Lucas. This project addresses the passage of a few generations through a particular point in space, adopting a temporalizing form of psychogeography to address the transgenerational transmission of the affects of place. Places, as this work understands them, are not passive settings but animate environments in which the past remains alive and continually re-invents itself. Let me just pause here a minute to fill you in. The Longford Project traces and works with the intersecting passages of a few generations of people, Indigenous and European, through the tiny town of Longford in northern Tasmania. A mere pinprick on the map of the world, this town was once the heart of the explosion that was European colonization of Trouwunna (one of the original names for Tasmania). This place and its surrounds formed a base for European expansion over lands that had been under the continuous custodianship of the Palawa people for around 40,000 years. It also threw together – and against each other – the interests of the British and colonial governments; the new colonial landed elite, who drove the process of invasion and colonization; other settlers, both willing and unwilling; and convicts from across the empire. The Longford Project initially grew out of a peculiar coincidence that struck Elizabeth Day – that a number of her (mainly) Sydney-based friends had some family connection with the tiny town of Longford (population about 4,500). This coincidence gave Day a sense of the possible significance of this tiny place on a tiny island at the southern end of the world, seeming to her to send out a series of sparks in the form of an extraordinary diaspora to various other points on earth. Long/ford: even this name – originally that of a town in Ireland – imposed upon this particular point at the other end of the world encourages the drawing of a low bow, or perhaps suggests the fording of an otherwise uncrossable river of time, travelling back to the blast site by way of the imaginative processes of making elaborating an ongoing process of research and reconnection. Coincidence is a source of surprise and delight, and a small source of wonder. It’s like the striking of a match that sends out tiny sparks in all directions. Too often dismissed as trivial, coincidence shows its strength in the fact that it can’t be undone. But if coincidence can’t be reverse-engineered, it can be re-engineered into other forms, and by that process, pressed into new meaning. As coincidence would have it, Julie Gough, standing beside me now on the verge in front of the house, is my cousin.2 About five or six generations back. That’s to say, we share the same European forebears. Julie is descended from Mannalargenna, one of the leaders of aboriginal resistance to the European invasion of Tasmania, through his daughter Worretemoteyenner,

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and her daughter Dalrymple Briggs (aka Dolly Dalrymple). I grew up in Adelaide, having migrated there as a child with my parents from New Zealand. I spent my childhood and most of my adult life under the impression that our family was a nuclear off-shoot from New Zealand, where both my parents and (as far as I knew) their parents, had been born, and had no previous connection to Australia, and it wasn’t until about ten years ago when my aged uncle suddenly turned into a geneaology and wanted to talk about it that I realized – with astonishment, with shame, with something like horror - how wrong this was. In fact our family washed around the south Pacific for generations, getting tangled up in the particular histories of the various places where they temporarily touched down. From the point of view of family history, perhaps it wasn’t so much one country or another as the sea that told the story. But this isn’t family history – or if it is, it’s not ‘that’ (kind of) family. And not that kind of history. Long and short, it wasn’t until about five years ago that Julie and I (strangers to each other but with close friends in common) realized how coincidence connected us. To return to the scene. This is the occasion of our first meeting, here on the side of the road, standing on and overlooking the contested land on which our common ancestors came to occupy, both to settle on and by virtue of that, to occupy in the military sense. But Julie of course also has other, older, much older, claims to this stolen land. I am so intensely aware of this, pricking with shame as I stand beside her in what is for me an unbearably charged moment, borne down by the weight of the whole history of the invasion of this island and the consequences of that history for its people – then, and still now, down the generations, right here to Julie standing beside me. Here and now, at this point of coincidence and conjunction, I find myself in a space of hesitation, not knowing what I am doing, not knowing what to do. Nor what to say. We are still awkward with each other, not sure what to make of each other, trying to see if we can connect. We’ve only been in each other’s company a couple of hours at most. We have driven out of town from our meeting at the bakery to see this house, but we have no plan for what might happen next. It’s clear neither of us wants to knock on the door, though we each make a feeble attempt to get the other to go first. I am shy. I hate talking to strangers. But I could be cover for her insurgency. (I know Julie has made a video work in which she creeps up on a colonial mansion, with a kangaroo skin thrown over her jeans and shirt and holding a spear, taking cover in the greenery of its expansive grounds.) On the other hand, I feel more the interloper. This is her country: maybe not strictly speaking Trawlwoolway land, but nonetheless. Not my country. I don’t even live in Tasmania. If we’re going to want to run away, it’s more likely to be from each other. ‘Bowthorpe’ – that’s what this house is called – stands on the Pateena Road just outside Longford. This was the road along the north bank of the

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South Esk River, where those who had once settled on Norfolk Island – some as convicts, others as military n were sent instead on the closure of the first penal settlement on the island as that settlement was deemed unviable. The first of the Norfolk Islanders arrived in 1804; the last, Julie’s and my ancestors, John Cox, a former soldier, and Ann Brooks, a former convict, with their seven surviving children, in 1813. Some time after that first meeting with Julie on the verge, I went to see an exhibition called Skullbone Plains. The Skullbone Plains in Tasmania are southwest of Longford, and a group of mostly white artists were invited by well-known local artist Philip Wolfhagen to camp there for two weeks and to make work responding to the place. In so much Australian work, place becomes amortized as landscape, stilled life on a large scale and a still European model, rather than the animate, breathing, living being that, for indigenous people, is country. Julie’s work, a large reed-woven form that hung from two wallaby jawbone hooks and which fell loosely into the shape of island Trowunna/Tasmania, presented an entirely different proposition, implicitly resituating the Skullbone Plains in country: that is to say, in Palawa country. Her country, but also colonized country, with a history of violence in the very particular forms produced by colonization. The accompanying video presented a found nineteenth-century woman’s shoe, attached to a story of domestic violence and murder. The reeds used in the work were taken from a site near where the shoe was found: they are ‘witness elements’3 to a violence that might or might not be related to the name of the place: ‘you don’t know, do you?’, says the voice of woman on the video we hear but don’t see. Not long after seeing this exhibition, I came across an image. The photograph captioned ‘Autumn magic at “Bowthorpe” on the Pateena road’ is taken from Heart of the North, a coffee-table book by Owen Hughes,4 designed for the tourist market of the 1980s and which I found in a junk shop on another field trip ‘to country’ as Julie says. It shows, as you might expect from the title, a scene of European deciduous trees in sensational autumn colours – fiery reds, oranges, brilliant yellows, golds, russets and rusts, depending on their relative state of vivacity or decay. This was colour as celebration of (northern hemisphere) seasonal spectacle, on display for the viewer – a visual treat to be seen through the windows of a touring car. Keats’ famous eulogy of (English) autumn as the ‘season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’ hovers about this sight, warranting the productivity of the earth under colonial cultivation, staking an implicit claim against indigenous entitlement (in the all too frequently made colonising claim, albeit heard less often these days, that ‘ “they” did nothing with the land’ and are therefore not deserving of title to it). Just visible through the leaves are the white walls of the house. The road runs up the image, from bottom right to slightly left of centre top, flanked by the white picket fence of Bowthorpe itself. In the middle of the road is a white car. This is what I did with that image.

FROM SITE TO SITUATION

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FIGURE 3.1

The text is cut up and recomposed from chapters two and three (‘Van Diemen’s Land: settling in the enviable isle’ and ‘The Black War’) of Henry Reynolds’ History of Tasmania (2012), both of which deal with the limitations of European perceptions of the land and with the terrible consequences of European invasion for Tasmania’s first nations. The text offered not only a suitable vocabulary for the cut up technique, but also puts forth a view of history radically different from that implied by the photograph. I say I did this, but actually this is a work in progress: it’s what I’m doing, because the collage I present here is only an experiment, a kind of test bed for what I actually want to do. Which is, in a first stage, a much larger version of the collage to render it more legible, with a different, more closely worked, writing. And then in a second stage, I want to make a kind of video animation of it – driving the camera through the image so as to further release the text, these images of words, from their indexical function and semantic meaning and foregrounding writing instead as ventriloquistic articulation and reconfiguration of forces. I said earlier that this all started with a house. More than one house, really. A whole series of crumbling mansions. Once upon a time, the novel was an instantiation of the house of fiction, an architectonics of story, or, as described by Henry James, an impossible,

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dreamlike architecture that provided innumerable apertures each with its particular lens through which to focus an affective apprehension of the world5. Once upon a time, critique could rely on the capacity of expertise for distinction – especially between subjects and objects – to construct a framework of authority supporting its arguments. Once upon a time, fictocriticism challenged the pretensions of writing in the Humanities to unsituated and passionless objectivity, insisting on the key role played by the affective investments of story – curiosity and excitement as indices of what mattered – in Humanities research. In fact the ficto – and the critical – always ran in both directions, stealing from each other’s houses. For example, philosophy, if we can take it as an instance of the critical, borrowed ways of figuring from fiction (and poetry), as Michèle Le Dœuff showed us in her feminist analyses of the philosophical imaginary.6 And fiction took on argument by other means in the novel of ideas, even as its mark of distinction, according to Bakhtin was its allinclusiveness, its ability to cannibalise other genres, especially extra-literary discourses so that it became an encyclopedia of other knowledges, as Barthes has it.7 More recently, a form of experimental writing has come into being whose appropriations of theoretical vocabulary rendered them sensuous, creating a third language. I became an experimental writer a long time ago because I couldn’t tell a story to save myself. I had too much uncertainty about story as psychic container, too much hesitation about narrative point, and even more doubt about where I could make a story go – as much doubt as Derrida had about the arrival of letters at their intended destinations in the days we still used the postal service.8 Besides, I was a feminist, and I understood the logic of the suffragettes who went about blowing up the mail boxes, even if I only wanted to do it in theory – theory which did seem, way back when, to be a series of love letters between men. Now, though, as images proliferate and visualization becomes increasingly privileged as a form of knowledge, language (and with it, story) is arguably losing its purchase on the worlds created and governed by the image. Witness the everyday, endless productions of social media in which a photo on Facebook or Instagram replaces the need to express experience in words, to describe. The powers of the image lie in its affective immediacy, and at once in its deceptive facticity and the illimitable ambiguity of its semantic surplus. Sometimes, not even a caption can tie it down. At other times, captions connive to produce a seemingly irrefutable facticity; remember those images said to be of bunkers containing weapons of mass destruction that legitimized the invasion of Iraq? Maurizio Lazzarato reminds us that language is only one component of the world and not a privileged one.9 According to him, its function is to reterritorialize, to stabilize the deterritorializations both required and effected by the ‘machinic enslavement’10 that defines capitalism.11 So my

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own practice of cutting and pasting cannot be any kind of avant-gardism, even if it borrows some of the most powerful strategies and tools of the historical avant-gardes of modernism, that’s to say from all those forms of the cut – interruption, appropriation and collage-montage – and repurposes them yet again for the a-modernity in which we find ourselves. In this cut-up composition, which replaces an unwittingly colonial image with a visual-verbal critique of it, Reynolds’ words are repurposed, pressed into new meaning as they are made to stand in for colour, leaves, trees and whatever else is represented in the image. Hence, in this translation from English into English, ‘blood’ will come to signify a colour, a kind of ‘red’, without relinquishing its literal meaning with its implication of the violence done to bodies. Merleau-Ponty claims (on the basis of his reading of certain experiments) that red produces a muscular response that makes us want to move outward and toward activity, so in this sense the reds of the original but now obscured image play a role in drawing the eye into the it, driving us along the road down which (in another unassailable coincidence) the white car at its centre travels.12 Following Félix Guattari, we might say that colour appears here as a mode of expression, a focal point or vector for subjectivation: it arranges human elements (perception, memory) and non-human elements (autumn leaves, the road, the car, the photograph, the coffee-table book) into what Lazzarato (interpreting Guattari) calls ‘an enunciative nucleus’.13 Here it is less a question of representation than of the ‘existential’ function of the assemblage or arrangement.14 This arrangement is more accurately an agencement composed of things in movement (or better, an agencement is a pattern of movement mediated by things). This particular agencement is always relational: it might not produce an invariable and stable signification (think the difference in reception of a potential white tourist in 1970s Tasmania versus that of an indigenous woman or a cultural critic now), but it does produce what Lazzarato calls ‘a model of behaviour which possesses the force of example and the self-evidence of physical presence’.15 The cut-up text or collage replaces the seduction of colour with the black and white customary in the world of printed text. At the same time, the text follows the form of the photograph, the precise contours of its composition, in terms of disegno, a drawing or design both miming and preserving the idea of the image, since it’s only in relation to the image that what I’m doing makes sense. My composition incompletely blocks out (in both senses) the visual composition in of the image, putting it under a kind of erasure rather than completely destroying it. Here the page becomes a field as the eye is pulled around by the varying angles of the lines of text, and as I work at wresting words from their conventional significations and attempt to make them mean differently, poetically, that is to say, metaphorically. The turbulent riot of leaves, with its ‘constant, endless movement’ and its eddies of ‘lawlessness’ and ‘insurrection’, both describes the leaves and, in another scenario, the threat the country once held for the colonizers – concealment for lawless bushrangers and matrix for indigenous people wanting to reclaim

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access to their land. In this way, I wager, (intercultural) history might possibly be written back into (Europeanized) landscape. What I am making is a writing in fragments roughly juxtaposed with each other, escaping from the overarching protective shelter of story, and the arc of narrative as a line pointing (and taking us) somewhere, like ‘home’. If this work belongs to a genre, it is that of the ‘imagetext’, the term W.J.T. Mitchell gives to the ‘composite, synthetic works’ making inseparable combinations of image and text.16 But it could also be considered a kind of ‘metapicture’, the picture that uses words, and whose ‘real purpose is to reflect, not on pictures, but on the way we speak of pictures and the way pictures “speak” to us’, as Mitchell, writing of Magritte’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ puts it17. There is a certain shiftiness in what Mitchell calls the ‘slightly illegitimate’ nature of the ‘cheating metapicture’.18 But it is in this very shiftiness, this moment of hesitation or even undecideability, that the potentiality of the metapicture lies. As Mitchell writes: it isn’t simply that the words contradict the image, and vice versa, but that the very identities of words and images, the sayable and the seeable, begin to shimmer and shift in the composition, as if the image could speak and the words were on display.19 What I am producing here, however, is a very particular kind of metapicture, since in it the space of indeterminacy between image and text is brutally collapsed as text comes actually to supplant and occlude the image, being pasted right over the top of it. But there is a paradox in this, because what happens is that writing becomes the image, that is to say that we are reminded that writing is (also) in the order of the image, not simply a transparent medium to be read through in order to arrive at meaning. Mitchell comments that one function of metapictures is to serve the ‘purposes of escapist leisure, consumptive and sumptuary pleasure, a kind of visual orality in which the eyes “drink” in and savor the scopic field.’20 In suppressing an image of seductive and vivid touristic pleasure (the pleasure of landscape), the black and white of the text that replaces it seems, if not exactly to deny visual pleasure, at least to shift the kind of visual pleasure offered by the image. For the image itself has not been completely disappeared: we are reminded of it in as much as the text still conforms roughly to the composition which is structured by the shape of the road, the position of the car, and the overarching branches of trees that frame the scene. The image still shadows the text, as a kind of underwriting, forming a sort of substrate or memory that constrains without determining what can be produced over it. It refers to figuration even while it resists it. This refusal to forget what lies under the text is even the point of the work, without which it couldn’t exist. The work relies on the fact that metadiscourse can never free itself from its entanglement with discourse so as to stand unambiguously outside it.

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The story here, then, is not one. It’s not exactly the history that Reynolds constructs, but rather a series of interruptions of it, a stuttering account of something that does not produce a narrative but which only gestures towards it, or gives glimpses of the possibility of story at certain moments as the reader alights on particular phrases. It’s an ‘architectural’ style of writing, actively shaping space with its crosscurrents now horizontally across the page, now downwards or at an angle as text blocks out (both obscures and sketches) the composition of the image. In making such a writing, I want to re-orient reading away from linearity and towards a kind of cartography, creating ‘an alternative syntax in “mapping” ’ (as Steve McCaffery writes in relation to one of his own projects21) in which the map is built up palimpseststyle, in a series of layerings, overlaps and especially juxtapositions of blocks of text which come to compose the syntax. This of course has implications for reading. Reading, as Manuel Portela argues, can be thought of as an effect of an embodied interaction with a particular perceptual field.22 Perceptual fields are, of course, always shaped by material modalities whether those of the poster, the codex or those generated by newer electronic forms including e-poetry, with its animated and architectural typographies which can be actively entered into and explored. As Portela writes, [s]urfaces of inscription offer themselves as sites for complex visual searches and perceptual queries. Reading then becomes an engagement with the dynamics of the visual and tactile field created by material forms. But these forms must be actuated by reading, producing an event in which meaning is a probabilistic distribution resulting from moment-to-moment interactions with material codes.23 Reading, then, becomes a performative engagement with surfaces: that is to say, an active, productive, or writerly activity. Johanna Drucker has long pointed out that the virtual space to which reading always gives rise is, ‘like the e-space... created through dynamic relations that arise from the activity that formal structures make possible’.24 These dynamic relations then, she makes clear, ‘provoke probabilistic, not mechanistic’ reading, producing the text or work ‘as an event’.25 These surfaces and the arrangements they effect with text by means of constellations, fragmentations, aggregations, superimpositions, combinations of verbal and pictorial signs all work to undo things with words, to defamiliarize reading, and in some ways to transform our more routine everyday experiences of it. In this, perhaps, we might rediscover something like an animist conception of writing in which, as David Abrams puts it, ‘words do not speak about the world; they speak to the world, and to the expressive presences that, with us, inhabit the world’.26 This way of what I will call ‘writing into images’, or perhaps ‘writing back to images’, however, to the extent that it is part of a collaborative

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project where the work of each of us, is in constant conversation with the work of the others in The Longford Project, is not about haunted places, not about being with spectres in any kind of melancholic (Tasmanian) gothic, ‘manufacturing a haunting’ which is part of the ‘European fetish for “the ghosts of the Aborigines of long past” ’ and which forms part of the ‘self-conscious and vandalising practice of erasing [actual] Aboriginal presence from land’, as Tony Birch makes clear.27 Rather, it is emphatically about a process-oriented and open-ended work of compromised joyfulness, involving inventing ways to be with a chosen form of extended and somewhat queered family in the present. Family, after all, is one of the key ways that ‘history . . . works through people and things to produce a force of knowing that makes itself at home in specific skin’, as Katrina Schlunke reminds us.28 It’s this proximity to skin, a point of tangible affect, which is the contact zone of experimental history – that is, a kind of history which hopes to work as an active point of intervention in or unsettling of the present. In this working sketch, I make use of the montage and the cut to try to produce this kind of reading which is less about extracting meaning from a work than about making it in collaboration with the work. Here, in this work, the montage and the cut enable the composition of a kind of patchwork that aims to piece something together out of remnants, something that might work at least for now, a production of examples without exemplarity, a demonstration without object or object lesson, a kind of showing that provides no evidence for anything and proves nothing. It is presented here not so much as evidence, but, rather, as an investigation of how what counts as evidence is produced.

Notes 1

My thanks to Ella Chmielewska for this resonant formulation, and to all the participants in the transdisciplinary KOSMOS workshop on Mimetische Formen der Kritik: Neue Schreibweisen in der Kulturwissenschaft und in den Cultural Studies/Mimesis and Criticism: New Discursive Styles of Writing in Cultural Theory and Cultural Studies (Humboldt University, Berlin, 25–9 July 2017)), for their generous and generative comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

2

My thanks to Julie Gough for her generous and very helpful comments on this piece.

3

Julie Gough, private communication.

4

Owen Hughes. ‘Autumn magic at “Bowthorpe” on the Pateena road’. Heart of the North (Owen Hughes Photography, Ltd, Launceston: 1988).

5

Henry James, Preface to Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971), ix.

6

Michele Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary. Trans. Colin Gordon. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.)

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7

Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 320–1; Barthes, Roland. Leçon (Paris: Seuil, 1978), 18–19.

8

Jacques Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’. Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1 (1982): 55–81.

9

Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Trans. Joshua David Gordon. (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014.)

10 Lazzarato takes this term from Félix Guattari. 11 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, passim. 12 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. (London and New York: Routledge, 1962), 243–5. 13 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 128. 14 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 203. 15 Lazzarato, Signs and Machines, 128–9. 16 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 89. 17 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 66. 18 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 66. 19 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 68. 20 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 72. 21 Steve McCaffery and bp nichol, ‘Manifesto as Interlude’, Open Letter, 2d. series, no. 9 (Fall 1974): 73–4. 22 Manuel Portela, Scripting Reading Motions (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2013), 25. Here I draw on work done with Maria Angel (see Maria Angel and Anna Gibbs, Exscryptions: Memory, Movement, and the Unfolding of Space in Digital Writing, forthcoming.) 23 Portela, Scripting Reading Motions, 25. 24 Johanna Drucker, ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’, np. 25 Johanna Drucker, ‘From Entity to Event’, Parallax, vol. 15, no. 4 (2009): 7. 26 David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous (New York: Vintage, 1996), 71. 27 Tony Birch, ‘Imperial Nostalgia, Haunting and Ghostbusting’, keynote address to the AAWP conference ‘Riding the Ghost Train’ (Melbourne: Swinburne University, 2015), np. 28 Katrina Schlunke, ‘Captain Cook Chased a Chook’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 14, no. 1 (2008).

Bibliography Abrams, David. The Spell of the Sensuous. New York: Vintage, 1996. Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Epic and the Novel’, The Dialogic Imagination: four essays. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Barthes, Roland. Leçon. Paris: Seuil, 1978.

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Birch, Tony. ‘Imperial Nostalgia, haunting and ghostbusting’. Keynote Address to the AAWP conference ‘Riding the Ghost Train’. Melbourne: Swinburne University, 2015. Derrida, Jacques. ‘The Law of Genre’. Trans. Avital Ronell. Critical Inquiry, vol. 7, no. 1 (1982): 55–81. Drucker, Johanna. ‘The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space’. Lecture presented to the Syracuse University History of the Book Seminar, 25 April 2003. http://www.philobiblon.com/drucker/ Drucker, Johanna. ‘From Entity to Event’. Parallax, vol. 15, no. 4 (2009): 7–17. Guattari, Félix. Chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Trans. Paul Bains and Julian Pefanis. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Hughes, Owen. ‘Autumn magic at “Bowthorpe” on the Pateena road’. Heart of the North. Owen Hughes Photography, Ltd, Launceston: 1988. James, Henry. Preface to Portrait of a Lady. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: capitalism and the production of subjectivity. Trans. Joshua David Gordon. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2014. Le Doeuff, Michele. The Philosophical Imaginary. Trans. Colin Gordon. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. McCaffery, Steve and bp nichol. ‘Manifesto as Interlude’. Open Letter, 2d. series, no. 9 (Fall 1974): 78–9. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge, 1962. Mitchell, W.J.T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Portela, Manuel. Scripting Reading Motions. Cambridge MA : MIT Press, 2013. Reynolds, Henry. A History of Tasmania. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, 5–67. Schlunke, Katrina. ‘Captain Cook Chased a Chook’. Cultural Studies Review vol. 14, no. 1 (2008): 43–54.

CHAPTER FOUR

Construction (and Connection) Katrina Schlunke

This chapter is a kind of critique of what a building site is, and thus of what architecture does. But it’s also a careful description of events and an argument about the way we imagine construction as concrete, real and ‘factual’, when it is also infused with the magic of volatile matter and the possibilities of affective connection. In a world so obviously fictocritical, simultaneously made up of fiction and fact, we need the techniques of fictocriticism to hold actions to all they are accountable to and to forge surprising alliances. This writing began with a flying tree. It came past my window chained to a high crane. Extraordinary. Moving. Strange. It was one part of an ongoing process of construction that was occurring next door, where an old and mostly empty (some squatters still came and went) hospital site was being turned into one very large care complex for the elderly. When a tree flies through the air, is fiction already tied to criticism? To say ‘trees fly’ suggests a fiction, but to say ‘tree removed by crane’ is entirely sensible and expected. And yet ‘removal’ hides the magical reality of ‘flying’, as ‘flying’ hides the stark tragedy of tree death. Representation entwines these strange facts and fictional truths as words on this page but can’t quite account for the sense of apprehension, the affective shudder that exists alongside the event of this suspended tree. I use description to stay with the scene of construction within which I and my fellow machine and organic actors are entangled. But this is not description where the human subject creates and comments upon a complete and indifferent object. This kind of description is not so much an act of critique but something like a process of attunement. A process whereby the possibilities posed by these multiple actors (including myself) come into view. In this I am attempting to mimic Kathleen Stewart’s method. She 37

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describes her work as a writer as one where ‘. . .she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs, and asserts not a flat and finished truth but some possibilities (and threats) that have come into view in the effort to become attuned to what a particular scene might offer.’1 Given the ordinariness of my focus – a building site, my own apartment, and life lived with both – I am inspired by Stewart’s methods, that she describes as ‘experiments that write from the intensities in things, asking what potential modes of knowing, relating or attending to things are already being enacted and imagined in ordinary ways of living’.2 To become attuned is to make a place for an embodied architecture that carries corporeal effects beyond the imaginative hand that may have designed the proposition that lives on within the construction site. This kind of architecture assumes it is one part of the iterative design and construction, design and construction process where in this instance the construction is also personal, producing distinct effects on and within me while producing other multifaceted connections between site entities including air and tree.

The flying tree One flying tree has to stand in for the many trees that were simply sawn down, bulldozed and chipped. This one tree was cut at its base and pulled slowly out of its place high into the air by a crane that seemed so big to us then but was nothing compared to the phalanxes of machinery that would come to work this building site. The tree passed my window, shivered against the backdrop of skyscrapers and open sky and bled down past remaining buildings to the ground. On the ground it had no last breath. It was simply dragged into the chipper that screamed where the tree could not and it became so many wood chips. So much useful stuff. We are all familiar with the destruction of construction. So familiar, in fact, that we barely notice it when we pass its progress at ground level except to note the scaffolding we walk beneath or the momentary loss of a continuous pathway. The safety fences that surround the site secrete the process away but small faux windows are now often cut into those surrounds so that passersby can catch a glimpse of work-in-progress. And that is what is being waited for – measured progress. How deep the hole, then how dense the piles then how fast the framing, how high the storeys and what time to completion? But at other times these processes are not glimpsed but forced upon us. Sometimes construction pours itself into our bodies in noise and dust and constant attack upon the familiar. This happens when construction happens just outside the windows of your home. While being at home, the raw, noisy beginnings of other homes, for other people come to stay – right next door. The direction of any construction project is toward ‘completion’. Completion is itself the final performance of building. Completion with its

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FIGURE 4.1 Flying tree. Photo credit: Katrina Schlunke, 2015. openings, declarations, visitations by dignitaries sometimes, polished floors perhaps, but decorated somehow, always, for on completion the building, this kind of complex building, is – ultimately – lived in. The same kind of processes created most of our own homes, our own ordinary places. That they too may have begun with a flying tree reminds us perhaps of what we choose to forget in order to be ‘at home’. As Alphonso Lingis writes: ‘When we look at the butterflies, trees, and mountains in their independence of and indifference to us, we see them as they are.’3 When we see them chained and flying, we don’t. Perhaps we see some final Heideggerian grotesquerie where the whole tree has given itself over to supporting our manipulations to make a cleared site for further building. That sawing, chaining and flying are needed might also suggest the resistance of this particular thing to becoming ‘appropriate’ for humans. Heidegger’s notion is that the being of things, tools in particular, is due to their relationships with humans. How the hammer fits into our hand, how

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our hand joins with the hammer and hammers.4 How powerful we humans are and how silent the effective hammer. A chained and flying tree, moved by the crane, controlled by the crane driver, is and isn’t that. That trees are available in their ‘treeness’ to be chained and flown may suggest a momentary appropriateness but that it ends in their own destruction does not. That trees should not fly has a powerful human history. In Dante’s Inferno, suicides were planted as trees, immobilized by their life denying, self pitying surrender to despair – the opposite of flying angels. In this circle dwell the souls of humans who are characterized by negative identity, by a negative metamorphosis that transformed them from animal to vegetable. Having willfully sundered the body-soul nexus, they are now what they should not be. In appearance they are now plants. But— as we shall learn—in substance they are still human. The reality, a terrible reality for these souls, is that selfhood cannot be undone.5 Dante’s punishing, terrible tree fixity is also the soul of ‘old growth’ forests and the romance of ancient elms and oaks. The assumption of a tree’s vertical stability flows into its collective noun; a ‘stand’ of trees. Trees and their association with fixity, roots and still, fruit laden, limbs flow through thinking from the Bible to Guattari. When Macbeth is warned that he will never be defeated until the forest of Birnam Wood marches, we share his belief that; That will never be. Who can impress the forest, bid the tree Unfix his earthbound root?6 But trees can now be moved. Too many are. And yet. And yet. A flying tree.

As one Between the architect’s proposition and the built fact lies the space of construction which is also destruction. This is a liminal space where the horror and joy of black and white magic abide. Where the direct encounter between the rhetoric of control, order, budgets and public relations battles the eruptions of economy, water, trees, dust, dirt, sub-contractors, neighbours and so-called consultation. Right from the start, when we entered the ordered room and were offered tea and sandwiches, we recognized it would be difficult to dint the quiet human machinery of PR. As the early stages of the building began, there were a series of ‘community consultations’ and this was the first. These were held after all the legal appeals against the size of the project, its treeless design and the destruction of the unique ecology that had grown through

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the long abandoned Scottish Hospital site, had been dismissed. So at the moment of taking their tea and sandwiches we, ‘the community’ were already face to face with the realities of living next to a building site. How much would we actually be able to see outside our windows when the building was done, where before we gazed across grass and trees? What were the rules around the terrible, terrible noise when before there were only birds and possums? What would ‘they’ do to ‘help’ us? What were the rules of engagement? We, the ‘community’, were now being managed. Perhaps that’s why we were given tea and sandwiches, given that court was no longer a possibility. Those building the expensive complex of five-storey accommodation for the aging – Brookefield Multiplex – wanted to be good neighbours. They had timelines and apologies for noise and promises to abide by the rules. The evidence from one of the other residents in our building, from her mobile phone video, that they had been starting before 7 am received a complete apology. No complaint cracked their seamless armour. But amid the historical context of multiple investigations by government into child abuse, the querying by one resident of whether the workers huts should go entirely along the playground fence that bordered the site caused a momentary split, the teeniest of fractures. The female PR person caught the pinprick of moral panic while the work site manager blankly restated that the workers must have access to windows in their huts. For a second, they were not as one. But that was the only hint of distrait between the well-oiled, seamless, wholly sensible, wholly caring team. This faint evocation of abuse. This faint connection between the historic hurt enacted in Christian institutions and them. This connection of incommensurate violence. They did not say trees would fly.

The skin of trees The thing is, the tree looked so small. It looked like a limb torn. But it felt like some white corpse had passed by. I forgot the green leaves seconds later, remembered only the bone, the sinew. The hanging. And in that second the tree, the corpse, medieval torture and the punishment of convicts and pirates, also hung in the air. Linear time was disturbed, elongated and overcome. In the face of this tree, the mechanistic time of construction did not endure and the emerging hole in the built environment was also a hole to and from other times. To think of construction as a very ancient order of torture might remind us of all of the prison, contract, indentured and enslaved labour, that have been the brute force of building. But the need for that mass of labour has now been replaced with machines that give some humans this power to move forests, to fly trees. But still the hanging. The unavoidable, lingering sight of death as spectacle. And then as if the building-to-be has caught a glimpse of its past, as if architecture has suddenly seen a ghost – it has gone. Minced into dust

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and garden cover. But as we all know, the disappearance from sight does not mean the disappearance of death. And death is a problem for the building of homes in Australia for the aging and otherwise. Building most usually happens as if the Indigenous life of the land has been ‘extinguished’, to use the legal term that misinformed judges like to use. And yet sovereignty was never surrendered and the vitality of a deeply diverse Indigenous life endures.7 The tree lingering on its chain calls up the colonial shaping of the land compared to its creation as lived country for 60,000 years, which makes this act of building so short and savage. The tree was pulled from what was once the garden of a hospital. A hospital built with money bequeathed to the people of Sydney so that even the poor would have access to care. The tree was taken from the land that runs down to Rushcutters Bay where the first convicts were killed by Eora people following the murder of an Eora man near Balmain. The first gallows used to execute convicts in Australia was a gum tree on a hill which is now a street corner of Sydney where the NSW Archives office is situated. And across Australia, trees are sometimes used to dangle already dead cats and dingoes. Deborah Bird-Rose uses the sight of those dead to make prayers for the dingoes she finds and to leave stones, a round one on top of two flat ones.8 But what to do here for one tree, strung up, passing by? I photograph, I video. When a friend sees the short footage on my phone she says: ‘You should put that on YouTube.’ But isn’t this tree related to me? Or at least a neighbour? Someone, something close enough to demand the ritual of writing, of being remembered, and of being represented if only to recall that what it is and did is beyond words. Instead it lingers, as construction does, between worlds. The tree that flew.

Mothers There is something wrong with the language of construction. ‘Diggers’ and ‘buckets’ suggest things that we pretended at the beach as kids. Or those endless games as caring adults with small boys naming, explaining and watching their collection of diggers do not very much. But these buckets are huge and these diggers are vast. Not mining giant massive, but big. And the buckets are not so much buckets as claws. Buckets suggest containers, something that matter of all kinds is gathered into and shared – water, chook scraps, soaking washing or sand for playful castles. But claws are other kinds of things. One day I watch as one of these diggers pulls metal from the innards of the first building being demolished. Pulling shreds from what used to be the operating theatres. It keeps reaching in and tearing out in long screeching strands the light steel framing and the aluminium struts that held who knows what. It is relentless. Like a crow in gizzards. Or perhaps because it

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is reaching into the ruin of the building itself, so reaching up and pulling it out, it is more like the robbing of a nest then the devouring of carrion. But the shredding that happens, because this is a claw not a beak, keeps on suggesting entrails – pulled viscera. And diggers don’t just dig but throw what they pull and scrape into huge metal containers on the backs of trucks. The noise can’t be blocked out. It is always eruptive, unpredictable. It keeps on jarring and then echoes across the whole body in waves of irritation. But one day, amid the screeching of that metal dragged onto other metal, I am making tea and see the almost sinuous arm of the digger with its stalled prehensility, drop its noisy load, pause, and come down to pat the pile of metal into place. It truly ‘pats’. I pause. It pats again. A piece of the metal hangs over the edge of the truck and it pulls it slowly back into the fold. It has my whole attention. Then it leans back and raises the back of its bucket so that it can rub the smooth side, along the topsy heap of metal until the pieces are soothed into place. It gently pecks the untidy corners into nursery-style order. I feel its gentleness. Then it seems to look and presses down once more at the far end so that all is even. It pauses again and then begins to turn away just as the driver of the truck switches the button and the load cover is pulled along its cannopied ridges, tucking away the metal load as if to sleep. And with that the digger, this mechanical hypnos, this maternal force, turns and returns to its pulling and dragging evisceration of another building. You see how these machines, these materializing things, revolt and seduce? Having now practised all the possible prophylactics against this construction – double glazing, noise-cancelling headphones, scholarly distraction, I am nonetheless sucked outward by the machines display to watch. I live with its noise and wait for its next and its next move, me now some sort of voyeur of this materializing intimacy between digger, truck, metal. Jane Bennett argues in Vibrant Matter for the need for a ‘touch of anthropocentrism’.9 The risk of recentring the human that such description could produce is a risk worth taking, as Peter Gratton suggests, for ‘without this risk of exporting what was previously considered human to a supposedly mechanized nature, we can never pull off descriptions that render animals and things not merely as “behaving” but as “acting” ’.10 But Bennett is careful in her later glossing of this idea to suggest some problems with anthropomorphizing including that such writing can ‘forget that the human body is itself a composite of many different it-bodies, including bacteria, viruses, metals, etc. and that when we recognize a resemblance between a human form and a nonhuman one, sometimes the connecting link is a shared inorganicism.’11 This notion of a shared ‘inorganicism’ seems most useful for my effort here to describe an event that is not a moment of animal at oneness or morethan-human becoming featuring orchids or ants but the restless, mechanized, destruction that is construction.

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That is, in my description of these inter-material encounters as evoking orders of mothering, of calling out connections of bodies we recognize as alive, bloody and sleeping, we must in that same effort of textual connection, of strategic representation, recognize the inorganic creation of their bodies and mine. That what I can hear is an association between my ears, the thin glass and brick of the 1960s construction I live within and its council housing heritage. Its modernist Seidler12-designed shape is so good for not hearing the neighbours but so bloody awful for capturing precisely in its H-design the howls of the ever-emerging building site. And there is in the constancy of the mother machine the recognition of the ceaselessness of writing that is made to appear on screen, erase, repeat, redo. The construction of writing and its endless destruction. And there is the ignored human inside the driver’s bubble of the machine I have accused of mothering in an effort to materialize our shared relations. That man with his hand on the stick neatly embodying the accusations of wanker that writers simply assume is said of us. But that man in his cabin will also be made like I am through the sensory assemblage created by the material that covers his seat and is met by his arse through the cotton cloth of his pants, the shape of the window and the possible extras of refrigerator, bottle holder and radio. We are all inside, we are all interconnected with machines. Yet my office, his cabin, the architect’s studio are usually built for quiet: order as built rituals for managing the abject. It is always outside my office, his cabin, their studio that there is the unstoppable dust, the rising mud, the mess of volatile matter and inside the digger-driver the mess of viscera, feeling, sweat and staining. Repeat for writer. And architect. So is writing architecture where you write to reveal these realities of being made up with stuff? And does that stuff in turn create the sense of both internal and external? Of being embodied and being machinic? And if we recognize that both independent writer and architect are inventions of multiple flows between things and the exertions of agencies that are morethan-human – are both buildings and propositions, writing and invented context, better imagined as materializing magic, neither natural or invented but something in-between? Flying trees and mothering machines are the writerly effects of what I call construction but they are also magical omens and embodied entities that suggest a different kind of building where matter, matters. And in caring about the matter of construction, the building site becomes something that calls us to other ways of understanding our everyday architecture. When we assume that the built environment is ordinary and so unfeelable, we silence not just the violence of the colonial past that created the original conditions of settlement and the local and global impacts of construction but the possibility of a different future. In writing the vibrancy, magic making and intimate gestures of the construction site, ‘the “distance” of the theorist/ critic collides with the “interiority” of the author’ which is what Nettlebeck suggests happens in fictocritical writing.13 In writing that collision across the

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page, description becomes a means of making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. As Muecke suggests: ‘Fictocritical language challenges any firm distinction between description and fictionalisation and it introduces a queer defamiliarisation into the heart of the most familiar experiences.’14 This writerly work of queering our familiar designed and built world through the invitation of and testament to a flying tree keeps us on our critical toes as we imagine our architectured world otherwise. A world where construction is also destruction but always connection.

Notes 1

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 5.

2

‘Kathleen Stewart’, The Heyman Centre, accessed 18 Oct 2019, http:// heymancenter.org/people/kathleen-stewart/

3

Alphonso Lingis Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000), 3.

4

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, [1962] 2001), 99.

5

Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Inferno 13: Our Bodies, Our Selves’, Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante (New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018). https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/ inferno-13/

6

Lucius Adelno Sherman. Shakespeare’s tragedy of Macbeth: edited with an introduction, notes, and analytic questions. (New York: H. Holt & co, 1899), 58.

7

There are many excellent accounts of the legal and cultural aspects of continuing Indigenous sovereignty in Australia. These include Murray Goot and Tim Rowse, Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo (Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1994) and Galarrwuy Yunupingu (ed.), Our Land Is Our Life: Land Rights – Past, Present and Future (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1997).

8

Deborah Bird-Rose, ‘Slowly: Writing into the Anthropocene’, TEXT Special Issue, no. 20 (October 2013): 10.

9

Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 99.

10 Peter Gratton, ‘Interview with Jane Bennett’, Philosophy in a Time of Error: Interview with Jane Bennett. Last modified 22 April 2010. Accessed 18 Oct 2019. https://philosophyinatimeoferror.com/2010/04/22/vibrant-matters-aninterview-with-jane-bennett/ 11 Ibid. 12 Harry Seidler was a well-known Australian modernist architect. See the following profile for an overview of his work: https://www.indesignlive.com/ the-peeps/indesign-luminary-harry-seidler 13 Amanda Nettlebeck, The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism (Perth: University of Western Australia Press,1998), 12.

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14 Stephen Muecke, ‘Momentum’, in Cultural Theory in Everyday Practice, ed. Nicole Anderson and Katrina Schlunke (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009), 293.

Bibliography Barolini, Teodolinda. ‘Inferno 13: Our Bodies, Our Selves’. Commento Baroliniano, Digital Dante. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2018. https:// digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/inferno/inferno-13/ Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010. Bird-Rose, Deborah. ‘Slowly – Writing into the Anthropocene’. TEXT Special Issue, no.20 (October 2013): 1–14. Goot, Murray and Tim Rowse. Make a Better Offer: The Politics of Mabo. Leichhardt: Pluto Press, 1994. Gratton, Peter. Philosophy in a Time of Error – Interview with Jane Bennett. https://philosophyinatimeoferror.com/2010/04/22/vibrant-matters-an-interviewwith-jane-bennett. Last modified 22 April 2010. Heideigger, Martin. Being and Time. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, [1962] 2001. Lingis, Alphonso. Dangerous Emotions. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Muecke, Stephen. ‘Momentum’. In Cultural Theory in Everyday Practice, edited by Nicole Anderson and Katrina Schlunke. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009. Nettlebeck, Amanda. The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1998. Shakespeare, W. and Lucius Adelno Sherman,. Shakespeare’s tragedy of Macbeth: edited with an introduction, notes, and analytic questions. New York: H. Holt & Co., 1899. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2007.

CHAPTER FIVE

Incompossible Constructions of an Island Paradise Hélène Frichot

Concurrent with a fleeting journey up the eastern seaboard of Queensland, Australia, toward the holiday destination of Fraser Island – known by the indigenous Butchulla peoples as K’Gari or Paradise or ‘a beautiful place’ – I venture a ficto-critical composition to address the ecosophical ramifications of a delicate latticework of mentalities, socialities and environmentalities. It is a mosaic approach composed of conceptual and place-based vignettes and seething processes of becoming-with-landscape affects. The location of arrival and departure will be the Kingfisher Resort on Fraser Island, a destination that demands the acknowledgement of its earlier indigenous name, K’Gari. Concepts including environmentality, the ambivalent role of social fiction, and the concept-method of the factish will be addressed. Where environmentality is a term that designates how modes of neoliberal governance exert control by way of a purported concern with ecological sustainability, social fiction operates upon a collectively situated imaginary producing either cohesive or divisive effects depending on how it plays out and what relations and encounters it procures, and the factish is an epistemological object and practice that is a composite of fact and fiction. Practices of naming and renaming, unreliable storytelling, and conflicting points of view together compose the construction of incompossible universes of value that refuse to be tamed according to a straightforward storyline. For a European and colonizing imaginary, the complex and contradictory social fiction that informs the contemporary occupation of Fraser Island emerged with the remarkable event of a shipwreck and the survival of an English woman called Eliza Fraser, who, once ‘rescued’, went on to tell vivid yet inconsistent stories of her ordeal. So compelling were her tales of 47

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encounter with the Butchulla peoples on K’Gari that they have been depicted in a series of canvases by the well-known Australian artist Sidney Nolan, and written into a novel by his friend the Nobel laureate Patrick White.1 Eliza Fraser has since been vilified and vindicated in turn, and made the subject of art historical, post-colonial and feminist analyses. These multifarious renditions of her story produce incompossible constructions that interlace processes of subjectification, social status and place, all in evidence on Fraser Island today. The incompossible, Gilles Deleuze explains in his books on cinema, is an effect produced by different narrations enunciated by different subjectivities, where ‘each forms a combination that is possible and plausible in itself’.2 Yet when all narratives come together, threatening instability, even a collapse of sense, it is the function of the incompossible to maintain the resulting contradictions, elisions and substitutions. The ‘island paradise’ of ‘Fraser Island’ has become a curated holiday resort that mimics a spatial logic of settlement, with its colonizing, territorializing impetus, including a village square and protective fences and gateways to keep more-than-human others at bay. Incompossible constructions, collapsing historical and analytical registers, spatially perform a telling tale of an island paradise. It will not be possible to get the story straight. We have run aground! The Stirling Castle brig, with its two square rigged masts, hits a sandy reef off the coast of Great Sandy Island, which will later be renamed Fraser Island, and in the future may well be returned to its indigenous name, K’Gari. Paradise, a beautiful place. Reef and island will in time deliver up the name of a singular passenger for public consumption: Eliza Fraser. Following much the same course, and in similar circumstances, but according to another narrative trajectory, the Bristol Maid hits a reef. Mrs Fraser, aboard the Stirling Castle, travels with three trunks, while Mrs Roxburgh, a passenger with her husband on the Bristol Maid, leaves behind her one and only trunk when they abandon ship. In this trunk lies abandoned the diary that her mother-in-law has recommended she keep toward her personal edification. Following yet another report of a shipwreck (they multiply, you see), two women, ‘the latter was coming out to be married [to] a Mr Fraser [sic]’3 were aboard a vessel, the Britannica, that would be wrecked before arriving at Sydney. The same ship or three different ships? The same woman, or a woman dispersed across a multitude of positions and performances? She suffers a presentiment and warns the captain, to no avail. They are wrecked and she is the only survivor. She is a subject between social classes, on her way from girlhood to womanhood, from one story to the next. She is the object passed in a narrative game of Blind Woman’s Bluff, hither and thither. She is multiple, and her multiplicity renders her unreliable. In her fragmentary archive of ordinary affects, Kathleen Stewart speaks of a ‘three-tiered parallelism between analytic subject, concept and world’.4 She cannot be extricated from the place that has given her the story that makes her. Processes of subjectivation, collective – if contradictory – acts of

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concept construction, and the occupation of environment-worlds are deeply interlaced. She carries nothing but the clothes on her back and something of a secret life growing within. And a delicate latticework pertains between expressions of subjectivities, socialities and environmentalities. It is a threetiered ecological system in which Mrs Fraser, Mrs Roxburgh, two women, one woman, three boats, the writer and she, together with a teeming cacophony of many other voices, are all deeply involved: ‘a writing moving not simply from position to position, but between positions. . .a writing [architecture] refusing and incapable of an “ordered account.” ’5 We’ll go awriting, we will! 25 May 1836 marks the event of the shipwreck; 28 July 2016 marks at least one moment of consolidated writing toward the current composition. It is important to keep in mind the way in which temporal registers tend to collapse. I write at the same moment that you read of the shipwreck on an isolated reef, and the survival of a sole woman whose already precarious subjective identity is about to come undone. Her shoes, her clothes, her very identity will be stripped away, and in at least one account her head will be shaved and smeared with charcoal and beeswax. She will survive her ordeal, however; she will live to tell the tale. Mrs Fraser will remarry, and rumours will surface that her new husband, some kind of storytelling entrepreneur, will help her to rewrite the tale. Wikipedia explains that ‘Eliza Fraser later returned to England where her services as a storyteller proved to be very much in demand’,6 but Yolanda Drummond explains that despite accounts of Eliza Fraser ending up in a fairground booth where customers paid to hear her tale, or else becoming a storyteller who has born witness to distant lands telling her colonial stories in Joseph Paxton’s famed Crystal Palace, no substantial proof has been discovered to confirm these accounts. A persistent after-image of Mrs Fraser in a makeshift carnival tent proves hard to shake. As does the image of her on all fours, reduced to something more or less than human as she gropes through the undergrowth. On a mild day in June 2016 the guide on the Beauty Spots Tour, which has been added to the Kingfisher resort package in advance so as to secure a discount, explains that the island is named after the ill-fated captain of the ship, James Fraser. Surely he is mistaken? The island is named after Eliza Fraser; the island is named K’Gari; the name means Paradise; no, the name means ‘a beautiful place’. The indigenous name for the island is K’Gari, which Kay Schaffer explains it is pronounced ‘Gurree’. It is also known as Thorrgine by the Butchella or the Badjala peoples. It was once an island thriving with life, densely populated, ‘possibly numbering 2000 at the time of the shipwreck of the Stirling Castle’.7 A sandy island, 122 km long, and varying in width from 5 to 25 kilometres. These were ‘lands of the Butchella or Badjala, the Gabi-Gabi, and Undambi peoples of the great Sandy Region’.8 The brig ran ashore at Eliza Reef (how can this be so, given that she is yet to be imagined?); the brig ran ashore at Swaines reef; the brig ran ashore at

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an unnamed reef. Captain Fraser is described as either noble or incompetent, depending on who you read, and when the account is written. He is ‘A pompous fat old bore of about fifty’9 or else he is ‘urbane in his manners, and in altitude and features, what is deemed a handsome man’.10 In most accounts, even where Patrick White fictionalizes this character as the gentile and frail figure of Mrs Roxburgh’s older husband, he is a man who is ailing. Whether it is the Stirling Castle, or the Bristol Maid, or even the Britannica, the vessel comes aground. The captain is unwell and unable to direct the best course of action. ‘His wife, a strong personality, was very much to the fore of organising this group, but tentative barter with ever-growing bands of curious Aborigines eventually led to their capture and subjection.’11 Mr Roxburgh is frail, and it is his wife who expresses a vital force of life in his stead. Mrs Fraser is ‘a woman, a doting affectionate wife, one, who being influenced by conjugal fidelity, and anxiety for the health and welfare of her husband, has left her country, her children and friends, to console him in the hour of sickness and exhaustion.12 In sharp contrast, Seaman Harry Youlden describes her as ‘a most profane, artful wicked woman’13 while the chronicler John Curtis finally admits that it is not possible to form an ‘adequate idea’ for the sensations of these women.14 Realizing that the Stirling Castle cannot be saved, they take to two long boats; realizing that the Bristol Maid is wrecked, they take to one long boat and another smaller boat. The Britannia, at this juncture, is simply lost. All are open boats, exposed to the elements. Mrs Fraser gives birth to a child. Mrs Roxburgh loses the child that we suspect belongs to her brother-in-law, whom the Roxburghs have latterly visited on Van Diemen’s Land. The child is still-born or the child drowns on its way into the world, because, at least according to one account, Mrs Fraser stands knee-deep in water, which the newborn swallows as it makes its way from one fluid medium into another. The child is wrapped in a sack, or someone’s coat, or some other piece of fabric ready to hand, and thrown overboard. Perfunctory. Jostling alongside each other, the accounts – which range from immediately after the event of the shipwreck following the improbable survival of Mrs Fraser, to present-day controversies about the renaming of ‘Fraser Island’ – merge fact and fiction, hearsay and labyrinthine sources that turn out to be dead ends. The story-lines splinter into incompossible universes of value. The stories shimmer, mirage-like, as parched throats seek out water. Some cultural theorists aim to set the story straight, but their own research and carefully constructed arguments will simply be added as another layer to the incompossible constructions of an island paradise. None of the accounts, whether from historical chroniclers such as John Curtis, who writes just two years after the incident in his Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, with its extended sensationalist subtitle . . . containing a faithful narrative of the dreadful sufferings of the crew and the cruel murder of Captain Fraser by the savages: also, the horrible barbarity of the cannibals inflicted upon the captain’s widow;15 or Patrick White’s powerful novel, A Fringe of Leaves; or

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Sidney Nolan’s series of canvases painted in three stages, 1947 to 1948; 1955 to 1956; 1962 to 1964, partly as revenge in the aftermath of a thwarted love affair with Sunday Reed;16 or the varied accounts of postcolonial and feminist theorists, including Kay Schaffer’s In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories,17 or the bodice-ripping movie starring Susannah York, or the theatre play where Eliza sings her story from a small booth; or the television mini-series that you seem to remember from your own childhood . . . None of these accounts can be entirely discounted, as many enter and mingle in a social imaginary embedded in place, on the island paradise, that ‘beautiful place’, stories now muddled up with honeymooners, families and crews of young people on holiday. All contribute to a curious mosaic that begins to shift like a kaleidoscope once turned upon itself across this present-day heterotopic holiday resort. Breakfast was not included in the room booking, but was to be added to the bill. The Beauty Spots Tour should be booked well in advance. Be wary of venturing beyond the fences that contain the resorts on this island paradise, dingoes abound. The dingo is an indigenous Australian dog-like creature that in 1980 sensationally caught Australian and international media attention in the aftermath of Lindy Chamberlain’s desperate cry at the camp site of Uluru (then commonly referred to as Ayers Rock) that a dingo had got her baby. Schaffer, who discusses how Eliza Fraser enters history primarily through ‘masculine constructions and categories of femininity’18 makes a point of drawing a line of association between Mrs Fraser and the much-maligned Lindy Chamberlain, whose primary fault was her perceived lack of affect. Thirty-two days at sea before they set ashore at Orchid Beach, as documented in a letter from Lieutenant Otter of the Royal Navy penned in 1836.19 Not far from where the shallow waters of Eli Creek meet the sea. Where we go wading, sipping in handfuls the soft fresh waters that are disgorged from a deep underground reservoir at 4.2 million litres a year, flowing over an improbably pale and fine, sandy creek bed. A regular stop on the Beauty Spots Tour. Amidst detailed descriptions of the mechanical genius of the four-wheel drive bus we are travelling upon, cresting, falling, and floating along sandy island tracks, the friendly tour guide explains that the Butchulla peoples succeeded in claiming native title of Fraser Island in 2014. Travelling in the early 1990s on a similar tour, Schaffer explains that the tour guide described no message of indigenous reconciliation at that juncture.20 ‘Who speaks for whom and by what authority?’ asks Kay Schaffer in 1989 as she begins to speculate on a post-feminist situation, and alludes to the near exhaustion of Eliza’s story.21 In the Hervey Bay Chronicle, I am told, the indigenous elder Aunty Marie Wilkinson aims to set the story straight. She has been writing letters to the Chronicle complaining that Eliza Fraser and her representatives have grossly misrepresented the kindnesses shown by Aunty’s Butchulla forebears, who

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should be thanked for helping Eliza to survive her ordeal. Or so the tour guide explains in conversation when we stop to have a look at Central Station on Fraser island, the former logging camp where Sidney Nolan once buddied up with the labourers. When I go looking it is not the Hervey Bay Chronicle, but the Fraser Coast Chronicle, and it is not Aunty Marie, but Aunty Frances Gala who explains that Mr Fraser was not speared through the neck for two simple reasons: 1. It has not come down through the oral story lines; 2. There is no dance about the event. Fraser Island should be renamed K’Gari, or Paradise, or ‘beautiful place’, but they all agree it will not happen overnight. There are celebrations and dancing on the sandy banks of the island when native title is handed over.22 Eventually, following her ordeal, Eliza will be saved by John Graham; she will be saved by David Bracewell; she will be saved by the convict Jack Chance, who was sent to the colonies for murdering his lover Mab in a fit of jealous rage. Chance kept songbirds in a small hut along the River Thames. Escaping from the midst of a corroboree, the convict and the shipwrecked woman become lovers briefly. Yet another secret to be kept and exchanged: Whose story is she carrying anyway? Returning from Fraser Island, from K’Gari, from paradise, under pelting sheets of rain – it was near impossible to make headway through the tempest – we finally arrived at my friend’s old Queenslander house, sitting primly above the wet ground on its stilts. We turned on the television for the news. Images, horrifying images. Tales of brutality inflicted upon indigenous children in detention. The presenter invites the viewer into a windowless cell. She has a serious expression on her face. Words are supposed to fail her, and affect is instead meant to adequately circulate. There is no running water except for that to be found in the toilet bowl. The isolation cells and their mean, concrete floored exercise room have been cleaned up since the 2014 tear gas event. Two forms of brutality are witnessed. Visual ‘proof’ of the infliction of physical harm on incarcerated children rendered through CCTV footage, and then the more insidious violence conveyed through the very circulation of the televised image and its heedless repetition. The investigative news program repeats some of the most shockingly violent scenes over again, in case the viewer has missed the point. Reference is made to indigenous Australians only twice, and only by one of the lawyers who is being interviewed. Otherwise the race politics is strategically back-grounded in implicit expectation of print media commentary and public debate. As for the television audience, the viewing public, their collective response is aroused less through reasoned argumentation, than by way of a direct assault on their nervous systems. The power of affective shock is mainlined. Consensus is elicited through what Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd call an ‘appeal to the passions’.23 There is collective moral outrage, but it is unable to direct itself toward any end, toward any substantial change. In their work on Jewish lens-grinder and philosopher Baruch Spinoza, also known as Benedict de Spinoza, which means ‘blessed’, Gatens and

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Lloyd discuss the role of fiction in the construction of social bonds, and as the means for a ‘common notion’ or what could be called a collective concept, to be constructed and shared, as well as disagreed upon. The role of useful fictions or parables operate by way of the imagination to convey useful knowledge about how to ethically cope in a world, they explain in Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. The power of fiction is not good or bad in itself, but depends on the context in which it plays out, what affects it arouses and what effects it produces. As Schaffer demonstrates, it can lead to the foundational myths of nationalism, but if only we can shift our collective reasoning, perhaps it can lead to a greater understanding, dialogue and even processes of decolonization.24 There are debilitating falsehoods as much as there are liberatory fictions that enable human relations and sociabilities to flourish.25 ‘Fictitious or feigned ideas are mixed methods of knowing’, they explain. ‘Fictions involve untruths that are knowingly entertained rather than mistaken for inadequate ideas.’26 Rereading Spinoza, they argue that feigning and the construction of fictions, while indicating a limitation of our knowledge, can also be seen as a positive response to what we do not know, and yet, fiction and the act of feigning are ambivalent, and can manufacture either pernicious or more affirmative, even joyful ends. Joys, sadnesses and the subject who comes to emerge following the eruption of such affects: Stewart explains a small narrative conceit that she has deployed in her quasi-ethnographic fragments, her vignette-scraps of other lives and ordinary affects: ‘I call myself “she” to mark the difference between this writerly identity and the kind of subject that arises as a daydream of simple presence. “She” is not so much a subject position or an agent in hot pursuit of something definitive as a point of contact; instead, she gazes, imagines, senses, takes on, performs . . .’27 Importantly, Stewart asserts that she purveys no ‘flat and finished truths,’ but she is concerned, she is affected, and she affects. As ficto-critical ethnographer Michael Taussig argues, we must make our practices ‘adequate to a situation’28 and as Bruno Latour has insisted, ‘There are no facts separable from their fabrication’,29 but he has also been careful to warn that this is not to discredit the role of either. Less than the perennial question of fact or fiction, there is extended the ethical challenge of how fact and fiction can be made to work in coconstructive collaboration. In an attempt to resolve the issue or else to hold it in delicious disequilibrium Latour invents a concept, the factish. Isabelle Stengers, the philosopher of science, takes the concept up in her two-volume work on Cosmopolitics. The concept travels. Beings created by physics (or insert your discipline here) may nonetheless be referred to as real, dated and transhistoric, those beings we fabricate, likewise fabricate the situations we study.30 The factish operates as a creative proposition.31 We construct our concepts, much as our concepts construct us. She (let’s say we are hearing from the writer herself just now) has long been fascinated by Michel Foucault’s claim that all of his work can be read

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as a fiction, but she also wonders whether he utters such statements as an elusive smokescreen. His enunciations flip and fold back and begin to fabricate him. Imagine, reflecting back on a history of one’s laborious research and claiming that: As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me a very important one; I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or ‘manufactures’ something that does not as yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.32 An apt definition of the factish. What happens when the fictions and facts, the factishes we construct and circulate, via idle chit-chat and gossip, via conventional and Web 2.0 media channels, via the brandscapes we daily inhabit, also via the theory we consume, taking in messages obliquely, begin to produce the cognitive architectures of everyday life? What we arrive at, I propose, is something that can be called ‘environmentalities’, or ‘environ-mentalities’. Here, strategically, a further hyphen can be deployed to create either a gulf or a conjunction between ‘environ’ and ‘mentalities’, at once compounding the ecological registers of subjectivities, socialities and environmentalities, further bringing together Stewart’s three-tiered system of analytic subject, concept and world.33 Environmentalities: I’ve been told it is a concept to be found in a footnote of Foucault’s lectures on the birth of biopolitics. Only when I go looking, the footnote is not to be rediscovered. Instead, I find that Foucault discusses ‘new techniques of environmental technology’,34 a shift whereby processes of subjectification are less targeted at the level of the sovereign individual (who in any case is a fiction that always already emerges after the fact of a collective subject or given population), instead the subject is procured in process because of ‘modifications in the variables of the environment,’35 accepting at the same time that human subjects likewise alter environments, something of a reciprocal relation is allowed. Arun Agrawal claims ownership of the concept where he explains that he has composed ‘environmentality’ out of Foucault’s well-known concept ‘governmentality’. Observing our contemporary drift toward environmental concerns, Agrawal claims, ‘environmental subjects come to think and act in new ways in relation to the environment’.36 In the early 2000s, they built a dingo fence around the resort settlements on Fraser Island. A story is told on the Beauty Spot Tour of a young boy who was bitten. It emerges later that the boy had been mercilessly harassing the dog. At Kingfisher Resort, there is a village square. A conglomeration of

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bungalows and nested multi-story villas cluster here and there, some seeming to become indiscernible from the rainforest. But their quiet and shady streets are now protected behind discreet barricades. An impressive entry statement circa mid-1980s issues her inwards to the reception desk. In the evenings she can join the cooking classes to learn about bush tucker. In her villa there is a discreet real-estate sign informing her and her companion that this ‘timeshare’ spatial product is available on the market. Expressions of interest are invited; see contact details below. By the time Mrs Roxburgh makes it to the mainland in a canoe that has been prepared so that the Butchella peoples can attend a corroboree, by the time she encounters Jack Chance, who has been taken in by a neighbouring indigenous tribe, she is near unrecognizable. Notoriously, Sidney Nolan depicts her naked on all fours crawling through the underbrush of an island paradise. It seems she is becoming indiscernible with the landscape that has engulfed her and the peoples who have taken her in as god or slave or simply as a foreign woman in plight. As Schaffer writes: ‘Mrs Fraser is depicted as a naked animal blending into the alien bush.’37 More than human, nonhuman, she is obliged to reclaim her own story because as Robert Melville remarks: ‘She is a woman liable to be taken from behind.’38 A generous reading might allow this to mean that Mrs Fraser’s stories will be removed from her, her own voice obfuscated. Schaffer cites Melville’s reading of Nolan’s notorious, compelling canvas where Melville’s barely disguised masculine disdain treats the near unrecognizable form of Mrs Fraser with considerable lack of delicacy: She has the look of a ‘stealthy scavenger’; she ‘walks on all fours’, and ‘Her plight arouses not pity but the sense of her openness to sexual assault’.39 Mrs Fraser’s figure, her symbolic role as crossover creature, between colonizer and colonized, between nature and culture, must be reclaimed and told otherwise. We must seek out other morals to this tale. As subject in process she emerges after the fact of proliferating, contradictory stories, accounts and critical readings, a multiplex universe packed into one aesthetic figure: Eliza Fraser. Critique, an attitude to criticality here does not aim to debunk and undo, to unravel the contradictory stories that compose Eliza Fraser. She is an aesthetic figure in the sense Deleuze and Guattari suggest.40 She mobilizes affects and percepts, she makes them circulate, and we must follow her to see how she composes herself, while she is ‘ceaselessly becoming other’.41 A mode of critique that is to be done with judgement instead attempts to identify a symptomology in order to address a non-totalizable system of signs or material carriers of significance, a material semiotics, at the same time acknowledging a shifting assembly of practices, or an ecology of practices. Isabelle Stengers insists: ‘We do not know what a practice is able to become; what we know instead is that the very way we define, or address, a practice is part of the surroundings which produces its ethos.’42 A practice emerges from the midst of a context in the encounter with a problem that demands it commence its work. A three-tiered construction of subject,

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environment, world. An ecosophical imagination that insists on the latticework of subjectivities, socialities, environmentalities. What is so perplexing about Eliza Fraser and her white woman story is that should we attempt to peer beyond her fringe of leaves we might bear witness to a morethan-human landscape, and an earth without us. In a related case, rumours of a white woman in Gippsland begin to circulate.43 Stories spread suggesting she has been captured, or else has found refuge with an indigenous tribe after the event of a shipwreck. In colonial settlements, the name Anne Macpherson is rumoured to have appeared carved into tree trunks where few Europeans have so far ventured. Yet another account offers visions of a woman with long flowing hair. Finally, following elaborate negotiations, and with the assistance of a young boy as translator, the Bungalene people promise to return the white woman. A party assembles in anticipation, the bagpipes are played, and when she is returned they discover she is not a live woman, but the carved figurehead of a sunken ship, the Britannica. A minor skirmish erupts, and further attempts to set the story straight are ventured . . .

Notes 1

Patrick White, A Fringe of Leaves (London: Jonathan Cape, 1976).

2

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Movement Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 101.

3

‘A Bit of an Early Gippsland History. Story of the Wreck of the Brittannia. On the Ninety Mile Beach in 1841. The Romance of the White Woman Survivor’, Traralgon Record (Traralgon, Victoria 1886–1932) Friday 31 May 1912, 4. Available online: http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article67468591 (accessed 2 June 2016). Bill Wannan, Australian Folklore (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1970), 117. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_woman_of_Gippsland (accessed 2 June 2016).

4

Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.

5

Susan Stewart cited in Anna Gibbs, ‘Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism – Explanation and Demonstration’, Text Vol. 1, No. 2 (October 1997). Available online: http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct97/gibbs.htm (accessed 4 May 2016).

6

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_Castle_(brig)

7

See Kay Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 263, fn 3.

8

Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact, 1995, xii.

9

Yolanda Drummond, ‘Progress of Eliza Fraser’, Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. 15, no. 1 (February 1993): 15–25, 15.

10 Drummond, ‘Progress of Eliza Fraser’, 15.

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11 Jim Davidson, ‘Beyond the Fatal Shore: The Mythologization of Mrs Fraser’, Meanjin, vol. 49, no. 3 (1990): 449–61, 449. 12 John Curtis, Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle (London: George Virtue, 1838), 21. 13 Drummond, ‘Progress of Eliza Fraser’. See also Fraser Bay Chronicle. Available online: http://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/fraser-or-kgariisland/2434511/ (accessed 28 July 2016). 14 Curtis, Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle, 21. 15 Curtis, Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle. 16 The stories of the artists at Heide, a property in bushland close to Melbourne owned by John and Sunday Reed, form their own mythology of the emergence of an Australian modernism. A mythology of ‘mythic, sometimes lurid proportions’ . . . ‘a lost world of bohemianism, glamour and sexual licentiousness’, as Philip Jones puts it in his review of Janine Burke’s biography of Sunday Reed, The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide. Philip Jones, ‘The Heart of the Matter’ in Weekend Australian, 16–17 October 2004. See Janine Burke, The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (New York: Random House, 2004). 17 Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact. 18 Kay Schaffer, ‘Australian Mythologies: The Eliza Fraser Story and Constructions of the Feminine in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and Sidney Nolan’s “Eliza Fraser” Paintings’, Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 2 (1989): 1–15, 13. 19 A letter from Charles Otter to his sister written in 1836. Cited in Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact, 5. Quoted, as Schaffer explains, by John Curtis, Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle. 20 Schaffer, ‘Australian Mythologies’, 1–15. 21 Ibid. 22 http://www.frasercoastchronicle.com.au/news/fraser-or-kgari-island/2434511/ Accessed 28 July 2016. 23 Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2002), 117. 24 Schaffer, In the Wake of First Contact, 20. 25 Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, 109. 26 Gatens and Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present, 34. 27 Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 4. 28 Michael Taussig, ‘Fictocriticism’, European Graduate School, 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkzrxvDhDak (accessed 3 June 2016). 29 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 30 Isabelle Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 19, 22, 23. 31 Stengers, Cosmopolitics I, 23.

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32 Michel Foucault, ‘The History of Sexuality’, in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 183–93, 193. 33 Stewart, Ordinary Affects. 34 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 259. 35 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 269–70. 36 Arwan Agrawel, Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2005), xiv. 37 Schaffer, ‘Australian Mythologies’, 10. 38 Melville cited in Schaffer, ‘Australian Mythologies’, 10. See also Robert Melville, Sidney Nolan Paradise Garden (London: R. Alistair McAlpine Publishing, 1971), 7. 39 Melville, Sydney Nolan Paradise Garden, 7. 40 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 65. 41 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 177. 42 Isabelle Stengers, ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1: 183–96, 195 43 ‘A Bit of an Early Gippsland History. Story of the Wreck of the Brittannia. On the Ninety Mile Beach in 1841. The Romance of the White Woman Survivor’ Traralgon Record (Traralgon, Victoria 1886–1932) Friday 31 May 1912, 4. Available online: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/67468591 (accessed 29 October 2018).

Bibliography Agrawal, Arun. Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the Making of Subjects. Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2005. Burke, Janine. The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide. New York: Random House, 2004. Curtis, John. Shipwreck of the Stirling Castle. London: George Virtue, 1838. Davidson, Jim. ‘Beyond the Fatal Shore: The Mythologization of Mrs Fraser’, Meanjin, vol. 49, no. 3 (1990): 449–61. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Movement Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Drummond, Yolanda. ‘Progress of Eliza Fraser’. Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, vol. 15, no. 1 (February 1993): 15–25. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Foucault, Michel. ‘The History of Sexuality’. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, 183–93. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980..

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Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present. London: Routledge, 2002. Gibbs, Anna. ‘Bodies of Words: Feminism and Fictocriticism – Explanation and Demonstration’. Text, vol. 1, no. 2 (October 1997). Jones, Philip. ‘The Heart of the Matter’. Weekend Australian, 16–17 October 2004. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1993. Latour, Bruno. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010. Melville, Robert. Sidney Nolan Paradise Garden. London: R. Alistair McAlpine Publishing, 1971. McGuire, M.E. ‘Whiteman’s Walkabout’. Meanjin, vol. 52, no. 3 (Spring 1993): 517–25. Schaffer, Kay. ‘Australian Mythologies: The Eliza Fraser Story and Constructions of the Feminine in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves and Sidney Nolan’s “Eliza Fraser” Paintings’. Kunapipi, vol. 11, no. 2 (1989): 1–15. Schaffer, Kay. ‘Eliza Fraser’s Trial by Media’. Antipodes, vol. 5, no. 2 (December 1991): 114–19. Schaffer, Kay. In the Wake of First Contact: The Eliza Fraser Stories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Stengers, Isabelle. ‘Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices’. Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 1 (2005): 183–96. Stengers, Isabelle. Cosmopolitics I. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects, Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2007. Tardent, Jules L. ‘Fraser Island’. Queensland Geographical Journal, Vol. 52 (1947–8): 75–98. Taussig, Michael. ‘Fictocriticism’. Lecture for European Graduate School, 2010. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkzrxvDhDak (accessed 3 June 2016). White, Patrick. A Fringe of Leaves. London: Jonathan Cape, 1976.

CHAPTER SIX

Archaeologies of Exile on Trikeri Island: Listening to Stones and Speculating on Prison Matters Elke Krasny and Phoebe Giannisi

Trikeri is a small Greek island located in the Pagasitikos Gulf of the Aegean Sea. Looked at from the Google-Earth-God’s-Eye-View, we see the lush green of the trees and the beautiful red of the earth. There is also a scattering of unassuming buildings along the shoreline and then some more buildings along the path which leads up to the largest structure of the island, the Monastery. There are no cars on the island. Only a very small number of inhabitants, fifteen to twenty in total, live here year-round. The island does not have a single hotel. One can spend the night in one of the austere cells at the monastery. Neither mainstream architectural history nor architectural criticism see any reason to engage with this island.

Listening to stones What if . . .? Our decision is to mobilize the mode of what if in order to slow down such easy passing-over of sites held to be irrelevant to architectural history, theory or criticism. There is more to Trikeri Island than meets the Googling eye. But, it also serves as an ethical proposition to slow down judgement when it comes to deciding what warrants research and analysis in the context of architecture and what does not. We invite the idea to approach architectures and sites, as if stones, as if building materials, could speak, and as if we, the human writers, were able to listen to what these materials have to say in order to find out what they remember. We are, of course, fully aware 60

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that stones do not open up easily to such conversations and that humans listening and writing might fail terribly in trying to understand what the stones are trying to tell them. But we see this suggestion of listening to the stones as a methodological proposition which is useful to a ficto-critical approach dedicated to writing-architecture-as-commemoration. We imagine ways of fiction-writing and methods of academic writing willing to imagine such openness to listening to stones, to listening to the materials out of which the architectural environment is built. This includes buildings that are still standing, just as much as buildings in ruins. Such writing starts from the assumption that there is a connectedness between ontologies and epistemologies that result in wider and more inclusive landscapes of commemoration along the diachronic and synchronic nexus of human time and non-human time. Listening to materials, as if it were possible to understand what they form part of and what they might have been exposed to in times long gone, opens many different moves toward speculative and generative insights. We would like to foreground two distinctly different, yet interconnected, ways of imagining such listening. Materials might be concerned with their humans, they might materialize their immaterial memories, their pain, their laughter, their joy, their ways of relating to the structures of support the material world provides for them as these ways betrays their emotional and affective ways of being. Materials might be concerned with their own histories, not necessarily one without humans, but their relating to having being transformed into a resource having being broken, crushed or cut. Even though the methodological orientation of writing as if one might be able to listen to materials might focus on very different concerns, we want to stress here that we see a particular potential to excavate and unearth unheard, untold, not-yet-fully-told histories of racialized, sexualized, gendered, environmental and ecological violence. Architecture comes into play in these histories of violence as they take place within architecture, which is very broadly understood here to include the built environment at large. However, there is not (or not yet) a specific strand of architectural studies dedicated to re-locating the histories of commemorating violence and trauma in architectural history, theory, and criticism. We see the ficto-critical strategy of employing the mode of ‘as if’ as a way of opening up such a field of study bringing together fiction and fact leading to a deeper understanding of how materials are permeated and penetrated with violence. Such acts of permeation and penetration are in and of themselves violent. Could materials speak, they would scream most of the time. Could materials speak, they would cry. Could materials speak, they might choose to remain silent. Past violence to humans and to the environment is stored in the material from which architecture is made. This includes violence that has happened to building materials along their path to becoming such, just as much as it includes violence these materials were exposed to as part of the site where this violence, including extreme violence of assault, rape or murder happened.

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As if . . . is propositional, a method to be explored further, to be developed in the future, to be put to use for our ‘catastrophic times’ and our catastrophic pasts.1 Here, two writers engage with this method, which they plan to develop and test further in the future. They are a cultural theorist with an interest in the ethics and politics of commemoration connecting violence and sites, and an architect and poet writing and performing on the relations between architecture, people, and landscapes. They share a strong belief in crossing disciplinary boundaries and trusting their intuitions when it comes to working with complex sites and violent histories. Phoebe Giannisi, who lives and works in Thessaly, learned about the history of this island, which is not too far from her home in Volos, when she went to Trikeri in the summer of 2000. Unknowing, she found herself amid the history of the Greek Civil War. The stone memorial plaque on the wall next to the entrance to the monastery made her aware of the fact that the island had been a prison, a site of political exile. Phoebe translates the Greek text found on the plaque as follows: ‘Here on this island of Trikeri from 1948 to 1953 lived five thousand women, politically exiled.’ Since 2000, she has returned to the island on several occasions. Together with her colleague Iris Lycourioti, also a writer, she decided to go to Trikeri with a group of students from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and from the School of Architecture of the University of Thessaly in Volos. The group worked on situated, transnationally entangled and ‘multidirectional’ memory practices bridging architecture, public art, landscape and art education. We write as if it were possible to conceive of writing-architecture-ascommemoration. In doing so, we turn away from the conventional notion of memorial architecture being monumental. We locate commemoration in the architecture of the everyday rather than adhering to the notion of statecraft that deploys monuments to honor those who were victorious, which most of the time is just another way of saying perpetrators. In the chosen context of Trikeri Island we specifically seek to imagine that we can listen to the stones in order to speculate on architecture as it is entangled with carceral matters and the violence of exile. Only very recently, under the Syriza government, the island was officially declared a site of memory. When walking across the island, one comes across a handful of signs – red words in bold, red Greek letters on a white background – that are the only indication of this. These signs have been set up next to ruins made of stone. The signs seem more ghostly than explanatory. One sign reads ‘kitchen’. Another sign reads ‘theatre’. No other information is volunteered. The signs name nothing but the function these stones had when they were part of walls, and before they were abandoned. Now, they are contemporary ruins. The signs avoid any reference to the historical context. If one were to walk the island reading these two signs, one would know the following two things: there was once a kitchen and a theatre. Who? What? How? Why? When? The signs are silent when it comes to these questions. These ruins are investigated and preserved by a contemporary archeologist. Archeology makes use of architectural remains. Archeology regards such

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fragments as a means of producing evidence. The stones are material witnesses. What do they reveal? Where have they been quarried? Who shipped them to the island? Who placed them on top of each other? Who cooked here? Who used the stage? We won’t find the answers to these questions in an architectural history. We do find an entry on Trikeri Island in the historical encyclopedia on Women and War from antiquity to the present, yet this does not provide answers to our questions. ‘At the end of the armed conflict, almost 5,000 women, some with their children, were in a camp for exiles, which had been established especially for women on the island of Trikeri.’2 The female resistance fighters had been part of ‘Communist-led Resistance organisations, the National Liberation Front (EAM) and the United Panhellenic Organisation of Youth (EPON)’ as well as in the ‘Greek Democratic Army’.3 If the stones were speaking to us, if we were able to listen to them, we might learn the following. When the female political exiles started to arrive, there was no prison on the island. The women had to build their own prison. The stones might remember the time when they were turned into a kitchen and a theatre. The stones might recall that the women’s hands were burning with the pain of breaking blisters. The stones might still try to forget the pain they felt through the prisoners’ hands. The stones might still be wondering where the women went, why they left, why nobody has come back to cook or to use the theatre. There are some more low stone structures on the island, but there is no sign in sight. The function of these stones is not self-evident to the untrained eye. Phoebe explains that these stones were platforms for the tents in which the women slept. The entire wood was filled with tents. The stones were with the trees, the tents, and the women. The stones might have heard the male guards when they came in the dark of the night. They might have sensed the fear, they might have shared the terror, they might have heard the muffled cries. They might have heard the children cry. Maybe some of the stones even remember how one of the women described the situation. ‘What scared us the most was when they were taking us out (of the tents) in the dark. We did not know what the purpose of these night abductions was and we were shivering.’4 Every night, the exiled resistance fighters went to sleep on the stones. Even had the stones wanted to spare their backs the pain, it was not in their power. Every night, the stones tried to offer the women the protection they sought. Every night, the stones failed. The failure remains. The stones are loyal. They would never tell where the women actually kept their notebooks. They know how to keep a secret. Architecture is generally aligned with those in power. Therefore, architecture is entangled with the relations between perpetrators and victims, as it spatializes these relations. The tents that housed the women prisoners, and the monastery that was the place for the guards, spatialize the relations between victims and perpetrators.5 Writing-architecture-ascommemoration shifts the perspective to architecture’s inseparability from the lived present which is then not told in history. Writing-architecture-ascommemoration shifts the perspective to architecture’s inseparability from

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FIGURE 6.1 The stones are remains of the platforms built for the tents in which female prisoners slept on Trikeri. Photo credit: Elke Krasny, 2019. the lived present which is then not told in history. Imprisonment steals life. The exiled women were extracted from their lives, their families, their friends, their comrades. The stones know that they mourn the lifetimes lost on the island. The exiled women also experienced their island solidarity as emancipation. They are proud of having made it through together, of having memories of friendships and political consciousness. The stones share the mixed feelings the women remember. Every year, the stones wait for the small group of women who are still alive to return, and spend time commemorating with them. They are together in mourning and in joy.

Speculating on prison matters Evidence 1: Entry: Map Which map? How far does a map reach? A map of the island’s outline? Ought the shoreline across the way be included? Ought the Aegean Sea be included? Ought the other islands of exile be included, Chios and Makronisos? Ought the exiles’ places of origin be included?

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How far does a map reach? Ought Athens be included? Ought Volos be included, from where we drove? Ought Vienna be included?

Evidence 2: A Map Again Let me now zoom in on the well they are pumping up water non-stop muddy water – starting at dawn ghosts and the sound of the pump haunts you still that’s what you said and I’m thinking of you. And what might I know of you when the sound of a Mendelssohn quartet is what I am now listening to?

Evidence 3: Wells Again Today the island’s wells where the exiled stood in endless, wearisome queues to draw water are polluted. Their water was poisoned by batteries and other waste: from the landfill in Trikeri, open air, at a high point on the island, heavy metals and toxic substances seep into the soil and the underground streams.

Evidence 4: Outside the window I will turn my gaze outward now and I won’t see you

Evidence 5: A Papyrus I saw it in Egypt – oh Egypt – so small fragile and unraveled the piece in the display case in the dark such a small segment excised from the whole and inscriptions in layers hid themselves

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though the structure still there present I read the mute strands as they vertically crisscross and fray right there at the edges the two leaves embraced forever joined by water and weight and the blows they both received I read on and on and can make nothing of it

Evidence 6a: Book: Women’s Camp Subtitle: Nine buried notebooks with stories by women prisoners in the camps of Chios, Trikeri, Makronisos during the Civil War 1947–1951. Editor: Victoria Theodorou, Athens 1976. Number of pages 413. Images – Engravings: Yorgis Varlamos. The book is out of print. Efi Kyriakaki, mother of the student Angelos Andonopoulos, happened to be passing by the hall where she overheard our guest lecturer Riki Van Boeschoten’s talk about the exiled, to the students at the Department of Architecture, on the eve of our departure for Trikeri. As she happened to be a niece of Victoria Theodorou who passed just this year, on 15/02/2019, she sent me a precious copy of this book as a family gift.

Evidence 6b: Buried Notebooks They divided the work in parts and each had the task to write exhaustively about a different place of exile. They hid the notebooks before leaving in an olive tree near the chapel. When after years she returned for the first time to Trikeri she found neither olive tree nor notebooks and the chapel was sealed off.

Evidence 7: Comment, footnote, Oedipus’ swollen foot, according to Derrida The notebooks were delivered to Victoria Theodorou by Rosa Imvrioti in 1972, the year after the first return to the island.

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Were these copies that had been spread around for safekeeping? Were they the ones under the olive tree? Were they at the home of some, now dead, grandmother? Were they notebooks or loose sheets? Sewn together with needle and thread? Notebooks buried forever. The icon of the Virgin Mary from the monastery, at one time been hidden for fear of pirates, is now on public view at the church, decorated for worship by the faithful. I will bring the notebooks there too, for votive offerings to hang before them, exposed and preserved behind glass, priceless.

Evidence 8: File 0151 (Modern Social History Archives). Theodorou, Victoria. Size and substrate: 3 boxes Endowment by herself, 14/1/1998 Among them: the notebooks of eight exiled women from Trikeri and Chios (1949–51). Address: 1 Elefhterias Square, Athens, Attica, tel. 2103223062 Hours: Monday and Friday 10.00–14.00, Wednesday 12.00–18.30

Evidence 9: List of other evidence From the book by Marigoula Mastroleon-Zerva, Exiled Women: Chios Trikeri Makronisos (Maroukla narrates). Athens: Syghroni Epohi, 1986. ●

how the camera came into the camp

●

shorts in prison

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emancipation: toothpaste in place of face cream and the hair-cutting of the woman from Agrinio

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the choir, the singing of demotic and rebetika songs

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transfer to Trikeri

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charms to ward off snakes and poisonous insects

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the seal sunning itself among the exiled women who were swimming but got sent away

●

the giving birth of the twins, in the trees, Marigoula on midwife duty

●

swims in the sea by the women from the islands and from Piraeus, the rest very nearly drowned

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●

the pebbles in the painter’s suitcase which they threw in the sea when she wasn’t watching

●

knowledge of French useful on Makronisos for the renunciation

●

‘as for us, we answered him with a song’

●

picture taking

●

the camera inside Mersouda’s breeches

●

the camera inside the hard-baked bread

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Lisa’s little oven

●

mushrooms, sea urchins, foraging for food

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charcoal burners

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the unearthing of the cemetery with the remains of exiled women and children

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the bus and mountains on the way back

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army boots on the island and heels in town

Evidence 10: Arrival in Trikeri on the boat Trikeri on the boat Pagasitikos a lone seagull on a reef a congregation of seagulls endlessly cawing will from time to time grow silent like cicadas whose incessant drone cuts off at the moment of calm in midday heat dragging the boat half ashore half still in the water dragging it further up so it stays anchored in pebbles the heat of new summer dries the skin the son the friend me him and afterwards we walked along the shore I thought I smelled frying fish the sea at midday like olive oil the sun stock still in the sky yet a breeze rising further inland

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alters the image of summer draws freshness from a distance carries dreams the current ones with the old and now forgotten6

Evidence 11a: Arrival from the point of view of Victoria Theodorou On 04/04/1949 1,200 women exiles leave Chios to continue their sentence on the island of Trikeri: The ship that took us was painted black and its interior was too from the soot. The ship that ferried us across the entire breadth of the Aegean battled with the rough sea-storm all the way to the shores of Pelion. Inside its horrid cabins they had thrown us weary famished. After it got dark and it ventured out to the open sea we were overcome by fright and horror as it rode up and down the waves creaking and moaning. And as for us: We thrashed against each other moaning. Many stayed unmoving as if dead others keened the little children harrowed beside themselves and the consumptives spewed blood and bile all mixed together. By evening of the next day, as we approached Pelion, the waters grew calmer. At its far side, we saw a green and tranquil island. We saw Trikeri. Among the olive trees reaching down to the shore, a few grey houses could be seen and fishing boats moored at the pier.’ 7

Evidence 11b: Landing in Trikeri from the point of view of Maroukla ‘It was a very pretty island. Green with olive trees. We docked in a bay and started unloading our luggage. A bit further off was a trawler that had come in with fine whitebait. Some women went up and asked if any was for sale. “It is, girls, come on over.” Some went to the sergeant, asked permission for

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us to be allowed. He was still recovering from the trip so he let us. We all ran over with our tin dishes and bought some. They sold it to us by the dish, without weighing. We hadn’t tasted fish in two years.’8

Evidence 12: The camera A gift by a friend a ship mechanic a box sent before Trikeri to the prison in Chios Hidden inside a pillow among kilos of sugar. What film did she use? Where did she keep it? A young woman a factory worker from Pireus she was already without teeth we hear she wears dentures and hides those as well during transfers so as not to lose them. Film and dentures. Camera. Mouth and eye. And notebooks.

Evidence 13: Hiding of the camera in Makronisos ‘I go to the tent where Mersouda was, the old gal from Mytilini, the one wearing breeches. “Mersouda, if you want to keep them from taking the camera, hang it inside your breeches.” ’9 Just as teeth are best kept safe outside the mouth, the camera is hidden inside the ample breeches, causing Mersouda to get chafed in her nether parts.

Evidence 14: Return of the camera from loan to the exiled males ‘We pick up the hard-baked bread, go into the tent and break them open. Inside the second one, we come across the camera wrapped in a piece of paper.’10

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The camera was baked inside the bread and sent over as a gift. Schemes of the meek and persecuted.

Evidence 15: Witness What is a witness? She bends and whispers the story in my ear. ‘Qui peut témoigner pour le témoin?’ ‘Vangelitsa Ergati, a young village girl of eighteen, died from tuberculosis a few days after arriving at the camp. They buried her there like some animal, but I mustn’t forget her.’11

Evidence 16: Other witnesses: The flies ‘Flies, black swarms, left the pits and the uncovered excrement and grazed on the bread, the food, plied persistently children’s eyes and mouth. The flies spread the germs of dysentery and conjunctivitis, the two banes of Trikeri.’12 ‘Where there are flies, there are men and Buddhas’, the Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa said, or near enough.

Evidence 16: The tsetse fly ‘A fellow exile suffered from the sleep sickness (tsetse fly). One morning, she wouldn’t wake up. We spoke to her. She wouldn’t answer us. We took up shifts: we fed her, took her to the bathroom. Very tiresome. A sleeping person is also very heavy.’13

Evidence 17: The women’s names in the pages of the book as many as Marigoula or Maroukla had memorized

Evidence 18: Palimpsest. Continued from Evidence 4. The sea perfectly still. The snorkelling sounds can be heard of the spearfisherman.

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Quiet calm talk can be heard. The emptying out of a truckload can be heard. A dog can be heard. The scraping of a metal chair across the floor can be heard. A lawn mower can be heard. Birdsong can be heard. A gull’s squawk can be heard. The planks in the construction site slowly being piled by the worker for tomorrow can be heard. The gentle lapping of the sea can be heard. A man’s diving splash can be heard. He can be heard talking with his wife on the jetty. His strokes can be heard as he swims. Your voices are not heard. The tiredness and sweat are not heard as you trudged uphill on the slope you named Golgotha laden with wood construction materials, sacks of food your tents. The wheezing of the sick is not heard. The teacher’s voice is not heard. The hunger is not heard. The cold and sweltering heat are not heard. The hands frozen stiff the feet frozen stiff are not heard. The wet clothes in bed are not heard. The body aches from all the labor are not heard. Their voices and the degradation are not heard. Your theater rehearsals are not heard your choir for joys and sorrows the childbirths the illnesses the deaths the departures the statements of renunciation are not heard. The solitary confinement in the cell is not heard. The cauldrons you carried are not heard the barbed wire you cut and rolled up and the pickets you uprooted and carried and loaded

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before leaving for where Trikeri will seem to you a small verdant island with pebbles and shells and mushrooms and greenery are not heard. The lesson is not heard the prohibited lesson to those who didn’t know how to read and write the illiterate mothers from the mountains the ones who signed by pressing an inked finger on paper.

Evidence 19: Nouns, verbs, participles Nouns: olive trees cottages tents things bundles clothes boots headscarves well ditches tents barbed wire pickets tents ditches tarpaper heaters out of metal cans planks bricks mattress out of juniper sage and heather branches Monastery ledges outhouses storerooms cells kitchen space garbage excrement dysentery staphylococcus psoriasis eye-ache tuberculosis amenorrhea wells pumps letters coupons parcels loads of wood sacks barrels full of oil hampers crates hardware cauldrons furnaces sacks of flour vegetables pulses beams lime bricks bales pebbles sand pickaxe and shovel rain and broken branches. Nouns=ruins=stones=traces Participles and adjectives: exhausted hungry dangerous pale laden dizzy weary bent over helpless indefatigable exiled upset joyous headscarfless dug-up just-constructed deserted abandoned and derelict Participles and adjectives=living bodies Verbs: we leave we go we exit we were at risk of drowning we went on board we saw we camped we took out we carried we are passing through we stayed outside we slept we were holding wore out we went up again to fetch we longed they bent down to go up to stumble we were walking we ran they were filling up we congregated we rested up we ran we could goes in and out they were coming alive they were talking they dug that we should live they were returning cursing we froze to repair they separated they commanded they hated they locked us up they force they prohibited they

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stalked they were watching we didn’t have license swept away hold onto guard ourselves against they forbade we moved aside we were carrying they were emptying they were draining they were strewing they dried they lifted they censored. Verbs=actions, events, happenings, emotions= air ‘Many times, endless times, we built and rebuilt.’ 14

Evidence 20: Exodus: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus Characters in the drama: State (Kratos), Violence (Bia), Prometheus, Hephaestus, Oceanus, Hermes, Io and the Chorus of the Oceanids The exiled women, among other performances, mainly with dances and songs from all over Greece, which they had undertaken at their own initiative, were preparing to stage Prometheus Bound. The Performance was prohibited by the Administration of the Camp. On the night of 3 June 2019, the visitors from Greece and Austria read and listened together to the text in Greek and German, our two languages, in the site of the nearly invisible theatre. Stones, weeds, prompter’s position, slope, dirt, dry branches, thorns, crickets. One firefly.

Epilogue (Post-face) No one testifies for the witness. (Niemand/zeugt für den/Zeugen) CELAN via DERRIDA Stones and bugs, inorganic and living, undying and mortal, crowd these few pages, which are an attempt to pay a homage of love and mourning to the prisoners following Jacques Derrida. As he writes in his book Uninterrupted Dialogue: Between Two Infinities, the Poem15, the meeting with the other is the beginning of a dialogue and its continuation is due precisely to its interruption, the dialogue’s necessary interruption after each meeting, each one a preamble to the forever severed dialogue which the death of one of the two at some point eventually seals, bequeathing the debt of its continuation to the survivor. Because with every death, the whole world ends, says Derrida. And this whole world, which ends, we bear, as the survivors, Derrida writes too, starting with Celan’s verses and also his dialogue with Gadamer. We are the witness of the other whom we came to know. We ought to provide testimony for him. And to pursue the dialogue with him. So the women toil to recall and record what they lived through as exiles, so that

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they will not forget, so that time doesn’t erase the details of their lives, the other persons who accompanied them and were lost, the dead and anonymous, and their passions. To write and incorporate into texts which will remain orphans going from hand to hand, doubly orphaned, orphans of writing, according to the definition Derrida gave starting with Phaedrus, where writing itself is an orphan because it is doomed to live without its father (its author, who could explain alongside it, what it is that was written) and also orphans because hidden, buried in the trunk of an olive tree. But what were the material testimonies, the traces we encountered there? Almost invisible, ruins that could be the remains of farmhouses, stones and foundations from constructions that have lain in ruin ever since they were built, stone squares for tents, half-collapsed shelters for cooking that smoked in the rain, an amphitheatre, all of it today is barely identifiable and gradually disappearing into the ground. For this reason, the archaeology of stones is as decisive as the archaeology of words and testimonies.

Stones don’t lie The bones of a newborn are under the concrete of the hotel that was never finished. The memories of rape, the aftermath of violence, are buried under the stones. The stones know. Our decision to explore writing-architecture-as-commemoration has led to writing that does not fill the holes that have been left between the stones. No adhesive was used. This text has been written as if the ghostly presence of women prisoners speaks through the stones. The archeological remains are filled with their echoes, their hopes, sorrow, pain, joy and terror. Lived emotion effects memory. Materials store this memory. Materials have a body of knowledge that has been silenced as it has always already been understood as silent, as if materials did matter to memory, as if materials cannot have a voice in commemoration.16

Declarations of repentance During the Greek Civil War, prisoners were forced to not only sign, but also to read out loud and perform their declarations of repentance. They had to denounce their ideas, their friends, their comrades. The stones on Trikeri know where the women were forced to declare their repentance. The spot has remained unmarked. We can trust the stones to not expose the prisoners. Some of the students from Vienna honoured the resistance to repentance. Benjamin Brommer, supported by Valerie Bosse, Johannes Rips, Miriam Raggam and Rina Kotsaki from the Greek group, returned the power of words and inscribed them in the stones. Maybe the rain has washed their

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FIGURE 6.2 Benjamin Brommer, supported by Valerie Bosse, Johannes Rips, Miriam Raggam and Rina Kotsaki: destroying the notions of faith, father*land and freedom. Photo credit: Phoebe Giannisi, 2019. inscription away. But the stones will remember: destroying the notions of faith, father*land and freedom.

Notes 1

Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism (London: Open Humanities Press in collaboration with Meson Press, 2015).

2

Anastasia Vervenioti, ‘Women in the Greek Civil War’, in Women and War. A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Bernard A Cook. Volume One. (Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2006), 253.

3

Ibid.

4

This was shared by journalist and political exile Aphrodite MavroedePanteleskou. Stavros Avdoulos, To Fenomeno Makronisos [The Makronisos Phenomenon] (Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 1988), 186, quoted in: Katherine Stefatos: Engendering the Nation: Women, State Oppression and Political

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Violence in Post-War Greece (1946–1974), PhD thesis, (London: Politics Department, Goldsmiths College University of London), 103. 5

Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019).

6

Phoebe Giannisi, Ομηρικά (Athens: Kedros, 2009); Homerica, translated by. Brian Sneeden, (Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2017). Assembled fragments of poems: Preamble, Apologoi I, Apologoi III.

7

Victoria Theodorou, ed. , Στρατόπεδα γυναικών. [Women’s Camps. Nine buried notebooks with stories by women prisoners in the camps of Chios, Trikeri, Makronisos during the Civil War 1947–1951] (Athens, 1976), 139–40.

8

Marigoula Mastroleon-Zerva, Εξόριστες: Χίος Τρίκερι Μακρόνησος. (Η Μαρούκλα αφηγείται) [Exiled Women: Chios Trikeri Makronisos (Maroukla narrates)]. (Athens: Syghroni Epohi, 1986), 44.

9

Ibid., 107.

10 Ibid., 110. 11 Victoria Theodorou, Women’s Notebooks, 134. 12 Ibid. 13 Marigoula Mastroleon-Zerva, Exiled Women, 137. 14 Victoria Theodorou, Women’s Notebooks, 145. 15 Jacques Derrida, Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003), Chapter 1. 16 The authors would like to thank their wonderful students for their dedicated, open-minded and inspirational engagement with memory work. Phoebe Giannisi wishes to thank Konstantinos Matsoukas, who translated her text, originally written in Greek, into English. She is also grateful to Vassiliki Lianou for her labour of love organizing the local part of the Trikeri travel and research.

Bibliography Avdoulos, Stavros. To Fenomeno Makronisos [The Makronisos Phenomenon]. Athens: Ellinika Grammata, 1988. Derrida, Jacques. Le dialogue ininterrompu: entre deux infinis, le poème. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2003. Giannisi, Phoebe. Ομηρικά. Athens: Kedros, 2009. Giannisi, Phoebe. Homerica. Trans. Brian Sneeden. Storrs, CT: World Poetry Books, 2017. Mastroleon-Zerva, Marigoula. Εξόριστες: Χίος Τρίκερι Μακρόνησος. (Η Μαρούκλα αφηγείται) [Exiled Women: Chios Trikeri Makronisos (Maroukla narrates)]. Athens: Syghroni Epohi, 1986. Rothberg, Michael. The Implicated Subject. Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019. Stefatos, Katherine. Engendering the Nation: Women, State Oppression and Political Violence in Post-War Greece (1946–1974), PhD thesis. London: Politics Department, Goldsmiths College University of London, 2012.

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Stengers, Isabelle. In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. London: Open Humanities Press in collaboration with Meson Press, 2015. Theodorou, Victoria, ed. Στρατόπεδα γυναικών. [Women’s Camps. Nine buried notebooks with stories by women prisoners in the camps of Chios, Trikeri, Makronisos during the Civil War 1947–1951. Athens, 1976. Vervenioti, Anastasia. ‘Women in the Greek Civil War’. In Women and War. A Historical Encyclopedia from Antiquity to the Present, edited by Bernard A Cook. Volume One, 253–4. Santa Barbara: ABC CLIO, 2006.

CHAPTER SEVEN

In Which Robert Smithson Visits Christchurch: Fictocriticism and the Field Trip Jacky Bowring

Prologue What if Robert Smithson were to visit Christchurch? Nearly fifty years after his iconic field trip to his childhood home of Passaic, New Jersey, in 1967,1 the environmental artist is relocated to New Zealand, to the city of Christchurch, in 2016. Smithson died at the age of thirty-five in 1973, and imagining him not only still alive, but walking in the centre of contemporary Christchurch, generates a freshness, a frisson, that unsettles a habitual way of reading the city. Through local eyes, the familiar is made strange, made anew, cascading into other versions of the city. It is a way to change things. As Viktor Shklovsky observed: ‘As perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. We see the object as though it were enveloped in a sack.’2 Things are noticed, chilling resonances are detected between two distant cities. The familiarity of Christchurch is unsettled by its Passaicness. For those who know neither Christchurch nor Passaic, the cities are revealed as latent doppelgangers, meeting for the first time through the transposition of Robert Smithson’s field trip from one city to the other. This process of imagining, and of this particular person, in this particular place, gestures to the practice of imaginary exploration. Walking, randomizing and making strange interweave through critical perspectives on cities and landscapes, from Iain Sinclair’s ‘true fictions’ as accounts of walking in London,3 to Naomi Stead’s narrative walking in Sydney and Stockholm;4 from Jane Rendell becoming a mermaid to imagine remembering 79

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an unvisited place,5 to Phil Smith walking and writing as Cecile Oak to construct a mythogeography of South Devon.6 Rebecca Solnit concludes that ‘walking is an art,’ and ‘an act of resistance to the mainstream’, a way of getting beyond the pace and alienation of the modern city7. As Sinclair put it, ‘Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city’,8 and walking fictively serves to enhance this efficacy. Smithson’s ‘field trip’ to Passaic was framed by the fictional. Rather than an objective fact-finding outing, Smithson infused his journey with imagined possibilities, ways of seeing an all-too-familiar landscape with fresh eyes. Writing of his field trip as an article for ArtForum as though it were an actual documentary, or a ‘[d]eadpan travelog’,9 creates a veil of the factual. Smithson’s field trip is a ‘superfiction’, the term coined by Peter Hill to refer to particular kinds of fictional invention that adopt languages of official institutions – like the art world, or like geography – to frame fictional works.10 To write of Robert Smithson visiting Christchurch is to create a fictional work based on a fictional work, a kind of doubling, an inflation. Setting up this fictional walk needs first a survey of the fields that underpin it, and as such this chapter begins with a series of studies, including an exploration of the practices of field trips and expeditions; a discussion on constructing versions of reality with photographs and captions; an investigation of the practice of inventing monuments; and a framing of Situationism and psychogeography as approaches to ficto-criticism. The chapter then recounts the process of becoming Robert Smithson, and then finally the section ‘Christchurch as Passaic’ records the imagined and impossible visit of Smithson to New Zealand. Smithson’s identification of monuments within the ordinary townscape of Passaic resonated potently with Christchurch, a city emerging from the ruins of the devastating earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.

Field trips and expeditions The field trip is a research exercise whose conventions are founded in the empirical scientific method. But, when liberated from science’s straitjacket, and launched into the fluidity of the postmodern world, the field trip can become a vehicle for exploring the domain between the ‘real’ and the fictional. Like the ‘documentary fiction’ of W.G. Sebald,11 the fictocritical field trip is an objective-subjective hybrid. Fictive field trips hijack the expeditionary mode to defamiliarize the all-too-familiar, particularly the ordinary landscape where architecture becomes the wallpaper for daily existence as we become immune to our habitual landscapes. Robert Smithson’s field trips conceive artistic practice as a type of science, suffused with a sense of documentation and discovery. This is vivid in his work ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, and also the group of projects gathered in his book Field Trips, together with the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, in the late 1960s.12 The ‘field trips’ included going to Oberhausen, a massive

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industrial complex in the Ruhr district of Germany, near Düsseldorf where Smithson was preparing for his first European exhibition. Just as a scientist would document the objects of their fieldwork – rocks, flora, fauna – the Bechers and Smithson documented the huge industrial structures of the steel works. Smithson exhibited the Oberhausen field trip in a Düsseldorf gallery soon after their visit to the site in 1968, and as Lingwood describes, ‘Different kinds of evidence rubbed up against each other – hard geological facts, photographic expressions and cartographic description – in a display which mirrors Smithson’s own restless mind as it oscillates between microcosm and macrocosm, scientific specimen and imaginative projection.’13 The concept of the field trip or expedition has been appropriated by artists and writers, in ficto-critically inflected works, as in the work of French artist, Laure Prouvost. Using factual footage interspersed with fictional imaginings, Prouvost blurs the two realms. In her piece for the 2019 Venice Biennale, Prouvost created a ‘fictional expedition’14 from Paris to Venice that includes footage of real-life events, such as Notre-Dame on fire. The sense of an ‘expedition’ cloaks the work with the semblance of purpose and actuality, a narrative Trojan horse that sustains the façade of factuality. Prouvost’s earlier works include the fictional travels of her fictional grandfather, who got lost digging a hole under the shack in which he lives, to get to Africa.15 As Naomi Rea observes, the artist deals in ‘fibs’ – or what Prouvost herself calls ‘salads’ – as an echo of the French term raconter des salades, meaning a teller of tales.16 Prouvost’s practice captures the appropriative device of the expedition and how this mode might interweave the mundane and the extraordinary, the actual and the imagined. As with Smithson and the Bechers, expeditions need not be to remote and exotic destinations – the Amazon, the Antarctic, national parks, wild oceans – a ficto-critical field trip can be to the seemingly nondescript suburbs, industrial zones, and the ordinary landscapes of motorway corridors and main streets.

Photographs and captions Embedded within the procedure of the field trip is the practice of documentation. A field trip is nothing without data, recordings, mappings. Photographs in particular offer objective proof of what has been observed on the excursion. But while the photograph alone suggests an objective record of what was seen, the caption can undo this certainty, and with a few words the real is disrupted, set adrift into the realm of the fictional. This hybridizing of the factual and the fictional via the devices of photograph and caption relates to a wider genre of texts, all of which reconstruct the familiar urban landscape in ways which challenge a sense of the real. André Breton’s Nadja,17 Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-La-Morte,18 and W.G. Sebald’s documentary fiction19 combine ‘real’ photographs with text and captions, creating a new work, a fabrication, even a ‘fib.’ In

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Smithson’s ‘suburban Odyssey’, it is precisely the juxtaposition of an image of the real suburban landscape with a caption that invents the monuments which are at the core of his work. The photograph and the caption feed each other, and the actual and the imaginary are fused, providing a vehicle for critical commentary.

Made-up monuments Smithson’s captions for his photographs of Passaic bestowed the status of ‘monument’ on the most banal elements of suburban infrastructure. Through the intervention of a few words, a children’s sandpit was elevated to ‘The Sand-box Monument (also called The Desert)’20. The stark monochromes document the banal landscape, with their monumental decree coming from the text and captions: ‘The Bridge Monument Showing Wooden Sidewalks’,21 ‘The Great Pipe Monument’; and ‘The Fountain Monument: Bird’s Eye View’.22 This practice of the reinvention of the ordinary landscape through the contriving of monuments also infuses the work of Patrick Keiller, in particular his three films London, Robinson in Space, and Robinson in Ruins.23 Keiller’s work parallels Smithson’s in many ways, including the appropriation of the device of the field trip, where the invisible protagonists set out on multiple ‘expeditions’ which are signalled via the intertitles. Keiller also works by combining image and caption to invent alternative realities, as in his work The City of the Future, which as David B. Clarke notes, ‘consists entirely of found footage, using intertitles to fashion a unified narrative from separate early actuality films’.24 Keiller invents monuments: for example, in the film London, where static shots linger over the various points in the landscape and the narrator enumerates the invented monuments within his voice-over, where Leicester Square is declared a monument to Laurence Sterne; Canary Wharf is ‘adopted’ as a monument to Rimbaud; Cannon Street designated a ‘sacred site’ – with the Number 15 a ‘sacred bus route’; and the BT Tower is imagined as a monument to the ‘tempestuous relationship of Rimbaud and Verlaine’.25

Pyschogeography and situationism This conferring of monumental status upon the elements of the ordinary landscape is a form of strangemaking,26 evoking landscape-scale readymades that are descendants of Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinal artwork, ‘Fountain’. The ordinary is made extraordinary through the magic of re-contextualization, just as Duchamp’s exhibited urinal became a work of art when placed in a gallery and entitled ‘Fountain’, again playing caption against object. This landscape-scale strangemaking by Smithson and Keiller

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resonates with the domain of psychogeography, and in particular the practices of the Situationists. The echoes with Situationism are seen not just in the use of strangemaking, but in the very practice of undertaking field trips. One of the key methods of the Situationisists was the dérive, described by Guy Debord as ‘a technique of rapid passages through varied ambiences’.27 The imaginative and fictive dimensions are found in the dérive’s ‘playful-constructive behaviour and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll’.28 Robert MacFarlane explains the significance of the dérive as a means of revealing the city: ‘By forcing an arbitrariness of route, and insisting on pedestrianism, the dériveur29 was, in theory, brought to experience astonishment upon the terrain of familiarity, and was made more sensitive to the hidden histories and encrypted events of the city.’30 Further to the technique of the dérive, the city was made strange through developing particular lenses through which to view it. As Simon Sadler explains, the Situationist Jacques Filon ‘joked about establishing an “alternative travel agency,” providing tours of cultural “others” that could be reached on foot from the Lettrist Internationale’s headquarters near the Place de la Contrescarpe’.31 The ‘alternative travel agency’ was a reframing of the familiar quartiers of Paris, where ‘Of the Chinese quarter our guide simply noted that “the inhabitants are very poor. They prepare complicated dishes of little nutrition and strongly spiced”’.32 Other areas toured by the ‘travel agency’ included Aubervilliers, where ‘the inhabitants are poor but speak fluent Spanish. They await the revolution. They play the guitar and they sing’.33 Concerned over how Paris was becoming more homogenised as working class and ethnic groups were increasingly replaced by the middle or ‘managerial’ classes, the Situationists drew attention to the vivid and lively enclaves that were being lost. As part of this concern, Filon’s ironic reading of the different neighbourhoods, in a manner antithetical to a travel agency, is a defamiliarizing move, an act of strangemaking, which plays on stereotypical ethnic descriptions as essences of these disappearing areas of the city. Intriguingly, Robert Smithson also wrote a fictional travel guide. While he had originally intended to visit the Mayan ruins in the Yucatan (arguably a more predictable destination for an expedition and a travel guide), Smithson instead focussed on the Hotel Palenque – an unremarkable hotel which exhibited both decay and renovation. Smithson photographed the hotel in 1969 and presented it as a ‘laconic’34 and ‘humorous’35 lecture to architecture students at the University of Utah in 1972. Smithson also prepared a drawing of the hotel’s layout, noting ‘areas of garbage, rubble and ruins as well as the rooms which had been finished, a dried out swimming pool and a dance hall with a stuffed hawk’.36 Fictional travel guides offer a means of moving through the city in ways which make it strange. Situationism, and more broadly psychogeography, suggests a range of potential methods for strangemaking the city. Robert MacFarlane provides a vivid explanation of a psychogeographic practice:

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Psychogeography: a beginner’s guide. Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw around its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Record the experience as you go, in whatever medium you favour: film, photograph, manuscript, tape. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data-steam. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resemblances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle and the record ends. Walking makes for content, footage for footage.37 MacFarlane explains a way of plotting a dérive through establishing an arbitrary route. To follow a circle drawn over the map of London imagines a way of moving, of experiencing the city against the grain of the normal, expected, passage. There are echoes with other authors who have set out to explore other landscapes using unlikely maps, like Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital, where his exploration was made by following the M25 motorway that encircles the UK’s capital city.38 Another technique of randomising a route of travel is to use a map of one place to explore another place. Sitiuationist Guy Debord explains this technique: ‘A friend recently told me that he had just wandered through the Harz region of Germany while blindly following the directions of a map of London. This sort of game is obviously only a feeble beginning in comparison to the complete creation of architecture and urbanism that will someday be within the power of everyone. Meanwhile we can distinguish several stages of partial, less difficult projects, beginning with the mere displacement of elements of decoration from the locations where we are used to seeing them.’39 This ‘displacement of elements’ is a kind of disruptive practice, which intervenes in the habitual way of seeing a place, to allow for a new seeing. Yoko Ono invented ‘Map Piece’, which required drawing an imaginary map and marking your destination. This imaginary map is used to navigate a real street, including inventing streets in the real world where they needed to be. When the destination from the imaginary map is reached, the instruction is to ‘ask the name of the city and give flowers to the first person you meet’40. Wilfred Hou Je Bek suggests a ‘stroll algorithm’ as a way of avoiding walking along expected routes, for example ‘2nd right, 2nd right, 1st left, repeat’.41 Or the arbitrariness can come from following a specific element of the landscape, such as colour. William S. Burroughs described the invention of an itinerary through the city by ‘walking on colors’, and through this another layer of the city can be accessed, as he describes to the artist Brion Gysin: For example, I was taking a color walk around Paris the other day . . . doing something I picked up from your pictures in which the colors shoot out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking down

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the boulevard when I suddenly felt this cool wind on a warm day and when I looked out all through the canvas like they do in the street. I was walking down the boulevard when I looked out I was seeing all the blues in the street in front of me, blue on a foulard . . . blue on a young workman’s ass . . . his blue jeans . . . a girl’s blue sweater . . . blue neon . . . the sky . . . all the blues. When I looked again I saw nothing but all the reds of traffic lights . . . car lights . . . a café sign . . . a man’s nose. Your paintings make me see the streets of Paris in a different way.42 The methods of following an arbitrarily established route, of inventing a fictional travel agency, of following a map of one place to explore another, offer means of reading against the grain of the city. Fictionalising practices are means of gaining access to the ordinary, as Ralph Rumney, the only British Situationist, put it, he wanted to ‘de-spectacularise Venice by suggesting unknown routes through it’.43 Vito Acconci adopted a strategy not of mapping, but rather of following: he simply followed the first person he saw, walking a few paces behind. As soon as that person disappeared, he would follow another.44 Sophie Calle also used rule-based ‘stalking’ practices, and like Rumney, she spent time following routes through Venice. For Calle’s Suite Vénitienne, or ‘Venetian Suite’,45 she followed a particular man, ‘Henri B’, whom she had previously met in Paris. While stalking Henri B, Calle made photographs that replicated the photographs he was taking, by using ‘a “Squintar” mirrored lens attachment, which allowed her to photograph subjects without aiming her camera directly at them’.46 Sometimes Calle calls her work a ‘joke’,47 illuminating a playfulness that interweaves through fictive practices. All of these techniques are based around finding a means to reinvent the city, to introduce a fictive overlay. As MacFarlane advises in relation to psychogeographic practice, ‘Part of the game is inventing your own randomizer’.48 My randomizer is Robert Smithson’s ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, rewalking his journey in another city, nearly fifty years later.

Becoming Robert Smithson On Saturday 30 September 1967, Robert Smithson left the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan, carrying his Instamatic camera, a copy of Brian Aldiss’s novel Earthworks (Signet edition, 1966), and a copy of The New York Times. Smithson took the bus to Passaic, New Jersey, disembarking at Union Avenue, at the Passaic Bridge. All of these details are offered by Smithson in ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, published in ArtForum in 1967. Each detail has an implied significance, a connotation beyond the seemingly banal. The novel, for example, is science fiction, underscoring the field trip as both a scientific undertaking (including Smithson’s deep interest in the processes of entropy), and a fictional framing as a mapping of ‘monuments.’ The title of the novel,

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Earthworks, also seems freighted with inference, as ‘earthworks’ is a term used for environmental artworks, especially those of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Smithson’s ‘Spiral Jetty’ in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. The copy of The New York Times included a critique of an art exhibition which Smithson discusses within his article. And the Instamatic camera frames both the objective practice of photography as documentation, and the Instamatic as the most ordinary of cameras, suited to the most ordinary of landscapes. Smithson’s trip to Passaic was not ‘fictional’ in that he actually went on the trip, but his narrative creates an alternative reading of what was encountered. Recounting the various ordinary structures and places along his route, Smithson elevates them to the status of ‘monument’ and constructs a different Passaic, one where he can ask, ‘Has Passaic replaced Rome as The Eternal City?’49 In becoming Robert Smithson, I gathered together a copy of Earthworks (on my Kindle), a copy of The Press (Christchurch’s daily newspaper), and my iPhone as a camera – being the most ordinary of contemporary photographic tools. I set the iPhone’s camera onto square format, to mirror Smithson’s square Instamatic images. The square format was also part of the transformation of my habitual way of seeing, of eschewing what might be the usual practice of going to take pictures on a walk through the city, composing photos within the conventional rectangular format.

Christchurch as Passaic The map for my dérive was plotted by working through Robert Smithson’s description of his movements and the monuments he encountered. I charted Smithson’s route onto a map (Figure 7.1), interpolating between the points and using any contextual clues provided. His pseudo-scientific demeanour meant that he conveyed sufficient detail for the route to be determined. He left the bus where Union Avenue meets the river, at the Passaic Bridge, where he located the first of his monuments. The bridge became ‘The Monument of Dislocated Directions’, reflecting its kinetic form as an open swing bridge, which pivoted around to let river traffic through. Walking north up the Passaic River, he came to an area where pipes were disgorging water into the river. This became ‘The Great Pipe Monument’. Further up the river he found the highway under construction, and made his famous observation of this site – that something under construction, such as a highway, is like ‘ruins in reverse’.50 He then proceeded to 11 Central Avenue, to the Golden Coach Diner, for lunch and to reload his Instamatic camera with film. The final monument he covers in detail in the ArtForum article is ‘The Sand Box Monument’, which was described as being near the railroad, in a large empty area, which I located approximately, using an historic map of Passaic.51 As with the Situationist practice of using the map of one place to navigate another, I set out to plot Smithson’s route onto a map of Christchurch

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FIGURE 7.1 Approximation of Robert Smithson’s field trip to Passaic. 1. Monument – Passaic Bridge, ‘the Monument of Dislocated Directions’; 2. Monument – approximate location of pumping derrick, ‘The Great Pipes Monument’; 3. ‘Ruins in Reverse’, highway under construction; 4. Golden Coach Diner, 11 Central Avenue, have lunch, load film; 5. ‘Sand Box Monument’. approximate location.

FIGURE 7.2 Plotting Robert Smithson’s Passaic field trip onto a map of Christchurch. 1. Potential bridge monument; 2. Potential Great Pipes monument; 3. Potential Ruins in Reverse; 4. Lunch location, ‘load film’; 5. Potential sand box monument.

(Figure 7.2). The parallels were uncanny. Christchurch had Passaic’s bridge, river, grid street layout, and even a railway line in an analogous location. I plotted the location for ‘lunch’ at a point that echoed the setting of the Golden Coach Diner, where two streets meet at an acute angle. This is where I would need to ‘change the film’. There was a powerful sense of resonance, a feeling which only increased once the dérive took place.

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Following the line of the dérive, I began at the Montreal Street bridge, where the Earthquake Memorial was under construction next to the river, and there was an immediate frisson of recognition: here were the ‘ruins in reverse’ (Figure  7.3). Walking slowly and purposefully, I began to notice curious elements of the landscape, like a solar panel apparatus attached to a tree. It was some kind of sinister surveillance device, whose absurdity was emphasized by the solar panel being located on the south side of the tree, which, here in the southern hemisphere, is the shady side (Figure  7.4). A small sign attached to two metal stakes created a sense of a sacred space (Figure 7.5), resonating not just with Smithson’s bestowing of monumental status upon ordinary elements, but also with Keiller’s character Robinson, who ‘declared Cannon Street to be a sacred site and the number 15 a sacred bus route’.52 In marking Assembly Space, the sign created a kind of force field, an emotional undulation in the landscape, the kind of ripple that

FIGURE 7.3 ‘Ruins in Reverse.’

FIGURE 7.4 A sinister solar-powered surveillance device on the shady south side of a tree.

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FIGURE 7.5 The Sacred Assembly Point.

FIGURE 7.6 Monument to the Melancholy of Leavings.

Debord noted in the dérive, that ‘cities have psychogeographic contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones’.53 Further along the river, following the map of Passaic, I encountered an ornamental pool which has been empty since the 2011 earthquake. Gathering leaves and other detritus, and maintaining its formal, classical outline, this became the Monument to the Melancholy of Leavings, a place to reflect on all that has departed, and all that has been left behind (Figure 7.6). Nearby was an empty podium, where a statue had toppled in the earthquake, leaving an absence. Here was the Monument to the Void (Figure 7.7). Moving up the river, I encountered a wrapped turret, which had been removed after earthquake damage. It became the Fragment Monument (also known as The Rocket) (Figure 7.8). A seat and rubbish bin inflected the space with another psychogeographic contour, the Monument to the Infra-ordinary (for Georges Perec) (Figure  7.9). As Perec asked, ‘How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal,

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FIGURE 7.7 Monument to the Void.

FIGURE 7.8 Fragment Monument (also known as The Rocket).

FIGURE 7.9 Monument to the Infra-ordinary (for Georges Perec).

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the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?’54 As I began to approach the ‘lunch’ destination, something very uncanny happened. Despite being fully charged at the beginning of the dérive, my iPhone suddenly failed. As though underscoring the parallel world I was inhabiting as Robert Smithson, while I did not have to ‘change film’ as Smithson had done, I did have to change cameras. Fortunately I had a small digital camera with me, and was able to continue my documentation of the dérive. Following this changing of cameras at lunch, I moved to the final location by the railway line, where it intersects the busy arterial route of Riccarton Road. And here was the ultimate in irony, amidst the dull and quotidian surroundings of motels, fish and chip shops and railway infrastructure, a sign: Keep Riccarton Beautiful (Figure  7.10). The sign seemed a kind of psychogeographic gift, a moment of vividness in a landscape I had never before noticed. As I stood there photographing it, a stranger came up to me and said ‘Isn’t it amazing what you see when you have time to stop?’ The strangeness of the moment unnerved me, the sudden realization of how much time had passed as I moved through the dérive, how I had become immersed in my Robert Smithsonness. The absurdity of the stranger’s comment was striking – after all this view was not ‘amazing’ in conventional aesthetic terms. It was a perfunctory sign next to a rudimentary garden

FIGURE 7.10 Beauty at journey’s end.

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along the railway line. Yet here, at this final point on the journey came a sense of pause. The stranger’s words provided an unexpected message, perhaps relayed from Passaic fifty years ago.

Epilogue Re-enacting Robert Smithson’s Passaic field trip in Christchurch changed everything. Christchurch was no longer as familiar as it had been, it revealed hidden psychogeographic contours, it showed its absurdity in south-facing solar panels, and it became a domain of minor monuments, like Keiller’s London and Smithson’s Passaic. Passaic changed, it became a way of seeing another place. And I, too, changed. Forced to walk slowly, and follow my invented itinerary, I became a plotter, in all senses of the word. Like Prouvost and Calle, there was a playfulness in fibbing and joking my way through the city, but also the gravitas of the forensic; frisking, detecting, revealing. As a ficto-critical practice, there was an unsettling of the taken-for-granted and of assumed ways of seeing and being. It was, to repeat Macfarlane’s words, an ‘experience [of] astonishment upon the terrain of familiarity. . . .’55

Notes 1

Robert Smithson, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, ArtForum, (December 1967): 48–51.

2

Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as technique,’ in Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Lee T Lemon and Marion J Reiss, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3–24.

3

See, for example, Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta Books, 1997); Iain Sinclair, London Orbital, (London: Granta Books, 2002); Iain Sinclair, The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City (London, Oneworld Publications, 2017).

4

Naomi Stead, ‘If On a Winter’s Day a Tourist’, Architectural Theory Review, vol. 14, no. 2 (2009): 108–18; Naomi Stead, ‘Writing the City, or, The Story of a Sydney Walk’, NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, vol. 18, no. 4 (2010): 226–45.

5

Jane Rendell, ‘Site-Writing: She is Walking about in a Town Which She does not Know’, Home Cultures, vol. 4, no.2 (2007): 177–99.

6

Phil Smith [Cecile Oak], Anywhere: A Mythogeography of South Devon and How to Walk It (Charmouth: Triarchy Press, 2017).

7

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust (London: Granta Publications. Kindle Edition, 2014), 267.

8

Sinclair, Lights Out, 4.

9

Michael Kimmelman, ‘Sculpture From the Earth, but Never Limited by It’, New York Times (24 June 2005), republished on the Robert Smithson website

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https://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/tnytjun.html (accessed 7 November 2017). 10 P.W. Hill, Superfictions: The Art Fair Murders. A Novel. An Installation. A Superfiction, (Hobart: University of Tasmania, 1997). 11 Mark Richard McCulloh, Understanding W.G. Sebald (Columbia, SC : University of South Carolina Press, 2003): xvii. 12 Bernd and Hilla Becher; Robert Smithson, Field Trips, 70–80. (Torino: Hopefulmonster, 2002). 13 James Lingwood, ‘The Weight of Time’, in Bernd and Hilla Becher; Robert Smithson, Field Trips (Torino: Hopefulmonster, 2002), , 70–80, 74. 14 Casey Lesser, ‘The Venice Biennale’s 10 Best Pavilions in the Arsenale and Giardini’, Artsy (10 May 2019). Available online: https://www.artsy.net/article/ artsy-editorial-venice-biennales-10-best-pavilions (accessed 6 June 2019). 15 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Turner prize winner Laure Prouvost: “I’m very strange” ’, The Guardian, (3 December 2013). Available online: https://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2013/dec/03/laure-prouvost-turner-prize-winner (accessed 6 June 2019). 16 Naomi Rea, ‘Laure Prouvost Is Digging a Tunnel Between the French and British Pavilions at the Venice Biennale’, Artnet, (May 8, 2019), Available online: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/laure-prouvost-digging-venicebiennale-1539073#:~:text=Laure%20Prouvost%20Is%20Digging%20a%20 Tunnel%20Between%20the%20French,Pavilions%20at%20the%20 Venice%20Biennale&text=(In%20French%2C%20the%20expression%20 %E2%80%9C,on%20the%20way%20to%20Venice). (accessed 6 June 2019). 17 André Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard (London: Penguin Books, 1999) (First published 1928). 18 Georges Rodenbach, Bruges-la-Morte, trans. Philip Mosley (Chicago: University of Scranton Press, 2007) (First published 1892). 19 See, for example, W.G. Sebald, The Emigrants (London: Harvill, 1992); W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn (London: New Directions Books, 1998). 20 Smithson, ‘Monuments of Passaic’, 71. 21 Smithson, ‘Monuments of Passaic’, 69. 22 Smithson, ‘Monuments of Passaic’, 70. 23 Patrick Keiller, London (London: British Film Institute, 1994); Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Space (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Patrick Keiller, Robinson in Ruins (London: British Film Institute, 2010). 24 David B. Clarke, ‘The City of the Future Revisited or, the Lost World of Patrick Keiller’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, vol. 32, no. 1 (January 2007): 29. 25 Patrick Keiller, unpublished script for London, nd. 26 Strangemaking is a variant of the word ‘estrangement’ or ‘ostranenie’ developed by Viktor Shklovsky in the context of Russian Formalism in literature. The concept of strangemaking and ostranenie has been developed in the context of

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landscape architecture in the chapter: Jacky Bowring, ‘To Make the Stone[s] Stony: Defamiliarisation and Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones’ in Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations, ed. Michel Conan (Washington DC : Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard University Press, 2007). 27 Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Les Lèvres Nues (November 1956), issue 9. Translated by Ken Knabb, republished on Situationist Internationale online, http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html (accessed 7 November 2017). 28 Debord, Theory of the Dérive, no page numbers. 29 Dériveur is one who practises the dérive. 30 Robert MacFarlane, ‘A road of one’s own’, TLS, the Times Literary Supplement Issue: 5349 (7 October 2005): 3. 31 Simon Sadler, The Situationist City (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1998), 56. 32 Sadler, The Situationist City, 56. 33 Sadler, The Situationist City, 56. 34 Lingwood, ‘The Weight of Time’, 77. 35 Nancy Spector, ‘Robert Smithson: Hotel Palenque’, Guggeneheim Collection Online. Available online: https://www.guggenheim.org/artwork/5321 (accessed 6 November 2017). 36 Lingwood, ‘The Weight of Time’, 77. 37 MacFarlane, ‘A road of one’s own’,3. 38 Sinclair, London Orbital. 39 Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’, Les Lèvres Nues, 6 (1955) http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display_printable/2 no page numbers 40 Peter Wollen, Paris Manhattan: Writings on Art (London: Verso, 2004), 157. 41 Wilfried Hou Je Bek Algorithmic Psychogeography. Available online: https:// spacehijackers.org/html/ideas/writing/socialfiction.html (accessed 6 November 2017). 42 William S. Burroughs, from an interview with Brion Gysin in 1960, ‘Ten Years and a Billion Dollars’, The Adding Machine: Selected Essays (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1985). 43 Ralph Rumney, The Consul (London: Verso, 2002) 47. 44 Vito Acconci (1969), Following Piece, Museum of Modern Art. Available online: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/146947 (accessed 19 November 2017). 45 Sophie Calle, Suite Vénitienne (Los Angeles: Siglo, 2015, originally published in French in 1983). 46 Rachel Taylor, ‘Sophie Calle: Venetian Suite, 1980, 1996’, Tate Gallery, April 2010. Available online: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calle-venetiansuite-t13640 (accessed 14 June 2019). 47 Michael Bishop, Contemporary French art. Volume 1, Eleven studies (Faux titre ; no. 317). (Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2008), 97.

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48 MacFarlane, ‘A road of one’s own’, 3. 49 Smithson, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, 74. 50 Smithson, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, 72 (emphasis in original). 51 Although Smithson includes just six photographs in his article, he took seven rolls of film on his field trip to Passaic. The images are held by the Estate of Robert Smithson and the Archives of American Art. 52 Keiller, unpublished script for London. 53 Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’. 54 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, trans. J. Sturrock (London; New York: Penguin Books, 1997), 206. 55 MacFarlane, ‘A road of one’s own’, 3.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hiroshima: Notes on the Expanded Field Kim Roberts

Travellers are, almost without exception, unnatural and irresponsible. KENZABURO OE, HIROSHIMA NOTES , 1965 1

Act so that there is no use in a centre. GERTRUDE STEIN, TENDER BUTTONS , 1914 2

In the weeks after her return from Hiroshima, she finds herself one evening kneeling in the lounge. She is preoccupied with getting her two-year-old son ready for bed. As she helps him with his pyjamas, her fingers reach for a button and she is seized by a memory that is not her own. It is the memory, the image-fragment, of a mother who lost her family – son, daughter, husband – to the conflagration of Hiroshima. She survived, living for many years, retelling her loss, over and over, in a segment of video-taped interview that plays in the exit corridor of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. The bomb destroyed her life. She provides no mitigating moral to her story. Eight thousand, one hundred and forty-two kilometres, sixty-eight years away from the source I touch this button and recoil. In this instant the son, whose body she finds on the little bed where she laid him down to sleep, is mine. The buttons of his shirt are burnt into his chest. I can neither breathe nor comprehend how to survive this moment. 96

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FIGURE 8.1 Aerial view of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park from the northwest, 31 July 1958. Image reproduced courtesy of Hiroshima Municipal Archives. She scrambles back. She attempts to place (to re-place) the experience of this woman outside the boundaries of herself. But something has fractured. (I cannot recall, cannot recount this without reciting her gestures, mapping them on my body. Fingers run outwards along clavicles to shoulders. Hand touches bone between breasts.) This is not my place. I must not be found here. Here, in this space, in this ‘past that was never present.’3 Here, in this, ‘a past that has never been present’.4 The words came almost as unbidden as the experience that prompted them. They rattled in the margins of my everyday realities for days, before finding concrete form on the page. Persistently, they carved out their particular cadences in whispers. Haunting and petulant, they insisted that they take their place, belatedly, in my field-diaries. It is there that they were eventually inscribed, alongside notes from my fieldwork in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, alongside interviews and observations of the ways in which foreign visitors, such as myself, navigate this commemorative space: physically and conceptually. These words represented both a departure from

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and a return to the site of this research. With the formation of these sentences came a critical expansion, a methodological swerve and immersion in a second phase of fieldwork. With a nod to Rosalind Krauss, I have come to think of this work as an attempted navigation of Hiroshima’s ‘expanded field’.5 The expanded field that I propose here is temporal and spatial. The subject site extends a nervous system of affect far beyond its empirical boundaries. A memory quickens. It snags on some chance likeness in the here and now. The line snaps taut and reels you in, reels you back, sends you reeling. It sends you forward into a new assemblage, a new cartographic warp and weft of mental images. Memory is the membrane, it is this graphite-smudged parchment upon which affects are written and which transmits them hereafter. As Gilles Deleuze wrote of a similar membrane – the cinematic screen in the hands of director Alain Resnais – memory is the membrane that ‘makes the outside [of the world] and inside [of the brain] present to each other’.6 On the surface of this membrane, on this screen, on this page, fragments of this (internalized) past fuse with this (externalized) present, reframing futures. The expanded field is something of an aporia: one best navigated not with the conventional maps of geography and plans of architecture alone, but with a simultaneous pursuit of what Michel de Certeau referred to as ‘spatial stories’.7 In ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, published in 1979, Rosalind Krauss exposed the tendency of art criticism to categorize sculpture by situating it in a historicized lineage of art. She challenged this strategy for its diminishment of difference, questioning the way it reincorporated the new as familiar – as the by-product of an evolution of past forms. In this way, Krauss traced sculpture’s journey from its once inseparable associations with ‘the logic of the monument’. The monument, she suggests, is a ‘commemorative representation’. It is situated ‘in a particular place and speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning or use of that place’.8 Outlining the failure of this traditional affiliation between site and sculptural object during modernism,9 Krauss claims that this period sees an inversion in which sculpture becomes baseless, homeless: ‘functionally placeless and largely self-referential’.10 By the early 1960s, she proposes, sculpture can be defined in purely negative terms: ‘it was what was on or in front of a building that was not the building, or what was in the landscape that was not the landscape.’11 In articulating an expanded field for sculpture, Krauss argues for a multiplication and expansion of sculpture’s critical framing. Her terms of reference attend to content and context rather than tracing a historical pedigree. These frameworks establish not fixed categories, but open and referential fields in which emergent models of sculptural practice and product might be mapped. The landscape of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, the product of a competition-winning design by Kenzo Tange and his colleges Sachio Otani

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and Takashi Asada in 1949, is certainly composed of elements Krauss defines as situated in the regions between architecture and not-architecture, landscape and not-landscape. Likewise, the tensions Krauss articulates between the languages of monument and modernism could be drawn out in relation to this site. Here, however, proposed expansions of the critical, perceptual and affective fields will take up other dimensions. Here, I focus less on the site’s objects and certainly less on any supposed meanings and representations. I focus instead on its (memorial) workings and spaces, operations and space-times forged between site and interlocutor. The first of these dimensions is the relationship formed between a particular subset of Park visitors – foreign tourists (of which I am one) – and (to use Michel de Certeau’s term) their spatial ‘practice’ of the site, both in situ and retrospectively through memory. Second is the way in which the thinking of this physical and mental landscape may be expanded and opened up via a writing methodology that employs creative non-fiction and fictional elements. I am suggesting a ‘site-writing’, similar to that proposed by Jane Rendell, one that turns its critical gaze to the positionality of author as researcher, observer, participant and writer quite literally within and in the creation of a field of knowledge.12 Before discussing these dimensions of potential architectural expansion in more detail, I want to raise a brief challenge to the definition of monument that Krauss proposes. It is a challenge that links and informs the expansions offered by both dimensions of the expanded field introduced above. This

FIGURE 8.2 View from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial looking north towards the Cenotaph (middle ground) and the Atomic Bomb Dome (centre background), 6 August 1954. Image reproduced courtesy of the Hiroshima Municipal Archives.

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challenge is one prompted by the redefinition of monument posed by Deleuze and Guattari in their final book together, What is Philosophy? In this work, the writers disconnect the use-value of the monument from its conventionally assumed function: the commemoration of past events. Instead, they link the utility of the monument to sensations experienced in the present. Like the scar of which Deleuze speaks in Difference and Repetition, the monument is an event of condensed contemplation and imaginative flight. The monument works, when it does the most revolutionary work intended of it, by contracting ‘all the instants that separate us’ from that past wound ‘into a living present’.13 ‘The monument’s action’, as Deleuze and Guattari declare, ‘is not memory but fabulation’.14 At its best, the monument is not simply a window that offers glimpses of a distant past. It is a passage that opens to real-time affects, real-time imaginative and evaluative encounters. This is a connection that charges the present with the virtual energies of past. The essentially autobiographical fragment that marked the beginning of this paper emerged in my field diaries at a key point in the conceptual expansion of my fieldwork. It is hard now to tell if the lived event and the act of articulating it in writing prompted this expansion or merely corresponded with a broader shift. It was written half a world away, far outside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park itself, weeks after I had returned home after a period of more conventional in-situ fieldwork. Here, against all my contentious ethical positioning of self as foreign within the site of my research, my subconscious stumbled; superimposing another woman’s memories on my own embodied reality. On the surface of a lived instant of my own life was grafted a ‘post-memorial’15 fragment, a fragment picked up in passing, a fragment that lodged in my mind like a stone in a shoe. Such a moment, a mediated moment – mediated through brain and body, mediated through memory and writing – aligns with the monument of which Deleuze and Guattari speak: a fabulation in which times and spaces condense, a fabulation that reverberates perturbing affect. This piece of writing drew my attention to a sharp contrast between the objective tone and content of my academic writing and that which emerged in my more personal reflections. I realized, looking back, that this followed a pre-existing tendency in my field diaries: a tendency to use a written form that borrowed from fiction, in style and in the restless manipulation of speaking and observational position, if not in content. Looking back, I was forced to acknowledge that the explorative voices of my ‘Hiroshima notes’ (with a nod to Kenzaburo Oe) had been creeping into my personal journals, my ‘field diaries’, for some twenty-six years – since the time of my first visit to Hiroshima. In one version, the origin story of this narrative bundle of memory and motivation goes something like this: Once upon a time, as a young girl [of 16] on a tour organized by others, I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. What I saw and experienced

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there opened inarticulate questions and vivid images that, like eyes, refused to close. These are the things that followed me home and ultimately begged my return. I had grappled with the questions of writing style before; as a scholar of literature as well as architecture, this was familiar territory. But the writing of this piece and the experience from which it stemmed brought these issues home abruptly. I realized I had extensively explored questions concerning the production of site through writing via the consideration of other literary and literary-cinematic works but still had not dared to fully or openly tackle them at the site of my own writing. Previously, similar site-writing had been an entirely more clandestine function of my broader architectural practice. A function that silently fed into ideas later formalized and abstracted in drawings and critical writing. One piece of literature and cinema that preoccupied me with its constructions and reconstructions of the subject site was Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Filmed predominantly in and around the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park shortly after the completion of Kenzo Tange’s master plan, the film was a radical departure for director Alain Resnais, from the documentary he had been initially commissioned to make. Several months into filming, Resnais became convinced that with a documentary he would only repeat the work of his earlier acclaimed short film, Night and Fog (1955) made about the Nazi concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Turning away from the documentary genre, Resnais collaborated instead with novelist cum screenwriter Marguerite Duras to create a film that was explicitly fictional. It is a film that is quite deliberately not about Hiroshima but in which Hiroshima is seen through the story of the 24-hour affair between a visiting French actress and a Japanese architect. Images drawn from the woman’s war-time experience in Nevers, France, return, bruising the once unimaginably traumatized but now serene surfaces of reconstructed Hiroshima in Resnais’ evocative cinematic montages and Duras’ haunting screenplay. The aesthetic techniques deployed are as beautiful as they are ethically and emotionally unnerving. In many ways emblematic of my research, in Hiroshima mon amour the spaces of the city break against the banks of the memory and contemporary experience of this foreign tourist and her lover. Hiroshima mon amour is no mere cinematic ‘tracing’ of the external appearance of Hiroshima but a ‘mapping’ of the spatial zones of intensity that emerge from the meeting of He and She in this city. The distinction I make here between mapping and tracing is draws again on Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that a map is distinct from a tracing insofar as it ‘is entirely orientated toward an experimentation in contact with the real’.16 It is the creative and critical thinking involved in producing a map that distinguishes it from a tracing that unthinkingly follows existing conditions, contours and modes of representation.

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Just as Resnais turned to fiction to explore complexities of the event-city of Hiroshima from a more oblique and more aesthetically evocative angle, my notes of the expanded field represent a refocusing upon the empirical site and my own acts of observation with new lenses. Spatial and temporal registers are transformed with distance. Poetic reflection shifts not only language but thought. These things illuminate the awkwardness of the transitory intimacy, the uncanny liminality and lingering affects of being a foreign object – a witness who is not one – in the acutely local but pervasively global site of the Peace Park. In these curious performances of site and self in writing, conventional logics come unhinged. Inner and outer worlds collide and momentarily adhere to each other – wet sheets, clinging, reveal living bodies and modes of operation that were previously indiscernible, that were previously nonexistent. The aftertaste of experience bites down, leaving an imprint on thought. The cartographic corner of what I thought I knew is lifted. A new nervous system is revealed as the Park reaches out its via ‘uncharted channels’:17 In bed. I lie awake and think of the Sparrow Man. The kids’ Bambi clock ticks persuasively in the other room I leave my warm bed for the computer. I started writing the first lines last night before sleep claimed me leaving the lights on. After the words ‘Swanston Street’ I go back to my notes, I mistrust my memory. In this instance the recording device failed. As I said already I mistrust my memory, the embroidering it does, the lapses it smoothes over. A cuneiform scatter in the dirt. It was the first thing I saw, Says the interpreter,

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The multitude marks of tiny feet. The man on the bench extends his hand. A sparrow hops and bends its head, sprightly, slender, to take seed. Sparrows gather on his knees at his feet to eat. Not like the blowsy brown birds of home these. Not like the scruffy scavengers in the forecourt of the library in Swanston Street. He is retired. Comes to the Park most days now to feed the birds, the sparrows. This particular place, this bench? I ask. Yes, mostly here. The sparrows remember. They flutter confidently to him. Then startle. Take pre-emptive flight. Seconds later a van door opens. They gradually resettle – dust to earth – As we talk. At about this time, a new and unanticipated phase of fieldwork began presenting itself. It took the form of stories spontaneously offered up to me by past visitors to Hiroshima who had heard – often in the most general terms as they intersected with my everyday, academic, and professional life – about my research. It became apparent that these people, having had more time to reflect and comprehend their initial impressions, had more nuanced and considered narratives to offer than many of their in-situ counterparts.18 Further, the workings and failures of memory shaped these retrospective accounts in highly revelatory ways. And so I conducted more interviews: interviews in the expanded field.19 These interviews with past visitors followed a similar structure to those conducted in situ, with one important difference. With my in situ interviewees, we verbally followed pathways taken through the Park, documenting their

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FIGURE 8.3 Feeding sparrows in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, August 2013. Photo credit: Kim Roberts.

affective responses to the space and the constituent elements that they mentioned. We traced their journey on a ready-made map of the Park. In my expanded field interviews, however, I asked each participant to draw a cognitive map of the remembered site. With each of these maps, the Park was reconstructed anew. When I transcribed the interviews, both in situ and within the expanded field, I did so with the pedantry of a novice. I spaced phrases into sound bites rather than prose, with ums, laughter, line breaks and ellipsis that, for me, best reflected the idiosyncratic rhythms of their speech and my listening. In doing so I found in their words a strange and stumbling poetry, one with gaps, hesitations and graspings – at things, at affects – they are unable to fully describe or explain. When the recording had failed, as it did on a couple of occasions, multiple memorial ‘transcripts’ developed, fumbling at the edges of what was remembered and the different fictions alternate language-permutations created. In this way, the expanded field of my investigations embraced not merely a geographical expansion; the research expanded too the terms of its disciplinary context and in terms of the type of knowledge produced. It expanded into a field of linguistic utterance, writing, and the fragmentary poetics of what it is to broach and articulate the doubtful and difficult postmemorial space of Hiroshima: a space that is both physical and the milieu of a ‘monumental’ encounter in the sense Deleuze and Guattari use the term. This is an encounter in which the categories and boundaries of self, other, place, object and meaning begin to shift, taking even the writer by surprise.

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The words of both transcripts and reconstructions tonally correlated, echoed and argued with my own notes of the expanded field. They were words that similarly broke and stalled, that changed direction and tried again as they struggled to find their way through a sprawling site via post-memorial pathways. This site was one that unfolded simultaneously from the real, remembered and imagined landscapes of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. This is a landscape construed between sites and selves, past and present realities, that emerge, fuse and communicate perhaps nowhere other than in the flashes of memory and words that seek to grasp those moment-monuments. As Deleuze writes in Cinema 2: The Time-image: ‘Landscapes are mental states, just as mental states are cartographies, both crystallized in each other, geometrized, mineralized.’20 Memory is not simply ‘the faculty of having recollections’, it is instead ‘the membrane’. It ‘makes sheets of past and layers of reality correspond’. From an already present ‘inside’, the past unfolds. Reality meets with this past at the resonating screen of memory, ‘arriving from an outside always to come’. The memory is the present against which they press, against which they ‘gnaw’, which they produce in the now that is their encounter. The two gnawing at the present which is now only their encounter.21 ‘Carey’, for example, recalls yellow flowers where his photographs show fallen yellow autumn leaves. He fabulates a narrative-image from scraps of fact. This image is one that corresponds with his feeling of leaving the solemn, ‘harrowing’ and ‘mausoleum-ish’ museum and returning to the light-filled outside world: It was kind of beautiful these blooming young flowers. and these kids that are blooming and full of humor. So it felt full of life outside. And you are taken from . . . [the museum] You’re dropped down to the ground.22 ‘Anita’ speaks instead of becoming overwhelmed looking up at the bright blue and peaceful sky, a stark contrast to the ruined Atomic Bomb Dome before her. She maps the landscape via an affective response. Shocked at her own emotions, seeing becomes conflated with feeling: But to just see that memorial like that Um was just like:

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Oh my goodness Um, what, this is what, this is the first thing that we’re feeling and we’ve read nothing and heard nothing and . . . [. . .] And then it was that sort of emotion And then I’m thinking, Oh And there’s more to see [. . .] So what is there to come? What emotion is there to come when you are seeing this image . . .? And I think just the way the sunlight . . . I don’t know. Just the way the sun was shining and the whole building and how . . . The age of it too, you know? And I don’t know it was just . . . The whole situation was just a bit: oh my god we’re actually here and what horrible devastation has happened?23 These words of my interview subjects, like my own writing, evidenced a collision of real and imagined, past and present worlds, the troubled tangle of observational and experiential boundaries. Within the words of my fieldnotes, in particular, the subject position oscillates (between first and third and occasionally second person) as I grope for a place to stand and test the ground beneath the feet I write. ‘Where am I?’ the empirical ‘I’ asks. ‘Where you are?’ the written “I” hazards elusively: fishing for clues. “Ere you are? Before you are? Perhaps after too?’ The conclusive, the authoritive: ‘You are here’, keeps slipping the leash. It keeps moving, always just ahead.

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FIGURE 8.4 Atomic Bomb Dome, Hiroshima, September 2013. Image reproduced courtesy of ‘Anita’.

Like memory, the ‘I’ that unfolds on the page – inscribing landscape as mental state, mental state as mapping – is the membrane that ‘is constantly making relative insides and outsides communicate or exchange’.24 As a statement in lieu of a proper conclusion: I believe that it is this very movement that informs my site-writing, a writing that expands the field of its exploration. It is this movement that drives its ficto-critical pursuits, its ‘autofrictions’25 and the uncanny stones it turns. This is the movement of thought that declines to settle into well-worn grooves. It is a movement that maps surfaces of past and place, their tentative occupation of the present – far away in space and time – here, on the page. It is a positionality that refuses fixity but that interrogates itself: an inquiry that brooks only interim conclusions as new questions rise up and take form. I would echo the sentiments of Canadian poet, painter and classicist Ann Carson, who, when asked why she writes, replies: ‘to find out what I think.’26 Or (and I would expand this field also): to find out what thinking is possible from this written space I construct and temporarily inhabit. When Carson describes poetry, she speaks of it as the ‘action of the mind captured on a page’.27 She is not talking solely about an action of the writer. When poetry, like fiction, like the ficto-critical, works this mind-movement is a stream that the reader too is invited to enter. This engagement offers the

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possibility of transformation and the pursuit of new lineaments – the fault lines of thought. Where the purely critical voice demands the reader follow in its wake, tracing a prescribed pathway through a carefully constructed argument, the poetics of fiction (of ficto-criticism) asks of its reader other things. If criticism articulates the logic-driven machinations of judgement, if it lays them out for the intellectual appreciation of others, the ficto-critical draws its readers into other types of thought. It urges a mapping rather than a tracing, a participation, an affective response. It seeks to compel the compulsive movement of thought that feels, that answers back and that creates in its own right. It seeks to compel a thought that fabricates: unfolding in that fabrication an expanded field of thinking that extends its reaches out beyond the page.

Notes 1

Kenzaburo Oe, Hiroshima Notes, trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa (New York: Grove Books, 1996).

2

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons: The Corrected Centennial Edition. ed Seth Perlow (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2014), 63.

3

Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London and New York: Continuum, 1994), 115.

4

Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), 252.

5

Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8 (Spring, 1979): 33. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=O162-2870%21897921%298%3C30 %3ASITEF%3E2.O.C0%3B2-Y

6

Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 207.

7

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984): 115. See also Kim Roberts, ‘Design as precursor: Michel de Certeau’s “practice” and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park’, in The Marvellous Real: Past Gazing, Future Glimpses, ed. Dominique Hecq (ed), Double Dialogues, Issue 17, Winter 2015.

8

Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 33. http://links.jstor.org/ sici?sici=O162-2870%21897921%298%3C30%3ASITEF%3E2.O.C0%3B2 -Y

9

In this Krauss echoes Lewis Mumford’s much earlier take that: ‘The notion of a modern monument is veritably a contradiction in terms: if it is a monument it is not modern, and if it is modern, it can not be a monument.’ Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996), 438.

10 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 34. 11 Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, 36.

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12 Jane Rendell, ‘Architecture-writing’, The Journal of Architecture, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005): 255–64. DOI: 10.1080/13602360500162451. Jane Rendell, ‘Sitewriting’, Home Cultures, vol. 4, no. 2 (2007): 177–200. DOI: 10.275/174063107X209019. Rosalind Krauss herself was to term a similar ‘dramatic interplay of levels and styles and speakers that had formerly been the prerogative of literature but not of critical or philosophical discourse’ the ‘paraliterary.’ Rosalind Krauss, ‘Poststructuralism and the “Paraliterary” ’, October 13 (Summer 1980): 37. 13 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77. 14 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 167–8. 15 This term I derive from Marianne Hirsch’s use of the phrase ‘post-memory’ in her research investigating the ‘inheritance’ of memories by second-generation Holocaust survivors derived not from their own experience, but from the photographs, objects and (frequently) scant narratives acquired from their parents. See Marianne Hirsch, ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory’, Discourse, vol. 15, no. 2 Special Issue: The Emotions, Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Winter 1992–93): 3–29. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/41389264. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997). Marianne Hirsch, ‘The Generation of Postmemory’, Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. (Spring 2008): 103–28. DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-019. 16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988), 12. 17 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 149. 18 The exception was those in situ interview subjects who had visited the Peace Park on multiple occasions. 19 This data was collected to supplement and challenge a more traditional architectural and historical analysis of the site. This architectural-historical study was anchored by an investigation of the 1949 competition-winning master plan of the Park by the team led by Kenzo Tange. The design’s development from the competition to construction and beyond, and Tange’s repeated returns to the site through writing throughout the course of his long career, were explored. Co-current with site-based observations, archival research in the Hiroshima Municipal Archives assembled historical photographs of the site documenting the annual Peace Memorial Ceremony, from the 1946 to the present. This collection of images became instrumental in mapping the confirmation and subtle adjustment of Tange’s design through ritual use over time. 20 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 206–07. 21 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 207. 22 ‘Carey’ in discussion with author, 29 March 2014. 23 ‘Anita’ in discussion with author, 17 March 2014. 24 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 207.

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25 In her use of the term ‘autofrictions’, Dominique Hecq, with reference to the work of Luce Irigaray, points to the tensions between ‘the I and the you’ and place poetics in upsetting conventional expressions of identity, meaning and knowledge. The space of this friction implies a ‘gap’ that exists ‘between discourses where knowledge can be intuited, articulated or performed’. Dominique Hecq, ‘autofrictions: The Fictopoet, the Critic and the Teacher’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 2. (September 2005): 179–80. 26 Ann Carson, interview by Will Aitken, The Paris Review, 117 (Fall 2014): unpaginated. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetryno-88-anne-carson 27 Ann Carson, interview by Will Aitken, unpaginated.

Bibliography Carson, Ann. The Paris Review. By Will Aitken. 117 (Fall 2014): unpaginated. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5420/the-art-of-poetry-no-88-annecarson de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. London and New York: Continuum, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Hecq, Dominique. ‘autofrictions: The Fictopoet, the Critic and the Teacher’. Cultural Studies Review, vol. 11, no. 2. (September 2005): 179–88. Hirsch, Marianne. ‘Family Pictures: Maus, Mourning, and Post-Memory’. Discourse, vol. 15, no. 2, Special Issue: The Emotions, Gender, and the Politics of Subjectivity (Winter 1992–3): 3–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41389264. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA , and London: Harvard University Press, 1997. Hirsch, Marianne. ‘The Generation of Postmemory’. Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 103–28. DOI 10.1215/03335372-2007-019. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’. October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=O162-2870%21897921%298%3C30%3 ASITEF%3E2.O.C0%3B2-Y Krauss, Rosalind. ‘Poststructuralism and the Parlaiterary’. October 10 (Summer 1980): 36–40. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3397700 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities. San Diego, New York and London: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1996. Oe, Kenzaburo. Hiroshima Notes. Trans. David L. Swain and Toshi Yonezawa. New York: Grove Press, 1996.

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Rendell, Jane. ‘Architecture-writing’. The Journal of Architecture, vol. 10, no. 3 (2005): 255–64. DOI: 10.1080/13602360500162451. Rendell, Jane. ‘Site-writing’. Home Cultures, vol. 4, no. 2 (2007): 177–200. DOI: 10.275/174063107X209019. Roberts, Kim. ‘Design as precursor: Michel de Certeau’s “practice” and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park’. In The Marvellous Real: Past Gazing, Future Glimpses Double Dialogues Issue 17, Winter 2015, edited by Dominique Hecq. http://www.doubledialogues.com/issue/issue-17/ Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons. New York: Dover Publications, 1997.

CHAPTER NINE

Writing Walking: Ficto-critical Routes through Eighteenthcentury London Emma Cheatle

Field note 1 Where am I going, I think, as I stumble along the pathway in the semidarkness. This essay explores a method of creative-critical writing through a practicetheory of walking. As Yasmin Gunaratnam and Carrie Hamilton outline, the word ‘method’ leads to the word ‘route’: methodos, meaning the ‘pursuit of knowledge’, comes from meta (expressing development) and hodos (way or route). Walking then, with its unfolding of space along a route, already intersects method’s etymology. If the ‘route is the right way to proceed’ then walking is a productive ‘method-as-route’.1 Field note 2 Time elides / my walks, taken on several summer afternoons in 2018, exchange with hers through London in the late eighteenth century. Gunaratnam and Hamilton highlight the ways in which method, rather than being pre-existent, is ‘entangled’ with the object of study. This is method as a relational handshake that is transfigured by and transfigures the object. My object of study begins with the city of London in the eighteenth century, when walking was a newly popular pastime. Then, as now, the city and the walking body, as well as the newly established modes of writing, were gendered. Writing critically (now) about walking (then) creatively probes the past city’s gendered spaces and practices. 112

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Field note 3 In another essay I wrote letters to her; postcards, to be specific. I had been walking then too, looking for her. As is my way, I travelled across concepts and disciplines.2 Miles Ogborn describes eighteenth-century London as a rapidly expanding city where ‘“private individuals” were constructed in and into publics’.3 Individuals, rather than completely shedding their interior, domestic spaces and ‘privities’, took on new forms of public-private or private-in-public.4 One of the ways in which the individual developed in the city space was through the mode of walking. John Gay’s 1716 poem Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London was illustrated with a plate showing an urban scene with clearly constructed pavements and bollards separating the walker from the muddy and lawless street.5 Vauxhall Gardens, the famous pleasure ground of the 1660s, was redesigned in 1732 to include a series of open walks indicating different kinds of spaces, people and activities: ‘Grand Walk’, ‘Druid’s Walk’, ‘Lovers’ Walk’, ‘Dark Walk’. These were bordered by stoa, covered walkways for interior, public-private (yet far from philosophical) walking and talking.6 Field note 4 I take an eighteenth-century map (Horwood’s Plan 1792–9) and overlay a contemporary map printed onto tracing paper. I mark out a route from the City of London to Somers Town, a walk of just over two miles. Notions of order and organization in the public realm were, and still are, established through the middle- and upper-class male gaze. Yet the walking body described by Gay (and Ogborn) is portrayed as a neutral “every(wo) man”. In contrast, it is now commonly assumed that unaccompanied women in public must have been “street walkers” – that is, prostitutes – and “respectable” only if accompanied by male chaperones.7 This is certainly true in the nineteenth century where conservative ideas of respectability meant that women were divided into those whose sexuality was owned by one man, and therefore maintained privately in domestic space, and those who were owned by many men and therefore sexualized by public space. Yet in the eighteenth century, it is evident that “respectable” women were visible on the street and performing public life.8 Field note 5 I walk with her, observing her closely. I am walking nearby. In this essay I use an ethnographic walking as the method-as-route, to follow you, a woman writer, from your publisher near St Paul’s to your home in Somers Town, north of the city.9 Field note 6 Am I writing the walking or is this walking writing me? I set out with the map slightly curling in my hand, my notebook and pencil in my pocket. I

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wear a skirt of thick herringbone fabric the colour of parchment, and sturdy black boots. I wonder if it is going to rain. St Paul’s is heavily scaffolded and the churchyard now a neat park. People, mostly well-heeled tourists, are streaming around the wide streets. The eighteenth century is mute, I think, lying metres below the tarmac street. Late capitalism masks everything – its chain coffee shops, and stainless-steel signage lining the slick pavements. Little trace remains of the small shops that once lay in St Pauls’ shadow, yet in my imagination I see the timber-panelled facades of bookshops and publishers in the narrow streets. My ficto-critical method is a feminist form of ethnographic creative writing that enables a gendered embodiment and positioning of the protagonist and author usually absent in history or theory writing. Walking-writing in real time, I use a close yet imagined observation, to draw forth a story from the historic facts. This is inspired by the work of filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha, whose mode of ‘speaking nearby’ demonstrates a situated, empathetic and ethical form of ethnography, exemplified by her 1982 film Re:assemblage. The film slowly observes a group of Senegalese women and, almost dialogue free (except for occasional voiced thoughts), makes no attempt to explain the group’s culture. Towards the end of the film we sit almost at the shoulder of the women, and a conversation emerges.10 Here, I use the second-person tense, to speak to, or nearby, my protagonist, between her interior private life and exterior public appearance (to me) as we walk in the developing urban landscape. The resulting text, eight numbered ‘field notes’, teeters between the creative, historical and critical. Field note 7 And then I see you, in the glass of the imagined shop, your back bent over the table, leafing through a manuscript. I am excited and stuff my map in my pocket. You turn toward me and I blush. Have you seen me? You come out of the door and move straight past me, your shawl drawn around you, your long hair twisted up, a faded, embroidered bag over your wrist. You wear pattens over your shoes, and their wooden soles clip out their sound, as you turn and stride confidently onto the street towards the west.11 I follow . . . Field note 8 . . . along the north side of St Paul’s Church Yard12 It is the summer of 1797, early in the afternoon. The grey sky threatens rain. Small inns and coffee houses sit amongst booksellers. Your publisher Joseph Johnson’s house with its shop at street level lies low in the shadow of what one visitor had called ‘St Paul’s magnificent emptiness’.13 The largest bookseller in the street, the front is panelled and painted the deepest maroon. I can hardly keep up as you stride onto Ludgate Hill to join the quickening throng of others. The fray and smell of the Fleet and Newgate Prisons spills over, and I nearly lose you as you navigate right into Fleet Market, built over

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the lost stream which once ran muddily from the north. The market, known earlier for its vegetable-sellers, is now a chaos of ‘china merchants, a fan maker, two glovers, a hatter and sword cutler, a glass manufacturer, a jeweller, three lace men, a sugar refiner, two tea dealers, and three watchmakers’.14 One ‘beholds a thousand shops crowded with goods, of which he can scarcely tell the use, and which, therefore, he is apt to consider as of no value’.15 London has everything: hosiers, haberdashers, leather sellers, linen drapers, woollen drapers, hatters, glovers, goldsmiths, stationers, lace men, grocers and tea dealers, clock and watchmakers and mercers; ‘even a manufacturer of ostrich feathers’. Elsewhere the ‘broad airy streets ma[k]e shopping for pleasure safe, convenient, and enjoyable’ but here on the fleet everything is shoehorned in.16 You pause for just a moment to look through a shop window near the clock tower. Women are everywhere, in this ‘ugly city with some beautiful things’, glancing like you through the ‘great glass windows’ at displays, talking to companions, tallying purchases – interrupting the flow of men at business.17 A woman shopping is tolerated as she will most likely purchase ‘if something catches her eye’. ‘Newer, clearer plate glass windows developed in the 1770s, which, coupled with displays designed to persuade passers-by into entering the shop, accentuate[d] the visual aspect of shopping as a pastime.’18 The shop window creates desire, whets the appetite; the price creates value for goods otherwise unwanted; purchase suggests delight; delight suggests the satiation of the falsely created hunger. You stop outside the apothecary at no. 67. You think of Dafoe’s Moll, ‘wandering . . . I know not whither’ through Leadenhall Street, and, as you go in, you remember her stealing a white cloth ‘bundle’ just because she could, because she wanted to.19 It is busy inside. You frequent the shop because it is run by a fine woman, Mme. Doucet, who knows you well after all these years, and you will support a woman’s endeavours wherever you can. She stands behind the counter busying herself with an order, measuring and weighing powders into small phials. The glass bottles behind her are luminous in the light of the high windows, their contents flashing colour and latency. She looks up at you and nods and you wait to one side. You recede into the shadows. Other customers are seated by the stiff curtain screen: a man awkwardly bent in the back and neck; a haughty, overdressed woman; and a thin-looking plainly-dressed girl. Now that you’ve stopped walking, the baby in your belly is kicking. The bulge it makes is swathed in the layers of muslin and linen you favour. Your stays are loosened to the widest. Dust motes swirl in the sunlight. The medicinal smells are delicious and soothing all at once. You hope Mme. has prepared the powders you need for this terrible indigestion of late pregnancy. Paying a florin, you carefully tuck the white cloth bundle into your pocket, and accept her gift – a linen cloth, slightly damp with a pungent but steadying odour.

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Back in the street words and images shout out everywhere: GIN • ALE • SHOE CLEANING 20 Left onto High Holborn ‘This overgrown Capital’, as Pamela would have said fifty years earlier, keeps growing.21 New four-storey buildings are ‘mostly brick and have no decoration other than big, well-kept windows, whose panes are framed in fine, white-painted wood. The front doors, compared to those in other countries, have the peculiarity of being tall and very narrow’.22 Yet they crowd the old two-storey houses and inns looking for order. You are tired, tired of London’s interminable growth, its grand plainness. You prefer the splendour of Paris. The baby kicks again, and the nausea rises. You move faster to quell it. Continuing onto Holborn Hill, you focus on the pavement so as not to stumble, the lavender-sodden cloth held to your nose. You recall the time in Paris during the Great Terror when you slipped on the wet cobbles of a backstreet and fell into the blood of many. BARBER – TOOTH PULLING HERE! • COFFEE • PAWNBROKER The main road is busy with pedestrians, both women and men, at this time of day. After the 15:30 meal they spill out of the inns, seeking jollities, new visions, sexual encounters or an extra florin from an unwary visitor. ‘How happy the pedestrian is on these roads, which alongside the houses are paved with large clean paving-stones some feet wide, where many thousands of neatly clad people, eminent men, dressy women, pursue their way safe from the carriages, horses and dirt.’23 Now that we agree that our streets signify our national fate – Gwynne’s ‘publick elegance’ for the ‘publick good’ – the main streets have been undergoing reordering in London for some time, with straightening, repaving improvements and, as the number of vehicles grows, clearer separation between street and pavement.24 Signs with street names have become common, and numbering systems are somewhat regularised. Crossing the road, you step up onto a recently raised pavement of ‘broad Purbeck Stone Paving . . . [laid on a solid substantial Foundation and cover’d with Thames Sand, or binding Gravel]’!25 But despite the new order, the limestone incrusted with its marine organisms is piled with refuse, dust, mud and horse manure. Scavengers and sweepers are around all day and the reclusive nightsoilmen appear after dark, but by mid-afternoon the piles of filth are despicable. Indeed parts of the street are cleaner than the pavements. You reach again for the lavender cloth, glad that your dress is cut unfashionably short and hence avoids the worst muck. As you step down onto the road, you make a mental note that your pattens need repacking – their metal strips are ringing on the stone. You cut up the narrow alley, Brownlow Street. At the end, you stop for a moment by the Bedford Row water pump. Scruffy children

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and elegant ladies both wait their turn for water, as do you. You take a brief rest here, as do I. I take a quick drink too, worrying about the cholera that later infamously collected around the water pumps. You think of heading for Gray’s Inn Gardens for a rest and to smell the pear trees, but feel inclined to hurry home today. The streets beyond here are wider and more airy and your belly is too uncertain. The back streets in these areas on the whole remain cobbled unevenly, noisome and dangerous after dark. You remember the sallow looking woman you once saw, very heavy with child, sheltering several other dirty children in the doorway of a back alley aptly named Spread Eagle Court near Holborn. She would shortly be in the lying-in hospital, if indeed even they would take her with the level of lowliness she was suffering. And most probably then end up in a box in the ground, the children in the workhouse and the babbie, if lucky, at the Foundling Hospital. Although called humanitarian by some, the lying-in hospitals as well as the infirmaries of Westminster, Guy’s and the London Hospital – all ‘springing up like mushrooms to support more hoary institutions, such as Bart’s or Thomas’s” – are all establishments you despise.26 It was not enough, you think now, but you gave the poor woman the contents of your purse and told her to go to see Mrs Barbauld at Hampstead, hoping Anna would know who could give better assistance.27 ENTERTAINMENT • WATCH HOUSE • STATIONER Turn left onto Theobald’s Road You walk for health, always taking the air rather than taking a chair – a prudence learned from Godwin.28 Indeed you detest the confinement of coaches, drawing rooms, and entertainment halls and love the outside air no matter how thick the smells and dust. Yet now you are in this late condition even Godwin appeals to you to take a hackney cab and rest. But rest is for home, and you spend more than enough time there. And a fine home it is, in the fields of Middlesex. Your thoughts turn to that wild and authentic landscape, its half-finished nature continuous with the nearby brick pits and dust heaps.29 PEACOCKS Right onto New North Street Is it dangerous for a woman in the street? Not nearly as much as the popular novels and guidebooks would have it, not really at all, and certainly not by day . . . although the young country ladies coming to see the sights often seem precarious in their giddiness. It is becoming unfashionable for a woman to walk alone though, as Mrs Inchbald is at pains to point out – unseemly even.30 But it excites you, as well as keeping you alive, alert and quick – and you take a slightly different route each day. The great city is ‘a complete CYCLOPAEDIA, where every man . . . may find something to please his palate, regulate his taste, suit his pocket, enlarge his mind, and make himself

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happy and comfortable’.31 Your sanity is bound up in walking the streets. No-one notices or remarks upon your pregnancy – women of all classes and stages are to be seen, except those who would not emerge from their carriages whether soon to lie-in or no. You understand the city through your walks, its rapid growth, its Huguenot and African immigrant occupants and visitors – French can be heard everywhere of late.32 The bellmen and newsvendors cry out daily news; the children shriek joy and dispute; knots of gossip coalesce at pumps, inns, corners. Taverns, gin shops and coffee houses distribute news and refreshments, rationale and philosophy. Handbills, newspapers, song sheets and pamphlets flutter about your feet. The city is a place of equal production between material ideas and waste. PRINTING OFFICE • TAVERN • PICTURE FRAMER • JOYNER Into Boswell Court In contradiction to the increasingly acceptable idea that women should stay indoors, you strongly believe that men are refined by our presence. You have written on it at length: female conversation and its ‘commerce’ is structural and instructive. Indeed your call is for more education for women to ‘furnish’ their minds so that they ‘embellish’, ‘enliven’ and ‘polish society’.33 Women necessarily are ‘agents of civilisation, setting standards in a wide range of subjects’.34 Surely they should therefore continue to ‘dwell in Clubs and Assemblies, at Tea-Tables and in Coffee-Houses’ rather than be stuck in those dreary outmoded Closets ladies still frequent.35 You will call for it again, and even perhaps write a new story on the subject – that is what lunch with Johnson, who is no mere publisher but also your mentor, moved on to. MERCER • CURIOSITIES • TEA COFFEE CHOCOLATE Oh but the Noise! Metal on pavement, shouting of hawkers and children, rumble of carts and cabs, bell ringing, shouts of Stop, Thief! Dogs yapping and snarling! It gets right into the core, and now the baby kicks mightily. And the Stink! Soot, the odour of bodies and their wastes, gutters filled with horse and human manure; wood smoke, the industrial smells of tar, alum, beer; the cats and the yapping dogs shitting. The cloth comes up again! The Earl of Bedford’s nearby Bloomsbury squares were built as a relief to the old parts of the city: they open it up with their ‘copious trees and wellkept lawns’.36 Although owned by earls and lords, they are lungs for the common good, the ‘fine streets and squares now . . . on what but recently had been uncultivated ground, brick-kilns and dunghills’.37 Bloomsbury strives to be a modern Athens where the ‘citizens were all pedestrians. They walked on foot in a city, “propre, passable, spatieuse”.’38 Social order perhaps follows these straighter streets and squares, with their consolatory air, but like Athens it is still order for the few, and frankly the New Museum is a pompous piece,

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built solely to legitimise the same lords’ ridiculous acquisitions.39 Although you often walk that way if seeing friends, today you walk towards the Foundling Hospital instead, perhaps remembering that little unborn babbie the woman was carrying. Yours lies still now in your belly. You muse that Mr Coram has tried his best. Although he has been ‘reproached for over-lavish expenditure on buildings, with the result that fewer children can be accommodated’, the building is suitably magnificent!40 Really, it is a city who allows her citizens to starve in the first place that ought-be reproached. MIDWIFE • GIN • CLOTH • BUTCHER • UNDERTAKER Right onto Devonshire Street Through into the still elegant Queen’s Square. You recall that one used to be able to see the countryside of Middlesex to the north here, but now a new row of houses forms an opaque edge. You leave the square and I can hardly keep up as the city now is dense and I have to move around buildings you glide through. The lowering sun is shining through the cloud now and you undo your shawl and tuck it into your bag. You follow Upper Guildford Street to where the Foundling sits, near the edge of the city where the streets, instead of reproducing, end in fields. The hospital ‘occupies a healthy situation at the far end of the city, and only the main building has three stories; half of the second one rests on an arcade supported by columns, which gives the place an attractive aspect’.41 You are breathing more easily now. Women aplenty, mostly German tourists you think, all coloured cloaks in the distance, are walking up and down. You turn up the gravel path to the side of the building, where there are young girls ‘playing on one side of the large lawns, the boys on the other’. You watch them from afar: ‘their brown clothes bound with red, and the girls’ white pinafores’ capturing your eye.42 Suddenly a woman is at your elbow. She is poorly dressed, thin, uncloaked and unbonneted. She clings to you and you naturally turn defensively away, protecting the baby. A man joins her and the two look and smell unkempt. You feel haughty and strong with annoyance and shrug them away with an exclamation. They slip on the gravel a little and begin to leave. You are unsure what they were about. Now a solid, middling man is striding along the path and cocks his hat as he approaches, and despite the early hour, cautions you in mild, generous tones about the encroaching darkness and unsavoury characters. His ‘amber tipt’ cane leaves little pocks in the gravel as he goes.43 The sorry pair have long disappeared and your annoyance has transferred to his masculine condescension. You could have walked the rest of the way through the fields but find you have tacked back along the rear of the Hospital and the Burying Grounds to Gray’s Inn Lane where more rows of houses have recently cropped up. You are a little short of breath by the time you arrive at the real outskirts of the city just beyond the New Road. Somers Town is ‘standing more or less in

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open fields’.44 Where the villages further into Middlesex ‘are beautiful, both by buildings and situation’, here is all brick fields, gravel pits and numerous dust heaps.45 We should not always believe the newspapers though: one recently wrote insolently that Somers Town was a ‘piece of common or barren brickfield whither resorted on Sunday the bird-fanciers and many of the roughs from London to witness dog-fights, bull baiting and other crude sports’!46 The nearby St Pancras Church is a dear place, and its plague pit long sealed over. The Smallpox Hospital is not a worry as your little daughter Fanny had the pox as a tiny girl, her skin poorly marked by it. They say she will not catch it twice. The Pancras Workhouse though, another evil place, does concern you. You plan to write another pamphlet criticizing the charities. Into Chalton Street then on to Evesham Buildings The street approaching the Polygon is lined with some finished two-storey houses and some three, and Godwin has taken his offices there, leaving the house for your own work and pleasing you both. You can keep an eye on Fanny yet leave the house whenever you please. Now you see the Polygon just ahead: Leroux’s strange sixteen-sided design pleases you every time. You agreed with Godwin wholeheartedly when you first encountered it, and not just because it was cheap. The French are everywhere in Somers Town too, and you stop and talk to Abbé Chantral of the events in Paris.47 A Paris that is now lost to you all. I watch you as you reach the front steps. You sigh as you bend slightly to walk up to the door. You turn, and I duck into the shadows opposite. You must be very tired. From here I know that you are very near to childbirth – you will lie in before the summer is out. You enter the house, and Marguerite greets you, and says Fanny is out playing in the fields. You ask for lemon water and go up to your study to write a letter to Johnson about the new story. *

*

*

As I sit at my desk shuffling the maps, now crumpled and scored with red dotted lines, I see a letter lying unopened on the table. How should I close this walk? Has it rewritten her, or opened me? Walking in the city is both a personal, private narrative that writes (and reads) one’s place, and a public performance to others. Writing is an exchange between two or more people, written by one to the other[s]. Derrida calls the letter – the postcard – part of ‘the delicate levers which pass between the legs of a word and itself’.48 In the eighteenth century, writing – the novel, pamphlet, letter – proliferated, as did the city. The new General Post Office postal routes widened and connected the whole of London; letters were walked (legged) by a letter carrier numerous times a day across the city. Into the nineteenth century, it was the recipient rather than sender who paid for the letter, charged for the distance travelled and the number of sheets used. Letter writing, then, is a complex lever, a walked as well as written practice of monetary and emotional exchange.

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This essay emerges through walking as a practice of pursuing – legging it after – a gendered history of the city. Despite the fact that parts of the old street pattern are lost with each century’s shift of rubble, the slow groundedness of walking enables me to observe my protagonist moving through the same streets. Like Minh-ha’s feminist, ethnographic mode of ‘speaking nearby’, rather than for, to or at, I search for a situation near and with her. Between the collected fragments and meanderings, she and I merge in a co-produced literary act. Remaining self-reflective and accountable, I hope I have also given her agency. The slow, hard, re-creative labour of fiction writing releases me from the confines of history, enabling me to build a story from words and feelings. As I walk-write, the chapter assembles fragments from multiple sources and positionings, questioning both the solidity of history writing, of gender, and of the city, and claiming a space within it. I, we, offer it to you as a map, a note, a walk, a letter – and as a delicate exchange through a part-present, part-lost London.

Notes 1

Yasmin Gunaratnam and Carrie Hamilton, ‘Introduction: the wherewithal of feminist methods’, Feminist Review, vol. 115, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–2.

2

Emma Cheatle, ‘Between Landscape and Confinement: Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, ed. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2018), 66. The ‘her’ I wrote to is Mary Wollstonecraft, eighteenth-century feminist, political reformer, pamphleteer and novelist.

3

Miles Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780 (New York: The Guildford Press, 1998), 91, 93.

4

‘Privities’ was a seventeenth-century word for genitals.

5

Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 104–05.

6

Thanks to Hélène for noting that the Stoics’s name came from the stoa in which they gathered to philosophize. In contrast, the pleasure grounds were places notorious for licentious sexual encounters and silly behaviour.

7

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust A History of Walking (London: Granta, 2014), 180–82.

8

Penelope J. Corfield, ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-century England’, Journal of Urban History, 16 (1990): 136.

9

‘You’ are both real and imagined: real in that ‘you’ revisit from my previous essay and work on Mary Wollstonecraft, on whom the ‘facts’ related here are true; and imagined in that history writing is always an act of imagination or fiction, see Will Pooley, https://storyingthepast.wordpress.com/2018/06/05/ creative-writing-as-a-tool-of-sustained-ignorance-by-will-pooley (accessed 12 September 2019).

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10 Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red (Abingdon: Routledge, 1991). See also Nancy N. Chen, ‘ “Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T Minh-ha’, Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 87. 11 Pattens were wooden and iron clog-like shoes used to protect and raise the cloth shoe above the ground. 12 Hereon the italicized street names pick out the route on the map. 13 Sophie von La Roche, Sophie in London 1786, being the diary of Sophie v. la Roche, trans. Clare Williams (London Jonathan Cape, 1933), 126. 14 Alison F. O’Byrne, ‘Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenthcentury London: a Literary and Cultural History’. PhD diss., University of York, 2003. 15 Samuel Johnson, ‘The Adventurer no. 67 “On the Trades of London” ’ [1753], in Samuel Johnson: The Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 261. 16 Mark Girouard, Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History (Yale University Press, 1985), 201. 17 La Roche, Sophie in London, 17, 87. 18 Girouard, Cities and People, 198–201. 19 Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders [1721] (London: Tegg, 1840), 221. 20 From archives of street signs, London Metropolitan Archives. Also see https:// www.bl.uk/georgian-britain/articles/the-rise-of-consumerism (accessed 12 September 2019). 21 Samuel Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 4 vols., in The Complete Novels of Mr. Samuel Richardson [1740–1] (London: J. Johnson, 1801), vol. 2, 3. 22

La Roche, Sophie in London, 89.

23 Ibid., 86. 24 John Gwynne, London and Westminster Improved illustrated by plans: to which is prefixed, a discourse on publick magnificence . . . (London: Printed for the Author), iii–vi. 25 John Spranger, A Proposal or Plan for an Act of Parliament for the Better Paving, Cleansing and Lighting of the Streets, Lanes, Courts and Alleys, and Other Open Passages, and for the Removal of Nuisances, as well within the Several Parishes of the City and Liberty of Westminster . . . (London, 1754), 2–3. 26 La Roche, Sophie in London, 45–6; Bart’s and St Thomas’s were the first hospitals in London, originating in the Middle Ages and rebuilt a number of times by the eighteenth century. 27 Anna Barbauld, poet, philanthropist, and teacher, was a close friend of Wollstonecraft. 28 William Godwin, writer, and Mary Wollstonecraft’s husband. 29 The county of Middlesex began just north of the city of London, where the present St Pancras is. 30 The novelist Elizabeth Inchbald was friends with William Godwin, and thoroughly disapproved of Wollstonecraft, and their relationship.

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31 Pierce Egan, Life in London: Or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and his Elegant Friend Tom the Corinthian (London, Chatto and Windus, 1823), 23. 32 See https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Population-history-of-london.jsp (accessed 12 September 2019). 33 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Joseph Johnson, 1792). 34 Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenth-century England’, in Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, ed. Judith Still and Michael Worton (Manchester University Press, 1993), 105. 35 ‘Spectator no 10, Monday, March 12, 1711’, in The Spectator. I, ed. Donald F Bond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), 44. 36 La Roche, Sophie in London, 39. 37 Ibid., 31. 38 Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 84. 39 The British Museum, of which Wollstonecraft was highly critical. 40 La Roche, Sophie in London, 176. 41 Ibid., 176. 42 Ibid. 43 Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 110. 44 John Summerson, Georgian London (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 282. 45 Richardson, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 26. 46 Heal Coll., newspaper cutting (22nd May 1758), B25. 47 Debra Kelly and Martyn Cornick, eds., A history of the French in London liberty, equality, opportunity (London: University of London School of Advanced Study Institute of Historical Research, 2013), 80, 94. The “events” are the French Revolution. 48 Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 78.

References de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011. Cheatle, Emma. ‘Between Landscape and Confinement: Situating the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft’. In Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, edited by Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, Helen Runting, 66–78. London: Routledge, 2018. Chen, Nancy N. ‘ “Speaking Nearby”: A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha’. Visual Anthropology Review, vol. 8, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 82–91. Corfield, Penelope J. ‘Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenthcentury England’. Journal of Urban History 16 (1990): 132–74.

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Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders [1721]. London: Tegg, 1840. Derrida, Jacques. The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1987. Egan, Pierce. Life in London: Or, the Day and Night Scenes of Jerry Hawthorn Esq. and his Elegant Friend Tom the Corinthian. London: Chatto and Windus, 1823. Gay, John. Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London [1716]. London: Penguin, 2016. Girouard, Mark. Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History. London: Yale University Press, 2016. Gunaratnam, Yasmin, and Carrie Hamilton. ‘Introduction: the wherewithal of feminist methods’. Feminist Review, vol. 115, no. 1 (March 2017): 1–12. Gwynne, John. London and Westminster Improved illustrated by plans: to which is prefixed, a discourse on publick magnificence . . . London: Printed for the Author, 1766. Heal Coll.: newspaper cutting, (22 May 1758): B25. Horwood’s Plan (1792–9). Available online: http://www.romanticlondon.org/ explore-horwoods-plan/#18/51.53058/-0.12275 (accessed 16 July 2019). Johnson, Samuel. ‘The Adventurer no. 67 “On the Trades of London” ’ [1753]. In Samuel Johnson: The Major Works, 261–5. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Klein, Lawrence E. ‘Gender, conversation and the public sphere in early eighteenthcentury England’. In Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories and Practices, edited by Judith Still and Michael Worton, 100–115. Manchester University Press, 1993. Löffler, Catharina. Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth Century London. London: Springer, 2017. O’Byrne, Alison F. ‘Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenth-century London: A Literary and Cultural History’. PhD diss., University of York, 2003. Ogborn, Miles. Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies 1680–1780. New York: The Guildford Press, 1998. Richardson, Samuel. Pamela or Virtue Rewarded, 4 vols. In The Complete Novels of Mr. Samuel Richardson [1740–41]. London: J. Johnson, 1801. von La Roche, Sophie. Sophie in London 1786, being the diary of Sophie v. la Roche. Trans. Clare Williams. London: Jonathan Cape, 1933. ‘Spectator no 10, Monday March 12, 1711’. In (1965) The Spectator, vol. I., edited by Donald F Bond. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust A History of Walking. London: Granta, 2014. Spranger, John. A Proposal or Plan for an Act of Parliament for the Better Paving, Cleansing and Lighting of the Streets, Lanes, Courts and Alleys, and Other Open Passages, and for the Removal of Nuisances, as well within the Several Parishes of the City and Liberty of Westminster . . . London, 1754. Summerson, John. Georgian London. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Joseph Johnson, 1792. Yi’En, Cheng. ‘Telling Stories of the City: Walking Ethnography, Affective Materialities, and Mobile Encounters’. Space and Culture, vol. 17, no. 3 (2014): 211–23.

CHAPTER TEN

The Indelible Traces of Her Footsteps Mireille Roddier

I. READING Street haunting The incipit is the literary place par excellence because the outside world, by definition, is continuous, has no visible limits. ITALO CALVINO 1

. . . a book is not only a fragment of the world but itself a little world. The book is a miniaturization of the world, which the reader inhabits. SUSAN SONTAG 2

A gleam of Borgesian infinitude comes to pass. The sunsets of nineteenthcentury Greece, the tin mines of Cornwall, travels to the pyramids, settling in India: all of time and space can be found in this bookshop, which, in the early hours of a winter evening, Virginia Woolf has entered. It is a detailed scene in the sequence of painted tableaux that make up her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting’. She is sauntering in and out of shops along the streets of London, and I with her. She is breaking free from the oppression and solitude of her private dwelling, the ‘shell-like covering which our souls have excreted 125

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to house themselves’,3 and I’m fleeing 2018, a year irredeemably subjugated to the spectacle of our own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.4 Where will these words find you? What spatial and temporal thresholds separate us? Where did you spend the last chapter? Where will the next one take you? I navigate through the pages as I do through the city, chapters as neighbourhoods, narrative threads as streets that unfold and transform and crisscross. Or maybe is it the opposite? Has my experience of the urban been conditioned by my formative years, travelling deep into the printed text, lingering inside every illustration? We have just reached the Strand, where Woolf came looking for a pencil to purchase; a thin excuse for a street-haunting adventure. It’s getting late and the stores are closing. In another paragraph, she will be home and the story will end, and with its closing words – its explicit – Parisian daytime will return. I shall go for a walk. This summarizes the two activities that, figuratively and literally, transport me: reading, and walking the streets of Paris. When reading about Parisian flâneries, I combust. Walter Benjamin, speaking of Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant, reported in a letter to Adorno: ‘I could never read more than two or three pages in bed at night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay the book aside.’5 Reading Benjamin and Aragon, I pause with each paragraph and remember to breathe. I linger on the threshold, acknowledge the outside world, gauge its interest relative to the lure of the printed words . . . and promptly re-immerse myself. It is nearly impossible to resist the absorption of the text, or the city. ‘Am I here, or am I there?’ asks Woolf, caught in the ‘thwarting currents of being’ that transport her between the material reality of her presence and the imaginary existences she projects onto the surfaces of the streetscape.6 The risk of dematerialization into passive spectatorship is very real, whether reading or walking the city, especially when fuelled by escapist tendencies. I turn to the two paradigmatic, if contradictory, modes of resistance against such passivity, offered by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. Brecht ruthlessly denies us the pleasure of identification by making visible the apparatus of mediation, while Artaud’s act of cruelty exposes his spectators to, rather than protects them from, the dangers of immediacy.7 In an attempt to embody their incompatibility, I step out into the streets and hit ‘play’ as I cross the boulevard and head towards the river. I’ve downloaded a reading of Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. I want to feel the Verfremdungseffekt through my skin. ‘Where does it start?’ The voice streams directly into my brain as if it were my own. I sense my muscles tense. ‘It starts with a step and then another step and then another that add up like taps on a drum to a rhythm, the rhythm of walking.’8 *

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127

I, flâneur Among all the cities there is none that is more intimately connected to the book than Paris. . . . Paris is a vast library hall, through which flows the Seine. WALTER BENJAMIN9

The social base of flânerie is journalism. As flâneur, the literary man ventures into the marketplace to sell himself. WALTER BENJAMIN10

I read the street like I would a book. They both invite my memories, my projections, my reveries. They simultaneously exist in the now and index the past. Benjamin calls this the ‘double ground’ of the paving stones.11 Who am I? I am the quintessential reader of cities, that perambulatory figure called the flâneur, and I drift with the current of dreams prompted by each scene of the streets. My basic experience is described as ‘the colportage phenomenon of space’12 – a precursor of sorts to the idea of augmented reality. The material stage of the walls, the faces of the crowd – they all trigger my powers of association, and I co-exist within multiple spatial logics. I am neither here nor there, but especially not here, not in the now. I am intoxicated by the speculative, I live in the conditional. I am a bourgeois archetype and have so much leisure time on my hands that, to show it off, I walk a turtle on a leash.13 I am male. I take for granted the many ways in which I profit from the hegemonic power of my class and gender. The grand boulevards are my dwelling ground. No traces of revolutionary blood run through my body: why change the world when it inspires such intoxication? Moreover, it provides me with all of the material I need for my stories, my paintings, or my photographs. I devour the city like one would a library. In fact, I consume space so voraciously that Benjamin calls me a spy for the capitalists.14 Whatever you possess, possesses you in return – isn’t this the law of consumption? Space-which-slips-away is what fills the void created by the absence of the self.15 I can’t deny that capitalism preys on my inability to live in the present moment, on my incapacity to perceive signifiers rather than ready-made signs, but I am content to be fooled by illusion. My greatest high? The sensation of the crowd pulsating through my body. The shattering isolation that accompanies the comedown evanesces into the promised thrill of my next fix. You, on the other hand, are appalled by my passive complicity. ‘Awake!’ you say, adjusting your halo. ‘Beware of the spectacle!’ Whereas I fearlessly lose myself in the city, your suspicion borders on the paranoia. To my flâneries you oppose your dérive, to my mindlessness your awakened consciousness. Where I read the city as a frivolous work of fiction, you read

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it as an instruction manual, or worse, as a manifesto, issued as governmental propaganda. Who are you? You’re the self-proclaimed scientific researcher of the laboratory-city, a situationist. You study the techniques through which the city psychogeographically conditions and produces us. I may be the scout of the market place, but you are scouting for the avant-garde’s liberation army. You only read the city in-between its lines, sporting dark-tinted glasses, careful to resist the lure of all that glitters. Like me, you observe its currents. Unlike me, you counter their flow: it’s the knowledge that drives you – knowledge of the know-your-enemy kind. ‘All of space is already occupied by the enemy’, you claim as you call urbanism the ‘capitalist education of space’.16 The city is my playground and your battlefield. As you like to declare, ‘urbanism is all that will be needed to preserve the established order without recourse to the indelicacy of machine guns’.17 You read the city to understand its rules, in order to transgress them. Your walks, or dérives, are an act of appropriation of the street – détournement is the term you use. It translates as ‘hijacking’, but also as ‘peculation’, giving the concept of spatial embezzlement a heroic twist. Your tactic of détournement is highly imprinted with the traces of previous avant-gardes. Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt, Victor Shklovsky’s ostranenie, here applied to the streets.18 They are ‘made strange’ and defamiliarized, their automatized perception denied. Now you can read them as new and see right through them. The streets inspire my stories and spawn your revolutions. *

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FIGURE 10.1 Olivia Howard, Turtle on a Leash. Drawing reproduced courtesy of the artist.

II. COPYING Storytelling cities Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process. WALTER BENJAMIN19

I walk. I walk in the footsteps of those who walked Paris before me. I walk in the footsteps of those who walked in the footsteps of those who walked Paris before us.

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From the tail-end, I follow a crowd of jostling ghosts: Louis-Sébastien Mercier in the lead, the nineteenth-century Baudelaires and Lautréamonts in his tracks, Aragon, Breton and the interwar amblers stalking them, Debord and Chtcheglov rehearsing behind, Eric Hazan’s posse closing the march, maintaining the vestiges of the peripatetic tradition on life support. Constellations form and transform and a cartography of interconnected clusters emerges – the expats, the poets, the revolutionaries – coloured by a variety of tones, from melancholia to academic formality, each in a gradient of increased intensity. The front rows walked to write, the last read to walk, inheriting an already signified landscape with ready-traced pilgrimage routes. Seen from the back, it’s difficult to discern any women. Some have infiltrated the crowd, hiding behind their androgynous attire or noms de plume, Charles de Launay, André Léo, Genêt. ‘To avoid being noticed as a man, you must first renounce being noticed as a woman’,20 wrote George Sand. Reflecting on the work of legendary flâneuse Djuna Barnes, Monique Wittig would later argue that ‘there is only one gender: the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general’. The point of view of the feminine distorts the general, and ‘only the masculine as general is the abstract’.21 Until recently, a woman publicly walking or writing the city could not avoid the mark of specificity that excluded her from ‘the general’. If recognized as woman, she could only perform as sign. In the act of walking, as in that of publishing, she would enter the public realm as the marker not of a public figure, but of a public woman: her name would become the subject of conversations, of articles, end up on bedside tables, in the houses of strangers, leaving the domestic sphere in which she was cloistered.22 The male voice, on the contrary, eludes specificity and profits from abstraction. The more abstract the voice narrating the urban drift, the more universal its capacity for identification. I, the reader, can either identify with specific accounts akin to my particular experience, or with abstract, general ones. Universal voices enable the messenger to disappear behind the message, which in turn can be fully received by everyone equally. As I read, I subordinate myself to, and internalize, this presumed normative point of view. As I read, I walk through the boulevards of nineteenth-century Paris as a man – failing to recall that I am a woman in the twenty-first-century – subject to the deafening noise of the street as well as to the seductive sight of the tall slender widow whose path I briefly crossed, and whose glance poured life into my being.23 One can argue that this is old news: the necessary invisibility of the flâneuse and the predominant masculinity of urban-drift narratives have been called out and are a thing of the past, to a two-fold outcome. On the one hand, the flâneuse is alive and well, in literature as in film, not as object but as subject. Flâneuses are everywhere and claim the title with pride. Everyone wants to be a flâneuse, long live the flâneuse! On the other hand,

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concurrent with the abstraction of the feminine point of view, the perspective of the flâneur has acquired gendered specificity and become a signifier of bourgeois privilege and spatial entitlement. Out with the flâneur and good riddance! And yet, this gender distinction is losing significance, the master subject as male being eclipsed by the master subject as metropolitan – a category inclusive of women but largely exclusive of many others. And as such, one can observe how flâneurs’ accounts of the boulevards readily evoke Mary Louise Pratt’s analysis of colonial travel writing,24 pointing to the evidence: to narrate the city is, first and foremost, to appropriate it. Whether performed textually or visually, to describe the city is to appoint one’s point of view as its centre – either on the ground or from an omniscient elevation. The repetition of the narrative serves to validate one’s sense of belonging, to profess the authority of one’s gaze, and by subjecting others to it, to produce the periphery. To exercise one’s voice, to voice one’s sights, demands the confidence of occupying that centre. As a performative act, it can also produce it. *

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The I behind the lens The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen. JACQUES RANCIÈRE25

‘What lens are you?’ I ask. That’s how street photographers meet one another. Susan Meiselas says they all know exactly who is what.26 There are the classic 35 and 50mm – most analogous to the human eye’s focal length – but also those who venture into much wider angles (24mm) or conversely, hide behind zoom lenses. With a 90mm lens, I can capture a scene from far away, whereas a fisheye lens requires exaggerated proximity, revealing my position in the process. The same optical characteristics separate orthographic (parallel) projection from central projection (perspective). The viewpoint of an orthographic drawings is abstract, at infinity. I imagine an eye, deep in outer space, looking at us behind a very large telescope, something akin to the Hubble Space Telescope’s focal length of almost 60 metres – the ultimate surveillance and spying instrument.27 Parallel lines remain parallel, and never intersect. On the other hand, in a perspectival construction (wide-angle lens), parallel lines converge towards vanishing points located on horizons that reveal the physical position of my eye, my literal point of view. The history of representing architecture and urban sceneries – the stage sets of social life –

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has oscillated between these two modes with grand ideological proclamations, from the much-theorized ‘Urbino Perspectives’ of the Italian Renaissance to the Russian avant-garde’s use of parallel construction that rejected the privilege associated with perspectival point of views, without acknowledging the privilege of distance. Our current paradigm is deep into the return of the distant, abstract, omniscient viewer. Axonometry is enjoying a global surge in popularity. When photographing the streets, going from a 135 to a 24mm lens compares to walking across a proscenium arch, leaving the comfortably seated position of invisible spectator behind, entering the stage of the action and sharing its spotlight. I accept being on display, being seen seeing. I accept myself in this space, I exercise my citizenship. I aspire to be an 18mm, not to seek attention, but to assertively renounce not being noticed, even if it means: to be in your face. By walking the streets, I claim my right to belong. By photographing them, I perform that entitlement. I share the traces of my impressions and participate in what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘distribution of the sensible’.28 In the act of entering the scene, I acknowledge that I transform it. This inclusion validates my gaze. Rather than hide my lens behind a covert body, I want to set up a large format camera on a tripod, just to take up more space, more time, and impose my presence more conspicuously, in order to affect the scene and to imprint it with my being there.29 Who am I? I am the one who doesn’t fit in, the one you crop out of the frame, because my body disrupts your vision of reality. I am the other, the foreigner, the marginalized, the subaltern. The one who exists in the shadow. The one whose gaze is denied, or discredited. I am far more than simply the women of Baudelaire – the widow, the prostitute, the lesbian – here deployed at the service of a noir aesthetic. I am all of those whose bodies are only ever imaged towards objectification, instrumentalization, or aestheticization. I am rarely the one behind the lens (l’objectif). Yet it is my rendering of the streets that needs to be circulated. I would like to see street photographs and urban narratives that actively assert unprivileged points of view, and report on the city from self-aware margins – not as other – but with authority. ‘Politics’, Rancière writes, ‘consists in re-figuring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it’.30 Re-figuring, as its etymology reveals, not only means ‘to represent’ but also ‘to re-imagine; to re-shape’. To represent is to simultaneously read and write. Representations are thereby both descriptive and prescriptive. The city is no less a representation than a text or photograph, but its performance is so immersive that it passes for non-fiction. Only if read anew, can it be re-written into a different script. *

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FIGURE 10.2 Olivia Howard, Her Footsteps. Drawing reproduced courtesy of the artist.

III. WRITING 1. The prescriptive gaze The polis . . . is the space of appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men . . . make their appearance explicitly. HANNAH ARENDT31

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This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all the marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White. DONNA HARAWAY32

I step out into the city clutching my camera phone, keen to contribute to the proliferation of recorded viewpoints in which one could find the antidote to a single dominant narrative. But precisely because they are ‘photogenic’, I find the streets of Paris difficult to photograph. On one hand, the city’s image has been so highly circulated that I only experience the moment of Kairos in sights framed by recognizability. On the other, these pictures have irreversibly primed me, and it feels impossible to see these scenes anew without either adopting or rejecting a previously internalized gaze. I hesitate to reinforce its importance. Many categories of photography have achieved gender parity, but street photography lags far behind. This is not helped by the genre’s insistence on the erasure of the subject: the ‘good’ street photographer will pride himself on his ability to shoot individuals 30cm away from their faces without their knowing. ‘Don’t ask for authorization’, many a post advises those in search of candid shot techniques on discussion forum threads. Never mind the privilege of such invisibility: not all bodies can evenly get into someone else’s face unnoticed. In these photographs, the camera’s point of view subsides behind the object of the photograph, and the inconspicuous photographer can share the fruits of his voyeurism. We are witness to scenes and to people who cannot see us in return. The more abstract the viewpoint, the less this aspiring omniscient observer’s partialities are made explicit. At the height of 80s’ feminist theory, the male gaze was everywhere. Laura Mulvey had unveiled the ways in which films were constructing our collective identification through it.33 Jill Dolan expanded her analysis to performance studies and live spectatorship.34 Donna Haraway called for the embodiment of observers in scientific knowledge production, including observations mediated by instruments of visualization.35 Hélène Cixous posited an écriture féminine and its embodied particularities, calling for women to write ‘their selves’ as subjects into their texts.36 Regardless of the discipline, the proposed paths forward were homologous: ‘to free the look of the camera into its materiality in time and space’,37 or what Haraway would later call the location and partiality of ‘situated knowledge’,38 and to let the subject interfere with the object represented by making the specifics of her point of view tangible – as the feminist performance theorists would come to recognize, a very Brechtian tactic.39 These ideas surfaced with the ebb and flow of interest in mediation brought about by structuralism, and dispersed with the ascent of affect and

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the turn to immediacy. Recently, however, directors such as Jill Soloway have pledged to revive the female gaze,40 and in 2018, for the first time, a woman, Rachel Morrison, received an Academy Award nomination for best cinematographer. The question remains whether she was recognized for excelling at the established standards, or for breaking them, but change begins with recognizing a woman’s place behind, rather than in front of the camera, scripting standards with authority. Most visual storytellers concerned with the representation of difference focus on the objects, rather than the subjects of their representation. And among the few who address standpoint theory, fewer yet include (selfproclaimed) street photographers, those who document the sphere of social life. Can the street photographer situate herself within the photograph? How can one take a picture in the first person? In a literal manner, Vivian Maier’s presence, camera in hand, is imprinted onto the cities’ mirrored surfaces. More allusively, the one holding the camera can also figure in the gaze of those photographed – a gaze that is conscious of being seen, that pauses/ poses in the midst of the bustle that surrounds it, but also returns the observation, distributing the power dynamics of seeing evenly.41 Commenting on Diane Arbus’s characters, Susan Sontag asks: ‘Do they see themselves, the viewer wonders, like that? Do they know how grotesque they are?’42 The real shock would be to read these questions on the faces of those photographed, referring to us, entitled scopophiliacs, passive voyeurs, image consumers. *

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I, Medusa Hold still, we’re going to do your portrait, so you can begin looking like it right away. HÉLÈNE CIXOUS43

I want to know your story. And then I will tell it back to you in a new way. Tell it back to you in such a way that it has become mine, my own. Re-writing you, I write myself anew. I am still author, authority. BELL HOOKS44

Veˉnˉı, vˉıdˉı imaginaˉvˉı. What I see, I capture and arrest in stone. My powers of representation transform my sights into your reality. I am a master sculptor, I engrave the world into friezes that narrate our collective stories. I will freeze you, too, in my style, in my voice. And so you are afraid, and now you’re petrified.

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Who am I? I am Medusa, object of inexhaustible, often contradictory storylines. Such multifarious depictions conceal the absence of my own selfportrait. Is my gaze threatening because, you know, #MeToo? The drive to blind and silence me is relentless, because you would rather take my portrait than let me make yours. Memento moriphobia. Photographs – all dialectical images effectively – are testaments to the passing of time, gestures towards what is no longer, notifications of our impending mortality.45 But more than fix the past, they also trigger the mutability of the ones or the things represented. Their circulation produces and reproduces our bodies, our living conditions, our collective milieux, our social spaces, our built environment. We model ourselves, our domestic and civic spheres per the imprints onto our imaginaries of the past scripts that regulate us, but also according to new or alternative ones. These scripts don’t only exist in the form of visual or textual portrayals, they are performed in the flesh, too, through the bodies in which we act out our lives, and on the stage of our theatrum mundi, the cities that reify the legal and social contracts we’ve written for ourselves. We write our cities and they write us back and we will re-write them until they write us all in. So much fear is involved. I saw the terror on your face when our glances crossed, and you must have seen it on mine. Different threats, different dreads. Inherited fears that engender real threats. You fear the Sartrean shame of seeing yourself being seen. You fear change, loss of hegemonic power, sharing space with too many leads, being recast as an extra, living in someone else’s dream, becoming other. I fear for my corporeal safety. I have been raped and beheaded by moguls you’ve not only absolved but literally sanctified. Most unforgivably, you have led me to believe that I was alone, that there was only one of me. Medusae of the world, unite! Only the visibility of our numbers will vindicate us. We are neither other, nor minority. The more we connect to each other’s presence, the more we will reshape the inferences we draw from our environment about our sense of belonging. Belonging, cognitive psychologists tell us, is a perception that we project onto our environment through the reading of specific cues that confirm our mindset. And so we return to step one: pacing our built environment, aware that someone else’s shoes have traced its storyline with assertion. We can internalize it and let it define us. We can also break down the ways in which it has been configured to produce some of us as centers and to relegate others to the margins. Once its fictional status attested, we can identify and demystify its effects over us. The more legible they become, the easier they are to rewrite. *

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Notes 1

‘L’inizio è il luogo letterario per eccellenza perché il mondo di fuori, per definizione, è continuo, non ha limiti visibili.’ Italo Calvino, ‘cominciare e finire” in Saggi 1945–1985 (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), 735. Quoted in Andrea Del Lungo, L’incipit romanesque (Paris: Seuil, 2003), 15.

2

Susan Sontag, ‘Introduction’, in Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street & Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jepthcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979), 21.

3

Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, in The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London: The Hogarth Press, 1942), 21.

4

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 242.

5

Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno, 31 May 1935, in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, The Complete Correspondence 1928– 1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 88.

6

Woolf, ‘Street Haunting’, 28.

7

Jacques Rancière contrasts these two paradigms – both quests against the passivity of the spectator developed by the interwar avant-gardes – in his Art Forum article on emancipation. ‘Either, according to the Brechtian paradigm, theatrical mediation makes the audience aware of the social situation on which theater itself rests, prompting the audience to act in consequence. Or, according to the Artaudian scheme, it makes them abandon the position of spectator: . . . they are dragged into the circle of the action, which gives them back their collective energy. In both cases the theater is a self-suppressing mediation.’ Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, Art Forum (March 2007): 274. An earlier version of these positions can be found in the texts of Rousseau and Diderot on theatre. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. d’Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968); Denis Diderot, ‘Paradox on Acting (1773–1778)’, in Selected Writings, trans. Derek Coltman (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1966), 318–19.

8

Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking (New York and London: Penguin Books, 2000), 3.

9

Walter Benjamin, ‘Paris, the City in the Mirror’, On Photography, ed. and trans. Esther Leslie (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 133.

10 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2002), [M16,4], 446. 11 Walter Benjamin, Arcades, [M1,2], 416. 12 Walter Benjamin, Arcades, [M1a, 3], 418. 13 ‘Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them’, in Benjamin, Illuminations, 197. Walter Benjamin’s flâneur ‘demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure’. Illuminations, 172. 14 Walter Benjamin, Arcades, [M5, 6], 427.

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15 ‘Time-which-slips-away’, Vaneigem claims, ‘is what fills the void created by the absence of the self’. In Raoul Vanegeim, The Revolution of Everyday Life, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Rebel Press, 2001), 154. 16 Attila Kotanyi & Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Programme élémentaire du bureau d’urbanisme unitaire’, Internationale Situationniste no. 6 (August 1961): 16. 17 Raoul Vaneigem, ‘Comments against Urbanism’, October Vol. 78 (Winter 1997): 123. Translated from ‘Commentaires contre l’urbanisme’, Internationale Situationniste no. 6 (August 1961): 33–7. 18 The Situationist tactic of détournement was inspired by Brecht’s method of alienation, itself drawn from the Russian Formalists’ wish to ‘make strange’. Take a familiar situation; so familiar it has become a sign of itself if not a sign of its own signalization. Through any means at your disposal, alter its signification to the point where the levels of representation collapse and the referent appears in question. Ultimately, any sign or word is susceptible to being converted into something else, even into its opposite. This ‘defamiliarization’ process can be perceived as a ‘refamiliarization’, especially when it comes to our experience of the urban environment, ‘the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction’. Benjamin, Illuminations, 239. 19 Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB , 1979), 65. 20 ‘Au reste, pour n’être pas remarquée en homme, il faut avoir déjà l’habitude de ne pas se faire remarquer en femme.’ George Sand, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome IV: Histoire de ma vie (Paris: Calmann-Levy Éditeurs, 1847), 82. 21 Monique Wittig, ‘The Point of View: Universal or Particular?’, Feminist Issues (Fall 1983): 64. 22 The French dictionary defines the noun ‘péripatéticien(ne)’ in its masculine form as a follower of Aristotelian philosophy, in its feminine form as a prostitute cruising the pavement. 23 ‘Fugitive beauty, in whose glance I was suddenly reborn, will I see you nevermore, save in eternity?’ The brief encounter is described in one of Baudelaire’s most famous Tableaux Parisiens. The figure of the unknown woman in the crowd, described by Benjamin as ‘love at last sight’, reappears as Proust’s Albertine, as Breton’s Nadja, generating an ever growing literary myth. Charles Baudelaire, ‘To a Woman Passing By’, in Flowers of Evil, trans. Keith Waldrop (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2006), 123. 24 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 25 Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten Theses on Politics’, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum Books, 2010), 37. 26 Susan Meiselas, ‘Masterclass with Susan Meiselas’, moderated by Shelley Rice (Paris: Jeu de Paume, April 14, 2018). 27 Behind the lens floats Haraway’s astronaut, ‘a man in space, . . . an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency’, there to represent ‘the ‘West’s’ escalating dominations of abstract individuation’. In Donna J. Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 151.

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28 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004). 29 I am captivated by Catherine Opie’s series on American cities. Shot at night or at daybreak with an 8 x 10 view camera, the photographs are conspicuously devoid of people. This absence has been interpreted as a focus on the architecture in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School of Photography. But for Opie, the emptiness is about loss – the loss of old technologies, of her friends to AIDS, of the ‘utopian notion of difference’. And yet as I assimilate her point of view, it is not Opie’s exclusion of the crowd that I endure, but the crowd’s exclusion of Opie, of her cumbersome camera, of her queer body, and of mine by extension – her photoshoot relegated to marginal hours by lack of eligibility for prime time. 30 Rancière, Dissensus, 37. 31 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 198–9. 32 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledge’, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women (New York: Routledge, 1991), 188. 33 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen. Oxford Journals. vol. 16, no. 3 (1975): 6–18. 34 Jill Dolan, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) 35 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’. 36 Hélène Cixous, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. K. Cohen and P. Cohen, Signs, vol. 1, no. 4 (1976): 875–93. 37 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure’, 18. 38 Donna Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges’. 39 Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on feminism and theatre (London: Routledge, 1997). 40 Jill Soloway, ‘The Female Gaze’, TIFF Master Class (11 November 2016), accessed 8 June 2018, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=pnBvppooD9I. 41 Craig Owens has written extensively on the pictorial ‘mode of address’, borrowing from Emile Benveniste’s linguistics. There is power in the ‘mechanism of pose: to strike a pose is to present oneself to the gaze of the other as if one were already frozen, immobilized – that is, already a picture’. In Craig Owens, ‘The Medusa Effect or, The Specular Ruse’, Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: UC Press, 1991), 198. Owens further develops the subject of the photograph as ‘neither seer nor seen; it makes itself seen. The subject poses as an object in order to be a subject’. In Owens, ‘Posing’, 215. 42 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973), 36. 43 Cixous, ‘Laugh of the Medusa’, 892 44 bell hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (1990), 152. 45 Susan Sontag, On Photography, 15.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sydney Letters: A to E Naomi Stead and Katrina Schlunke

Sydney Letters is an alphabetic correspondence, or the beginnings of one, in which two authors write to one another, in messages where the subject line of the missive is also the object described. It is an attempt thereby to map out a taxonomy of urban things, and to write a portrait of the city of Sydney through its objects, commencing an A–Z of material culture. It is here represented in partial form, in the fragment from A to E, from Airconditioning ducts to Escalators. Sydney Letters is a writing experiment that is also a writing architecture, a ficto-critical, epistolary writing game that attempts to enact in words and form the effects of happening upon particular things in the city, as we encountered them and they us. The writing is underpinned by the idea assumed in most works informed by new materialism but emerging in particular from Bruno Latour: that objects have agency and produce effects. In his formulation these lively, non-human objects are ‘actors’.1 They do not, however, ever act alone. As Jane Bennett suggests, ‘while the smallest or simplest body or bit may indeed express a vital impetus, conatus, or clinamen, an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces’.2 Sydney Letters is thus above all a writing of things, specifically urban things, and hence investigates the relationship between things, objects, and written representations – a space of fiction, and equally of criticism.3 As Peter Schwenger notes: ‘All our knowledge of the object is only knowledge of its modes of representation – or rather of our modes of representation, the ways in which we set forth the object to the understanding, of which language is one.’4 Schwenger argues that while the object presents itself to representation – to language and other media – the thing surpasses the limits of representation, because of its ‘unknowable otherness’, its ‘ineluctable presence – the thingness of the thing – that we can never grasp’.5 141

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Writing also about things, W.J.T. Mitchell observes that ‘The slogan for our times . . . is, not things fall apart, but things come alive’.6 It is this liveliness of things, their sense of animation, of possessedness, that is one of their most intriguing but elusive qualities, and it is that quality which we have tried to catch here, to allude to. Furthermore, this idea is not new; as Mitchell observes, The physical is a thoroughly metaphysical concept. The concrete is (as Hegel points out) the most abstract concept we have; bodies are spiritual entities, constructions of fantasy. Objects only make sense in relation to thinking, speaking subjects, and things are evanescent, multistable appearances; and matter, as we have known since the ancient materialists, is a ‘lyric substance’ more akin to comets, meteors and electrical storms than to some hard, uniform mass.7 Even as Latour may not necessarily agree with this proposal of a dependent relation between object and subject, or the object’s necessary constitution by the subject, still Bill Brown notes the semantic instability between things and objects. Items that are valued and understood in the course of everyday human life are denoted as objects, while things are a much more shadowy group of entities. In his conception, things are both the vague category of material before a specific object is recognised, and the conceptual excess that comes after objects, as ‘what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects.’8 It is this latter sense, of what exceeds ‘mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence,’ that we wish to draw upon here. As Brown writes, The story of objects asserting themselves as things [. . .] is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.9 Our exchanges were written across the emerging thinking around things.10 As a textual exchange we were embedded in the histories of things that privileged their representation and creation by us as writing subjects, but as particular assemblages being made and unmade by the volatile stuff around us we were edged by our experiment into a recognition of the flat ontology that did not privilege our humanness. We were one more actor among many who shaped us and whom we also shaped. We were also experiencing the rushes of affect that challenge the mediating role of representation, while also being started and stopped by the romance of the city and its cultural and literary pasts. We were many things, we felt many things, and so we wrote. The Sydney Letters therefore seek to write not just the immediate encounter of self and thing but the cascade of connections and relations that

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come along with following the thing itself. To do so involves a dedication to a particular kind of description that is both embodied and also emplaced. Indeed Casey argues that you cannot be embodied without being located and so ‘emplaced’, and hence there is a close reciprocal relation of coexistence and co-creation between places and bodies.11 Embodied humans take on the characteristics of the places they inhabit and those places in turn are modified to suit the dwelling practices of human beings. In this back and forth of mutual creation, neither place nor embodiment come first but rather they co-evolve together. The site for the Letters was the seemingly ever-evolving city of Sydney. While some of our things did tie us to a particular way of being, a concrete moment of being within or passing a threshold as most doors will do for example, we were also engaged with the passing through – and so into – the city, that soft anonymity that the urban affords. If we were emplaced it was in an elongated and emerging manner; we were things among other things; we sought to write this thingly togetherness. Our form of writing did however mimic the back and forthness of an evolving place, as a correspondence in the old sense. We had established that the writing would take the shape of an email exchange where each author followed the other as we wrote a series of chosen, alphabetized things. And the writing thus shows not just the thing we had encountered in the city but the body writing and effected by that thing and the object of writing itself. We comment on our writing, complain about our letter, apologise for our lateness and generally bracket the liveliness of our things with the awkwardness of our own subjectivity. In this sense Sydney Letters is a live wrestle with how a writing stays in the body, and shows the effects of things all the while performing an argument with elegant fictions. And the Letters begin to write a city. And we also hope the things we write carry you through the city – one refound, enlivened thing at a time. As Stephen Muecke suggests of fictocriticism, ‘The point is not to adjudicate representations, it is to create momentum’.12 -------- Original Message -------Subject: Air-conditioning Ducts From: Katrina Schlunke To: Naomi Stead Dear Naomi These could be called pillars or pipes. Stuck to walls with a steeplechase of brackets, the largest of these take up a framing task, they shape the building – more of it than upon it. The thinner ducts are usually in multiples and run, often in fours, along the backs of buildings like swollen veins. Once you’ve seen them, you notice when they’re not around. You wonder where they are.

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You might think about the layers of building skin gone into hiding these markers of cooled breadth – doesn’t anyone else want to know that the air that is chilled comes somewhere at sometime from outside the building and that the air that has been breathed is released, somewhere outside the building? Perhaps we don’t want to know too much about the air that we breathe inside the city, inside our cool buildings. We want the sensation to be natural and ordinary – we don’t need to be reminded of ducts like we don’t need to be reminded of the alveoli in our lungs. And these ducts are less the tiny air cells of our lungs than the arteries and veins. Carrying in and out the refreshed and exhausted air of a hot climate. They are too important to know too well. Too much attention and we might think again about what we breathe, in this sometimes-steamy city. Perhaps it is that ‘not knowing’ that shapes the sense of familiarity and decorum that makes up my response when I see, again, the ducts I know best. It was not imagined when they were erected that I would see them as I do now. Then, they would have sat, high on the backs of two buildings in a modest and appropriate spot and we would always have had to look up from below. Now an overhead pedestrian bridge means that I see them at my eye height. They sit either side of the bridge and thus inaugurate a second level of space and meaning. As if all along their role was to make this high in the air space, make sense. Curiously, their formal organizing doesn’t last long. If you look too long or too often, they become friendly and soft. Fat slugs come to mind. Pupae and squashable things. All those struts now seem to strain against softness. You sense that if left to their own devices, these ducts would fall down to their natural home, the ground, and there begin to burrow. Or perhaps, caterpillar-like, they could eat off giant leaves in some unknown aerial jungle. But instead their work is here: the conditioning of our air. The ducts I know best frame the small pedestrian bridge that crosses Harris Street. They are painted blue at the moment and hang somewhere between soft and hard and in these times when I stop to sketch them I feel suspicious and draw badly. I feel that I am being rude, taking a liberty: like watching someone as they sleep. Here I am watching a building breathe. Sorry this was written from my notebook and fails the direct address of the email but this task is like writing back to a city. I want to write a whole book on air-con ducts now – and I certainly want to talk to the air-con man – but the point is to have more to say, isn’t it? Sorry to be so slow, was caught up with affect over the weekend. I’ll try and scan the bad sketch! I am into writing in situ, en plein air and I guess this is the time we try everything?? I will get faster! salut k

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-------- Original Message -------Subject: Baggies From: Naomi Stead To: Katrina Schlunke Dear Katrina, Often on the ground, on the footpath or in the gutter on my way to work there are small, clear plastic zip-lock bags. They last until the next time the verges are mown, or the street sweeper makes his slow way along and they are taken up with the dead leaves and cigarette butts and screwed up bus tickets. Baggie. The term arrives immediately when I see one. That seems to me an American word, I wonder where I could have got it from, probably one of those slacker Gen X movies, the kind with improbably witty dialogue and characters loveable in their slovenly ennui. Are they called baggies here as well? They could be called ‘drug paraphernalia’, that anachronistic legal term. This is probably the smallest module that such bags come in, about three by four centimetres, with the distinctive red line across the very top then four raised ribs of clear plastic then the zip seal beneath that. Small enough for very small things, beads, maybe, or very small buttons, or pills and powders more illicit. That must be the major market – they are a pretty specialized item – and I wonder whether the industrial designers acknowledge that amongst themselves, whether they try to serve their customers by improving the fitness of the baggie for this main function, whether this is a kind of open secret where everyone goes along with the fiction of their ostensible purpose carrying beads or buttons, but they are really designed and known for another, unspoken useage: carrying small and precisely measured units of controlled substances. They are quite nicely proportioned, as a composition, although many of the ones I see have been doubled by being opened along the side seams, which tear cleanly since the joint is heat-bonded, folded simply over at the bottom. When I see the unfolded bags discarded, I have a powerful mental image of a tongue seen very close, coated pale uneven whitish yellow, the taste buds picked out as red dots, saliva bubbles squashed as the broad slug of wet muscle drags its way across the plastic surface. The residue, see, not to leave any of it behind. After what wild nights or mundane days do people come along here, discarding these small plastic envelopes on their way to something else, someone else? Walking, or letting the bag flutter away in the rush and slide of air through a side window. To what journeys, sordid or euphoric, is this an index? And then the other associations so innocuous and mundane – the larger bags with their multigrain sandwiches, their frozen remnants of chopped parsley, their pieces of cheese, all sealed carefully for freshness. Eegad this is tricky, now my turn to apologize and slow things up. But there it is done, such as it is. I assume each email is a reply to the one before, so it gets longer and longer and longer? The string? Maybe this one is too

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marginal, too much of the minutiae. Hope you are well, looking forward to the next. Yours, N -------- Original Message -------Subject: Cracks From: Katrina Schlunke To: Naomi Stead Dear Naomi There are some cracks that seem whole. They form a whole shape, not simply bent lines, and their scalloped edges suggest a giant oyster shell has been stamped into the asphalt or is emerging from it. Other cracks try to complete some geometrical imperative to join diagonals or neatly divide squares and some form letters in some leftover, hesitant alphabet. Many cracks act as the memory, the mark of another mark; the reminder that that telegraph pole, that sign, that manhole, that thing – was put into the city, put into earth, concrete, layers of wires and tubes that were already there. So cracks are not only reminders of what exists now, and what once existed: they speak, too, of what will come. Cracks describe the forces of the city; the going up and the coming down, the moving out and moving in. Cracks drag up concrete and asphalt into tiny hillocks and bluffs so we know there is something alive beneath us. And cracks sink down into the surface so that we can see what forces are always pushing from above, further and further down. Like some godly accordion we are pulled with the city back and forth, each noted movement a small, sometimes unseen fissure. Below are the pockmarked surfaces on other surfaces, pits of wires, rivers of pipes, other ruins that are run through by the geological tremors, squeezed and hugged by tectonic forces. Above is the pounding of cars, the grabbling of roots, the weight of fifty, seventy, 100 storeys – and so the cracks tell us, this city is alive. And we, we humans, are one more downward force being held up. Cracks are always being papered over. In the city the ‘paper’ is machinegunned tar, filler, cement; another layer, another expansion joint or contraction seam until the next moment, the next movement in one direction or another. To deny cracks is to deny the pace a city sets. Deny the pulse that spreads in unpredictable ways through people and places. Nothing in the city disappears when it ‘falls into the cracks’. It simply goes a certain way down then is thrown back up along waves of rubbled infrastructure. It makes you think about ‘cracking up’. When you crack up, the insides get shown on the outside, we spill our guts through our eyes or mouth as madness or laughter. For what are cracks but wild seams, showing not where things came together in some state sanctioned marriage but came together too quickly or were pulled too far apart by time and temperature? Thus the

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street slides over itself or splits. The wear and tear of existing with each other marked by cracks that mean we have made enough space to try again. In this city in any season when coloured leaves or bright dirt drifts into them, the cracks materialize a litter of gold and light – a pavement patina. It is easiest to see this at dusk. Hardly ever, when working over these roughed up landscapes in the middle of the day, do we see what an encrustation of cracks produces for we must all the time look at our feet to watch that we are not caught by these same cracks. Look too long at cracks and a faint suspicion enters the scene. Am I looking to stage an accident or am I finding proof of my fall, my twisted ankle, my bruised back – someone must pay for the crack attacks. But who moves a city? Who turns on the cold or the heat, the rain or wind or weight or anything that helps a crack grow? Just after rain cracks paint a picture of the city as a place crisscrossed by tiny rushes of tiny rivers. As the surrounding paving and paths dry the water still trapped in the cracks become a dark contrast to the red and grey paving. Minute green debris lies in some of the wider gaps and a life of islands and dark Conradian rivers appear beneath our feet. Some are so small, they are more like veins than rivers and that is when you realise that cities are alive. And they bleed. Wishes for D, katrina -------- Original Message -------Subject: Decals, doors and doorknobs From: Naomi Stead To: Katrina Schlunke Dear Katrina, I was having trouble so I talked to some people about D. My first ideas were ineligible – they were urban atmospheres or types like dodgy or dodgy bloke, which would have been about the feeling you get sometimes in the city when a situation or a person feels subtly wrong or threatening, and how over time you develop a hyper-sensitive awareness of this, especially if you are a woman, especially if you walk at night, and how fascinating it is that police and self-defence professionals say you should trust this intuition absolutely and act on it; how they call it a sixth sense, when you’d think these would be the most pragmatic and rational of all people, the kind who would countenance five senses and five senses only for the knowing of the world, but instead they say that that ineffable apprehension, it is your best defence for recognizing and avoiding danger. And it would have been about the way that when I came back to Sydney from Stockholm my own dodgymeter went into overdrive, and I realized how it had been muted there in those safe and orderly streets, and that the dodgy character and characters of Sydney have quite a specific flavour. But dodgy is not a thing and this is about things. So demolition was no good either, even though the Carlton

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United Brewery is being dismantled and taken down, and every day a new skyline appears in the places where buildings have been undone, and some parts like the darkly smogged brick chimney are being protected and preserved while the rest is falling and there is a cold smell of damp concrete dust creeping out from under the hoardings and the site fences. But demolition is not a thing, and everything else I seemed to think of – dyke, Dionysian, deliquescence – were also not, and this is about things. And the things that I could think of – dogs in particular, dachsunds or dalmatians, delivery vans in particular white, dice in particular fluffy and hanging from rear-view mirrors, dollars in particular dollar coins found on the ground – were not thingly enough to excite me. So I talked to some people about D, and I told them the game and the constraints, and I asked for suggestions. They got quite excited. In the beginning it was a kind of improbable fictional eye-spy with dromedary and danish and dill pickle, then it settled a bit with daybed, but this was ruled invalid by the group because an item of interior furniture and not urban enough, even though it was agreed that sometimes people have daybeds on the front porch of their terrace houses. Someone suggested doors and door handles and sure, that gives a whole lot of scope to talk about entry and threshold and the delicate scale that stretches between the public and the private realms, what it means to step through one invisible membrane after another and knock your actual knuckles against the actual material interface, whether you then step backwards again, whether you stand sideways or look down while you wait for someone to come, whether you knock differently depending on whether this is the door of a friend or a stranger. And there would have been scope to talk about shop doors and the doorways of public institutions, and car doors which close with the satisfying pneumatic ‘thunk’ of the engineered capsule, and doors which open on a sensor and can either make you feel affirmed and validated when they open for you, or when they don’t can bring on a little metaphysical crisis – if this door does not recognize me, does that mean I don’t exist? Am I being judged by this door? Do I not measure up to the door-determined standards of being human? Someone suggested decals as in stickers, the kind you put on walls or windows, the kind that are fashionable at the moment, stylized flattened silhouettes of chandeliers or deer heads, with that ambiguity about whether this represents the cast shadow of an olde-world luxury furnishing or whether it is simply an image of it collapsed and popularized and made wittily available to everyone, and the others thought this was good because it could also cover any kind of stick-on image including more properly urban ones like bumper stickers or the translucent coloured dolphins and rainbows with which hippies and children decorate their house and car windows, or the various modes of no-junk-mail sticker on the letterboxes you pass. On Wilson Street is a terraced house, part of a long row, where once there was a small hand-written note about the size of a business card

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stuck low down on the door near the letter slot, and even though it meant stepping through the gate and into the front yard I had to know what it said, and written small in blue biro were the words ‘please don’t leave junk mail or I will cry’. As a decal on a door in Darlington, does that do? Well that is a bit of a baggy monster, I’m afraid, what with its multiple participants and wandering. Interestingly, I have realized that the word desultory doesn’t refer to laziness, as I always thought, but to a statement or conversation which leaps all over the place without apparent sequence. Appropriate, perhaps. Anyway let’s meet! It’s time for sherry! N -------- Original Message -------Subject: Escalators From: Katrina Schlunke To: Naomi Stead Dear Naomi The thing about city things is that they disturb more than most the assumed logic that the person is always outside of the thing. In the city we are not certain where the human ends and begins for we are most certainly one part, one pull, of this bigger thing called city. But which part? Which pull? And which part of what we would once have understood as a single self joins with what part of the city in what way? Multiple selves? Assemblages? Becoming different things? – What set expression describes this world of being moved in multiple directions while seemingly moving as one? Perhaps the word is escalation? To step onto an escalator is to step onto and into a thing. There is always a tiny hesitation as the body catches up to the rhythm of the mechanical and the mechanical comes down to the feet and together we become something more. This is not a moment that can be reduced to simple observation by others but it is with others that we catch and so create, this order of escalation so that we move smoothly, oh so smoothly, faster just that much faster, then we could walk. Until that escalation ends and we are broken down and apart and the steps descend and depart and the body that walks, returns. Those first few steps away are a fleshly beating of feet on floor, a short, violent mourning of the humanical. Until the next crowd, the next thing, the next moment when we realise again that we are only human when we are in relation to others, to other things. That’s why we can’t write of city things or thinging cities without also writing of other people and feelings and sixth senses for its through the material we have the corporeal. There is a magic in the escalator. The sympathetic magic of modernity that refigures and returns the ancient. The ancient in the escalator is the horse. As steps moved, we rode them. The moment of escalation is also the moment of reclamation, we are riding again. And these magical stairs carry that hint of the animal that begins with the anxiousness of climbing aboard,

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of adjustment to something not us and then, one, two three – we are riding. Not steps and stairs but escalation. The logics of the escalator have to be learnt. As a small child, I came from the country to Sydney with my family for the first time that I remember. We were children used to finding our way across paddocks, responsible in our negotiations of creeks and swamps, sensible of danger and knew to plan our routes of return. Perhaps because of this and the certain boundaries of the department store, my parents let us roam free in David Jones. I found the escalator and classified it in the minor order of sideshow alley rides that I knew from the country shows. To step on the ride was certain and thrilling. I didn’t know at first that I could move on them, tripling the power of every step I took into the air, but I learnt. And I kept arriving higher and higher, following my fellow travellers around the top to the next one and the next one. Higher and higher, until there was nowhere to go. Then I was lost. How did I go down? And then I saw that they also went down but by walking around a longer loop. It was a knitted sequence, up, up, drop one, round, return, down, down. Going down felt wrong, against the order of nature. I felt about to topple, girded myself against bumping, against the overheady sensation of descent. But at bottom, I was not where I started. The escalators divided particular layers but I had no idea with what layer I had begun. I began the grim return; up, up, up, but with short, increasingly panicked excursions out from the top of each stair. Every time having to return again and again to those always moving steps. I began to think I had missed something, somewhere – I had been glided away from my bearings. I knew I had been gone longer than I should have. Then I saw the miracle of my father, simply standing with a bit of a smile on his face and I surprised him by crying into his thick wool sports jacket and pure wool woven tie that everyone who grew wool wore then. ‘We were starting to get worried,’ was all he said softly, smiling as if of course children always returned from exploring a city shop, from riding the escalators, in tears, over wrought and thankful for a moment, for a father from the country. An indoor escalator is all about moving people through layers of possibilities, of buying, becoming and looking. But the outdoor escalator stands like some craggy leftover, some shaggy old lion pacing out its real capacity in a cage that creaks against what it could once have done. The escalator I know is always breaking down and why wouldn’t it with all the tiny gaps that rain and dirt would fall into and wind would blow upon? That vulnerability makes it seem old, and venerable and riding it in the open is a privilege – an illumination of escalation and air. The rules, stated as always in three instructive panels are the same. Children must occupy a separate step and retain contact with their mothers, men must not stand with their legs apart, and dogs (small dogs only?) must be carried. The rules about dogs adds a certain Parisian flair to the indoor escalators to the escalators that join hosiery to cosmetics and the food hall to menswear but

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outdoors one pictures some terrible industrial accident – a tail caught, the horror of a small paw taken even for a second. Outdoors the escalators grind, indoors they glide. Katrina

Afterwards It’s been years since we wrote the Letters. Now we live in different cities, and neither of us in Sydney. The places and times and things they record are past, although many linger in their physical form. What do we have here? These accounts, are they thick descriptions, emplaced encounters, Situationist happenstances? Perhaps all of these things.13 Certainly also urban, also things in and of the city, and of walking – passing through, connecting but only briefly. A spatial kind of writing, to the extent that the things are encountered in space, located and embedded, within and without architecture. There is more, of course – it continues on: figs, grates, hats, intercoms (one of the best of them, intercoms) and jellyfish. A disparate list well-suited to the ‘inchoate’ mode that is ficto-critical writing. We hope we have left enough space for the things themselves. And that we have performed in the style and shape of this writing experiment, a shift in our practice of the city. As Muecke suggests: . . . when we couple criticism to fiction, to the imaginative, we seek rather to perform a kind of ethics by asking, what can that thing do that it couldn’t do before? what can that sentence say? and in consideration of these things, how has my place in the world shifted?14 We hope you can read that shift off the page so that we can make of our Letters an emerging space where the liveliness of our city things throws up new practices for these particular times where coalitions of ‘baggies’ and ‘air conditioners’ are needed.

Notes 1 Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An introduction to Actor-Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 10. 2 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter (Durham NC : Duke University Press, 2010), 21. 3 See Hélène Frichot, Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2019). 4 Peter Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1 (2001): 99–113 (101).

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5

Schwenger, ‘Words and the Murder of the Thing’, 101–02.

6

W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Romanticism and the Life of Things: Fossils, Totems, and Images’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1 (2001): 167–84 (172).

7

Mitchell, ‘Romanticism and the Life of Things’, 171.

8

Bill Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22 (5).

9

Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, 4.

10 Including the tenth chapter, ‘The Thing’, in Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the outside : Essays on Virtual and Real Space. (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2001), 167–84. 11 Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a New Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 1993), 23. 12 Stephen Muecke, ‘Momentum’, in Cultural Theory in Everyday Practice, ed. Nicole Anderson and Katrina Schlunke (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2009), 293. 13 The idea of ‘thick description’ comes of course from Clifford Geertz, (1973), “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture”, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 3–30. 14 Muecke, ‘Momentum’, 294.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Outrage on Calle de Alcalá Scott Colman with Lars Lerup

The escape On 11 November 2026, seven maquettes escaped the Swedish-American architect Lars Lerup’s Parque móvil (Trailer Park) exhibition at the Círculo de Bellas Artes museum in central Madrid. The breakout damaged the otherwise pristine gallery walls, smashed the ideology of the glass facade and caused havoc on the streets. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, observers struggled with what they had seen. Frightened and perplexed, witnesses offered largely incoherent accounts that suggested a swarm of furniture or furniture-like objects – chairs, a closet, a chaise longue, coffee table, lamp and a gawky tallboy – had fled the gallery. Crudely recorded media interviews conducted minutes after the breakout looped on screens for days. In perhaps the best known, a distraught museum visitor describes himself transfixed yet terrified as he watched the objects limp hurriedly into the street from his vantage on the museum terrace. ‘Clearly these things are dangerous. Look around you!’ He points to distressed witnesses huddled in small groups in the museum café. ‘Those things – those creatures!’ The objects stampeded along the Calle de Alcalá, a principal thoroughfare in the city. Teetering between pedestrians and automobiles, humans and machines, they caused disruption and chaos. Agitated observers gesticulated as they struggled to describe appendages swinging wildly, corners striking the ground uncomfortably, odd hobbling movements and clanking, thudding, and scraping; not the fluid actions they’d come to expect of autonomous vehicles. Most bystanders were stunned and scared. As news of the incident spread, many Madrileños sought refuge and word of loved ones. Confronted near the Fuente de Apolo, a group of resentful locals were caught on mobile 153

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FIGURE 12.1 Objects in the exhibition as shown in Lerup, Room, 1994. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup.

phone video chasing and hurling stones at the fleeing meubles. Others, taken by the Dionysian scene, seem to have welcomed the pandemonium. In one clip, the owner of a local carniceria shouts to a reporter, ‘Appendages were flailing in all directions; it made my day’, over the sounds of cleavers descending onto wooden blocks. Surveillance footage shows one spectator climbing onto a stone wall to attempt a selfie. Scraping his elbow, then craning his arm and twisting his torso into an awkward position, he seems to inadvertently mimic the strange objects. Then, looking down at his phone and scolding himself, he appears disappointed to have captured only a trace of the strange creatures. Some of the early accounts, obviously fanciful, have contributed to the mythology of that day. In a breathless staccato, another witness recalls chairs disassembling as they moved, ostensibly collapsing into street junk, only to miraculously rearrange themselves into a new contraption. A columnist in

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FIGURE 12.2 Lerup, Racer, 2014 Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup.

El País colourfully described the incredible feat as ‘copulating-in-flight like characters from a manga comic’. A resident on a normally quiet block near the boundary between the Pacífico and Niño Jesús neighbourhoods claimed to have heard a revolutionary chorus carried by the autumn air. Apparently, having rampaged along the boulevards and occupied the streets, the wild bunch exhibited remarkable camaradería when left to their own devices!

The initial response International Commodity Enforcement (ICE) were ordered onto the streets in the hours after the breakout. The presence of the force calmed some citizens. But armoured trucks, weaponized agents and the lockdown of the central city also frightened many and caused greater disruption than the

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original incident, which had been confined to the neighbourhoods immediately south and east of the museum. The quasi-military response, which involved large vehicles rumbling down narrow residential streets and armed officers inspecting private homes and businesses, seemed intended to demonstrate the efficacy of the new agency. But, by intensifying media attention and scrutiny of the incident, the heavy-handed tactics inadvertently led, over the coming days, to a full-blown crisis that threatened both the agency’s existence and the agenda of the recently formed government, known as the Reforms. As it happened, the ICE response proved ineffectual, despite its costly mobilization of resources. Credit for discovering the whereabouts of escapees went to local citizens and investigative reporters. The fugitives were located within a matter of days. Racer, with one wheel missing and the other buckled, had been taken into a front garden as a low and sturdy seat. New Red + Blue ‘crashed and died like a late-twentieth-century computer’,

FIGURE 12.3 Lerup, Lean-To, 1996. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup.

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FIGURE 12.4 Lerup, Maus, 2014 Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup.

a commentator mocked, and was shattered into pieces that were scattered by flocks of movos (Madrid’s preferred brand of electric scooter). Lean-to, its door removed, discarded and lost, was found repurposed as a planter, having suffered irreversible water damage. Maus’s ‘T’, evidently thrown like a boomerang, was discovered buckled and dented, propped as a souvenir, like an Aztec mask, behind a bar in Cortes. Its holed surfboard had become an immobile skateboard for landlocked kids. Its bowling ball, devolved into urban flotsam, rolled into a gutter in the Retiro neighbourhood and, after a time, fell into the city’s sewer system where it precipitated a blockage. Tallboy was unceremoniously returned to the museum, hurled through the bookshop window, damaging the store’s small collection of texts on art theory. The official exhibition photograph, taken when the pieces were first installed, was a portrait of pristine objects. Before the escape, this photograph

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FIGURE 12.5 Lerup, Tallboy, 1998. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. seemed to depict an upstanding band proudly putting on a show. In the immediate aftermath of the breakout, the slight turns of the objects for the camera – almost classic contrapposto – were generally interpreted as impish indications of the disruption to come. But, juxtaposed with photographs of the repurposed and destroyed works, the portrait came to be seen nostalgically as a last shot of glory. The gloss and colour of the objects in the official photograph called attention to every scrape, stain and splinter in the crime scene shots. To keep ratings and clicks up, media commentators emphasized the pointless suffering of those final hours. The scattering menagerie, it was lamented, probably felt more panicked than liberated. A certain sector of the Madrid public, local property owners and those interested in art for the most part, turned on the gallery in the days after the remains of the objects were discovered. Regardless of whether the actions of the museum were deliberate or negligent, art enthusiasts and collectors were

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FIGURE 12.6 A staged portrait of the objects before the escape. Designs by Lerup. Models by William Green of Blacksburg, Virginia. Photograph by Frank White, 2018. Image reproduced courtesy of Lars Lerup. appalled that the value of these specimens and of the artist’s work had been diluted and the sanctity and reputation of the institution tarnished by the event. These objects were meant for a pedestal, not the street. They were critical pieces, brilliant satirical swipes, odd, yet not entirely unfamiliar, objects of everyday life, created with the intention of unsettling domesticated habits. They began as drawings, closer to the imaginary. Modelled, these fictions gained disconcerting physical presence. But the events raised new questions about Lerup’s work. Had the pieces really been destined to occupy the city? Was that the plan all along? If so, shouldn’t they have been more prepared for the world? Shouldn’t the world have been more prepared for them? Local residents, oblivious to or impatient with the arguments of experts, just found more urban detritus intolerable. They understood errors had been made by the museum (an otherwise respected institution) and that the objects themselves were partly to blame. But they felt the event was entirely preventable.

The background In the years leading up to the museum exodus, the streets of global cities had become inhabited by an entirely new ecology of technologies: surveillance cameras and wireless parking meters, congestion sensors and electronic bus shelters, bike-share docks, delivery portals and digital screens. Then dockless technologies introduced an entirely new level of urban entropy as

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electric bikes and scooters, concierge robots, driverless cars and delivery drones swarmed through city streets and luxuriated in cycleways, footpaths, squares and parks. As competition within the burgeoning ecosystem of autonomous devices intensified, and the devices themselves – with brands like Birds, Limes, Tiers and Winds – proliferated, the city became a jungle of electronic flora and fauna. Perching and bouncing in prominent, often inconvenient or dangerous, locations to attract attention, racing underfoot, flying and hovering overhead, these organisms produced an exotic urban atmosphere of blinking, beeping, droning and swooshing. An otherwise peaceful stroll would elicit a cacophony of electronic squawking and programmed gestures. There seemed no end to the novel gadgets, even as daily revelations exposed the deleterious environmental consequences of uncensored and largely unregulated production. Although the ‘Reforms’ were concerned with far more than urban mobility devices – the ecological crisis and an acquisitive culture prime among them – their effect in cleaning up the streets and making the city safe and peaceable for pedestrians was one of the most praised accomplishments of the innovative legislation. The Reforms put in place a robust set of limitations and requirements and a strict system of testing and approval on all new objects or devices intended for sale, service or release into the public sphere. Using a ‘carrot and stick’ approach, the policies provided government-funded support for material research and innovation as well as a strict critical regime for determining which designs could be put into production. Most importantly, this set of acts established the ‘public and environmental good’ as the threshold standard for any commodity, requiring developers to prove the value and sustainability of their products before allowing them to be ‘published’, which is to say, before they could be sold, traded or inhabit public space. An influx of museum pieces wantonly charging through the streets was widely interpreted as an early test for the new regulations. The museum’s initial efforts to dismiss the event as the naïve transgressions of a few exhibits met a sceptical reception. It quickly became evident to the museum management that they would need to accept culpability in the affair. There was a consensus among observers that these objects would never have passed the review system put in place by the Ministry of Criticism, the agency established to administer the Reforms. Many believed the museum had broken the new laws, if not literally, then certainly in spirit. Numerous commentators suggested the museum had deliberately released the objects as some kind of publicity stunt. But whether this was a deliberate provocation or just negligence, it was clear that the artist, the museum or both had conducted an unsanctioned experiment on the city and its people, with real psychological, social and material consequences. It was just this kind of arrogant disruption that the Reforms had been intended to outlaw. It was right for ICE to have tried to put a stop to it, otherwise the struggle for reform would mean nothing. There had been no study of the potential effects of releasing these objects into the world, of how they would assimilate

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into or transform the existing urban ecology, let alone any consideration of the long-term material consequences should they proliferate. Aside the initial havoc and fear, the release of the objects turned out to be relatively innocuous, but that was just good fortune. It might not be that way were it to happen again. It certainly hadn’t been that way in the past. It was important to put a stop to this kind of thing once and for all. The new Ministry of Criticism was little prepared for these events and made clumsy missteps in the first hours after the breakout. The minister had exercised an outsized role in establishing the new regime. Her name was one of three associated with the complex legislation required to enact the ground-breaking measures. Yet she seemed entirely unprepared to deal with the crisis. She contradicted her initial effort to downplay the incident when she ordered ICE into the streets. Her subsequent attempt to distinguish between artworks and commodities was a nuance with little credence among the great majority that had backed the Reforms. If the art world constituted a grey area under the legislation as it had been written, then that needed to be addressed.

The protests The so-called ‘art question’ played out dramatically on the streets of Madrid in the weeks after the breakout. As the remains of the objects were being gradually discovered, protestors erected an encampment in the Plaza de la Lealtad. They strung a large banner – ‘¡Las calles son para la gente!’ (‘The streets are for the people!’) – between the obelisk of the Monumento a los Caídos por España (Monument to the Fallen of Spain) and a nearby tree, co-opting a memorial that, with its inscription ‘Dos de Mayo’ (Second of May), commemorated resistance to Napoleon’s imperialist forces in 1808. The younger protestors slept in the gardens. Older and less able Madrileños flooded daily into the square to attend speeches. Residents of the surrounding neighbourhoods provided food and refreshments. Many opened their homes or businesses to the protestors. The early occupation was festive and calm. Laid out on the grass, the gathered enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather as they made their discontent visible and their voices heard. Speakers demanded the museum fully account for the incident and vow to prevent further incursions. But the real focus of grievance was the government. A manifesto circulated among the assembled sought assurances the new laws would be proactively enforced and future issues would be handled without turning the city into what it described as a ‘war zone’. A number of orators pointed out that the art of architecture was regulated and the city planned for the collective good, albeit insufficiently, and there was no reason why this shouldn’t be the case for art too. As news of the occupation spread and an unexpected coalition of factions gathered in the Puerta del Sol in opposition to the populist Reforms, the

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attitude in the Plaza de la Lealtad soured. Advocates of unfettered production – libertarians, neo-liberals and materialists – and disrupters of all stripes (such as the Designers’ Union, the Silicon Valley investor clubs and proxies of the technology companies) saw an opportunity to use the ‘art question’ and the clumsy ICE response to shift opinion and potentially turn back or at least amend the Reforms. They argued the laws were unworkable because they were impractical. The ineffective response by the government had proven as much. In statements addressed to equivocators, they claimed disruption by innovation was preferable to oppression by the state. Despite the apparent reasonableness of this commitment to democratic values and intellectual freedom, the more extreme elements in the ‘Antiref’ (AntiReform) movement were propagandizing from an ideological conviction to re-establish the old capitalism. Many had travelled long distances to Madrid, often with the support of business and right-wing political organizations. What was known as the Van de Velde League, one of the more prominent factions in the Antiref movement, condemned the ICE intervention and lamented that the liberty of the escapees had been so brief. Like their turnof-the-twentieth-century namesake, Henry Van de Velde, the group sought to defend the autonomy and creativity of the designer. They called on their membership to mobilize against the new laws, unwilling to accept that the reform legislation was the last word in the matter. The more extreme Chattelists reasserted with theological conviction their belief that possessions constitute identity and their argument that prohibitions on the right to invent, produce, distribute and own commodities constituted a form of totalitarianism. How is it possible in today’s complex political economy, reformers countered, to draw a line between the freedom of the artist and the freedom of the corporation? And why, the reformers went on, should we regulate the creations of certain industries, such as the pharmaceutical, food, automobile and healthcare industries, but not regulate other industries with equally existential consequences for our social and political relations, material wellbeing and the environment? Why should some industries be required to conduct research in a petri dish, with strict testing and approval processes, while others are free to experiment on humanity, the metropolis and the planet? For the most part, however, the leaders of the Antiref movement made pragmatic rather than ideological arguments. They asserted the Ministry of Criticism was unable to cope with their recently assumed responsibilities. Criticism was slow. As a consequence, innovation had stalled and the economy had faltered. Criticism had not developed the means to meet its newly assumed responsibilities. On this last point, left-wing reformers couldn’t disagree. They also thought criticism was in a poor state. It had foundered for decades as nothing more than an apologia for corporate production. Nevertheless, they understood and had committed themselves to its potential.

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The confrontation The police did their best to restrict anti-reformers to the Puerta del Sol, but in the late afternoon of Saturday 28 November, more than two weeks after the spectacle on the Calle de Alcalá, Antiref protestors broke through barricades at the eastern end of the square and, with the setting sun at their backs, marched along the Plaza de las Cortes in the direction of the reformers only a short distance away. Although word of the movement reached Plaza de la Lealtad within moments, the reformers were entirely unprepared for a confrontation. Their movement had been more festive than antagonistic and they had nothing of the disciplined organization or backing of the Antiref groups. Remarkably, and fortunately for all involved, the Municipal Police of Madrid were staging a shift change in the shadow of the Fuente de Neptune at the time. Within minutes, the official forces found themselves caught between two groups, at once threatened by the prospect of being overwhelmed by the various positions and in the perfect situation to moderate and mediate their antagonisms. In retrospect, it seems an extraordinary confrontation of viewpoints, as local residents, art connoisseurs, artists, interested critics, socialists, capitalists, designers, investors, anarchists, libertarians, consumers and numerous other factions gathered in the circus around the Neptune fountain in a tense constellation of swirling perspectives. Although minor scuffles occurred at the periphery of the assembly, as it would turn out, the significance of the encounter did not lie in any ensuing violence – unexpectedly, the confrontation ended peacefully. Rather, the extraordinary gathering provided the backdrop for a profound consolidation of our thinking about criticism. In an astonishing fortune of history, Ireñe Pablova, a well-known and respected intellectual in Spain, a descendent of both Varvara Stepanova, the great Constructivist, and Expressionist Franz Marc, finding herself only minutes from the fountain, took it upon herself to address the crowd. It is said the surprise of seeing Pablova slowly climb up onto the top of one of the police trucks was sufficient to stun the protestors into silence. We have all seen the crude videos of that remarkable address, spontaneous and sometimes faltering, but unmistakable in its conviction and commitment to the idea that criticism could lead us into a new epoch.

The consequence Free Critics often dismiss Pablova’s arguments, suggesting she overstepped when she asserted that it was the responsibility of the critic to project and take a position on the potential of an object. The role of the critic, they argue, is not to decide whether objects should live or die. It is to cultivate as many affective novelties as possible, in the belief that every aesthetic sensibility deserves to be expressed, and will find, if not now, then in the

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future, its pure resonance in a beholder. All the critic can do, the Free Critics argue, is create an intellectual environment in which artistic fictions are promoted and accepted into the world, in the faith that these speculations should be free to circulate in the material marketplace of ideas and to enrich our global ecology, an environment that is too complex to presage or plan. Yet, Pablova’s defence of compromise is, for now, orthodoxy. Criticism remains a mediating and collective endeavour. It has, under the star of her vision, inaugurated a material culture in which prudence is valued above unbridled action, and consequences are weighed equally with artistic expression. The current system – in which speculation is confined to socalled ‘valleys’ of research and the potential effects of releasing the species cultivated in these valleys is thoroughly studied – has proven, despite the more notorious failures, to be a far more sustainable mode of production than that which led to the environmental crisis. We no longer conflate the applied and pure arts nor entirely divorce the arts from the sciences. We no longer exclusively promote mineral-, carbon- or silicon-based lifeforms. We speak with far greater nuance about the different material and social consequences of creative practices, now defined more inclusively to encompass not just arts such as architecture and literature, but all realms of activity, from engineering, to farming, to journalism, to political economy. And we can do so because, through the more exacting and responsible criticism of the past decade, we have a far richer vocabulary of concepts to describe what the artist Lerup, at the very origin of these events, called the ‘dark side’ of objects. In an interview in the last days of her life, perched on the edge of a couch with Lerup’s restored Tallboy looming awkwardly behind her, Pablova suggested the events in Madrid had precipitated an historical watershed in which the remarkable power of artistic creation was finally harnessed and controlled. ‘Ficto-criticism as a method, a never-ending oscillation between imagination and reason, had finally brought into balance centuries of tension between the rights of the individual and those of the collective, between expression and its consequences,’ she claimed proudly.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Aesthetic Recycling of Cultural Refuse1 Michael Young

In discussing architectural images, there is an aspect that initially seems secondary or of lesser importance. Although every image engages this issue at some level, it does not matter if it is an abstract orthographic drawing or a hyper-realistic perspective rendering. Furthermore, if avoided, ignored, or absent, the representation will often be called out as lacking or it might even be condemned. The issue I am referring to is how all the stuff of the world – the trees, furniture, devices, bowls, pillows, knick-knacks, cars, lamps, rocks, animals and people – is represented. These things are typically not designed by the architect and are often the last things added to a representation, but they are crucial to how an architectural image is received. To make the situation even stranger, there is little in the way of considered argumentation about the roles these things play. They populate representations as mere scale figures, are blandly dismissed as ‘not architecture’, criticized for hidden agendas, or generally treated as kitsch accoutrement, but rarely recognized for the different ways they have operated throughout architectural history. The discipline of architecture uses a French term to gather this marginalia together, entourage.2 Traditionally entourage plays two entwined roles: familiarity and speculation. Objects give scale and character to a representation, providing a level of the plausible, the familiar, the habits of inhabitation. Entourage also alludes to scenarios of action; propositions of ephemeral fictive futures. This combination can be mundane but can also establish the crucial components that allow a representation to become a critical act through its fictional speculations. The combination of fiction and criticality in architecture often begins through the aesthetics of the image, and it will be primarily images that this chapter explores. 165

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Entourage represents the things that exist outside of the value system used by the discipline of architecture, yet necessary for the rendering of the image. This relationship was transformed in the twentieth century through architecture’s engagement with the aesthetics of montage. Through montage, much of the cultural value located in the architectural building was transferred into mass-produced commodity objects redirecting attention towards socio-political interactions and lifestyles of inhabitation. At their best, these representations reformulated how architecture used the speculative image as a critical device. The argument I extend in this chapter will be that in several contemporary practices, entourage is undergoing a cultural-economic exchange where the detritus of commercial culture, including representations of nature, become revalorized as the elemental objects of architecture itself, the environment literally formed from the aggregated accumulation of what was once known as entourage. A prime influence for this discussion comes from Boris Groys, especially his book On the New (1992) from which I have (in)appropriately appropriated the title used for this essay.

Entourage, objects, ornament, exchange The date and location of the introduction of entourage to the architectural image can be debated, but a key aspect to remember is that the issues of entourage first appeared in painting, that is within the aesthetic discourse on images. For Post-Renaissance painting, figures and their groupings were a primary concern for the artwork. This is the ‘istoria’ that Alberti discusses in Book II of Della Pittura.3 Groupings of figures conveyed narrative through gesture, posture, and formal composition within the conventions of the painting’s genre. Architecture and landscape established the support for narrative interpretation, operating in the background, outside the focus of attention. When human figures entered architectural imaging, the roles were exchanged, architecture was now the focus, figures became the support. There are several examples that we could use to illustrate this, but I’d like to refer to the perspective drawings from Paul Letarouilly’s Edifices de Rome Moderne (1840–55) for they not only display these aspects, but are also clearly images for an architectural audience and as such offer an aesthetic distinction between architecture and entourage still in practice today. In these images, human figures interact with the architecture revealing possibilities for inhabitation. The gestures these figures express do not establish a narrative as found in neo-classical painting, but instead, their presence gives pause to the viewer’s eye, redirecting attention to features of the design. This reversal of importance between foreground and background is a matter of attention. The entourage is still literally ‘the foreground’ and the architecture ‘the background’, but within the architectural image entourage diverts attention from itself and directs it

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towards the environment.4 The scale figures in an architectural image are radically different from human figures in painting, they act more like objects than people we would encounter in social settings, they operate closer to sculpture, furniture, or vegetation. An alternate proposal for the aesthetic interaction of objects can be found in the legacy of the seventeenth-century Dutch Still Life genre. Svetlana Alpers masterfully deciphers the differences between the Northern Italian Renaissance tradition with its importance given to the narrative ‘istoria’ from the still life’s desire for a crafted description of the world.5 ‘I think, in particular, of the way in which still lifes isolate and attend to objects. Each object is displayed not for use, or as a result of it, but for the attentive eye.’6 This distinction, narrative vs description, interpretation vs. attention, produces different ontologies for objects. In one situation figures exist solely for interpretation; for close reading, in the other, objects exist as aesthetic interrelations of specific interplays of light, reflection, luminosity, material texture, ornamental detail; for close attention. The still life captures the tensions between objects and their qualities without requiring additional layers of narrative meaning to justify the value of the artwork.7 The common everyday objects of a peeled lemon, a glass goblet or an overturned crustacean gain the cultural value formerly attributed to biblical events and classical myths. This can be described as a form of ‘cultural-economic exchange’.8 This innovation was not fully valued until the aesthetic redistributions of realism in the nineteenth century.9 This transference of valuation into everyday objects aligns with the argument that Alina Payne posits in her book From Ornament to Object. For Payne, the perceived ban on ornament in early twentieth-century architecture was actually a shift in the location of ornament from one that physically lodged itself into architecture towards the designed and manufactured objects of daily life.10 In our modern nomadic occupation of transient living environments, these objects are taken by the individual from place to place as signifiers of personal sensibilities. This required architecture to become more neutral, less decoratively busy, ‘calmer’ as Le Corbusier desired in The Decorative Art of Today.11 There are two important aspects to this. One, ornament and decoration are not the same thing. Early twentieth-century architecture may have shifted ornament towards the object, but decoration was maintained in the clean, (often white), ‘a-tectonic’ articulation of surfaces. This blank decoration operated as a background to frame, collect and encourage a shift in attention towards objects. Two, if we believe that ornamental aspects are now to be found in objects, this means that for the architectural image the communicative intent of ornament transfers into the entourage. The importance of furniture, dinnerware, lighting fixtures, trees, plants, artwork, ashtrays, even things like automobiles and aeroplanes, is increased in a situation where these objects are now carrying the importance formerly attributed to architectural ornament. The Bauhaus, during its years in Dessau, focused on these objects

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of everyday use in its workshops. Questions were formulated around how social transformations could occur when objects were developed through an aesthetics of abstraction and techniques of mechanical mass production. Embedded in all entourage is an economy of exchange. Objects are designed for obsolescence; they demand continual renewal, consumption, disposal, and accumulate as waste in the environments located outside the culturally maintained traditions of architecture. This is a very real material situation, but it can also describe the internet image culture which serves as the reservoir of entourage for contemporary architectural images. Commodities are culturally pre-consumed though advertising images as signifiers of social aspirations. Architectural renderings as images of social and economic spatial conditioning participate in this culture of advertising, and entourage is much a more politically charged object than one that simply adds scale to a representation. The exchangeable image-object commodity has been part of architectural entourage throughout the twentieth century. The uses ranging from seductive renderings for residential developers to utopian political critiques of consumer society. Photomontage is a crucial influence in this discussion. The transformation of Dada montage into what became known as Pop Art crystallized initially around the Independent Group in London in the 1950s and reflected a shift from the political ideologies of post-World War I to the accelerated immersion in commercial advertisement of post-World War II. The photomontages of Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard and Terry Hamilton, and John McHale were fundamental in establishing many of the conceptual and aesthetic agendas for the generation of architects emerging in the 1960s and 1970s (Archigram, Superstudio, Archizoom, Rem Koolhaas/OMA). These montages used the Dada dialectical rupture of disparate juxtaposed images, but shifted the terms of the social critique.12 Pop montage extracted idealized images of everyday objects and environments, especially the domestic interior and its commoditized accoutrements.13 The source material was found ready made in the bourgeoning advertisement and lifestyle magazine culture of the 1940s and 50s.14 Montage transferred these fragments into a culturally valued aesthetic proposition that also opened critical positions on late capitalist society. This appropriation has only accelerated with the use of Photoshop to digitally post-process images. Today all architectural images are in a manner photomontage. Throughout this chapter thus far, there has been a discussion of aesthetic shifts as a kind of exchange. These descriptions are based on an argument from Boris Groys and it is time to look a little closer at it. For Groys, innovation is created through the profanation of the culturally valued, or the cultural revaluation of the profane. In his terms, innovation is a ‘cultural-economic exchange’, value is transferred between realms of the culturally accepted and the culturally ignored. ‘One result of every innovation is that certain things in the profane realm are valorized and enter the cultural

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archive, while certain cultural works are devalorized and enter the profane realm.’15 The border between the valorized and the profane always exists but is never stable. The process of creating ‘the new’ or the innovative is an exchange across this border that in the process alters what was perceived to be the dividing line determined and policed by policies, disciplines, and institutions.16 If the profane realm represents ‘the other’ outside cultural traditions, at various times its meaning has changed. Truth, essence, authenticity, reality, nature, reason, desire, spirit, the unconscious, the primitive, the kitsch; these and others have served at different historical moments as the content of ‘the profane’ realm. Groys argues that these terms are often mistakenly seen as the origin of innovation in themselves, but what matters is less the term as a source, but how innovation occurs through the exchange. Most artists defend the cultural fortifications that separate art from this outside by refining and extending accepted, archived and valued traditions. When the tradition appears to stabilize, there is an incentive to innovate. This can occur through a devaluing (negative adaptation), a revaluing (positive adaptation), or both, shifting ideas and objects between realms simultaneously.17 What becomes the most innovative, thus allowed into the culturally valued archives, are the objects and ideas that exhibit the most extreme tension in the transferences between the two realms. These arguments regarding innovation as exchange can clarify the aesthetic redistributions of montage as discussed above. In montage, the image-objects of profane reality are shifted to become culturally valued, while traditional values such as the author, originality, harmonious composition, historical precedent, etc. are devalued. In these transgressions, the traditions of aesthetics are altered, the concepts delimiting art are challenged, and attention is adjusted regarding the background of reality. If entourage was traditionally added to renderings as a representation of ‘reality’ supporting architecture as the culturally valued artifact, within Groys’ arguments, architectural montages can be understood as culturaleconomic exchanges shifting value from architecture into the social scenarios performed by the entourage within the fictional plausibility of the image. Whether or not these representations become critical fictions or compliant seductions depends primarily on the level of innovation the exchange provokes. The difference between critical fiction and seductive fantasy is typically understood as dependent on the content represented. While content always plays a role, what is missed is that a critical speculation is most effective when it challenges assumptions regarding the stability of cultural values. Alternatively, an image that seeks to seduce the viewer into a spectacle of desire often reiterates accepted values defending cultural borders for the maximization of profit. Furthermore, it is not enough for the critical image to raise awareness of a problematic condition, it must propose an aesthetic redistribution at the same time in order to initiate the exchange. This is a crucial component in the conjunction of the fictional and the critical.

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Architectures of accumulation At an extreme point, entourage can accumulate to such a density that it becomes the environment itself. No longer defined in relation to an architectural background, in these instances it literally forms the background. This aggregation of objects constitutes an exchange of value; from entourage as isolated distinct image-objects towards an environment created through the aesthetic recycling of cultural refuse. It will prove helpful to look a little more closely at some specific examples that could be considered as architectures of accumulation. It may initially seem a stretch to bring the work of Office Andrew Kovacs, Mark Foster Gage and Junya Ishigami into the same category. The three architects have very different agendas; conceptually, methodologically and aesthetically. Yet, I will claim that all three share a relationship to entourage that challenges traditional understandings. Each works through speculative images, their designs proposing worlds where fiction interrupts assumptions for how environments appear. Furthermore, their speculations can be described as a crossing of economy and ecology, transforming the objects of the everyday into a reimagined background of reality. Terms such as ‘hoarding’ are sometimes used to describe the assemblage approach to design practiced by Office Andrew Kovacs. Although this word captures the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ effect of many of his projects, its dismissive overtones miss the precision and care that goes into the work. More appropriate affinities are towards the collector or the archivist. For

FIGURE 13.1 Andrew Kovacs, Proposal for Collective Living II (Homage to Sir John Soane), 2017. Image reproduced courtesy of Andrew Kovacs.

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FIGURE 13.2 Mark Foster Gage, Guggenheim Helsinki, 2014. Image reproduced courtesy of Mark Foster Gage.

Kovacs, the elements of the design are distinct, as-found detritus, appropriated from 99-cent, hardware, toy and household supply stores.18 The model exhibited at the Chicago Biennale in 2017, titled Proposal for Collective Living II (Homage to Sir John Soane), is an architecture recycled from cultural fragments. The project posits an equivalency between classical columns, plumbing pipes, sand toys, and model trees. All are treated equally as objects combined into an overall configuration of local adjacencies. Colour distinction, leaps of detail, resolution and scale are crucial devices that allow individual elements to remain distinct and also enter new relationships through an aesthetic abstraction of particular features. The entire assemblage aesthetically poses the precarious feeling that it could be reconfigured and recombined. This aspect of informal or loose organization is an attitude often associated with entourage, especially furniture layouts and object display cases. In Kovacs’ project, this affect is extended to the three-dimensional piling and stacking of objects, thing after thing after thing.19 For Mark Foster Gage’s Helsinki Guggenheim proposal, found digital objects are gathered as disparate independent elements digitally combined to create new configurations. Objects that would formerly be considered as entourage are now so densely fused that they become a kind of mosaïque, or surface decoration. Gage describes this process as follows: ‘individual figures

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were intended to lose any associations of symbolic content in favor of the emergence of a new and highly complex form of architectural aesthetic.’20 The effect of the accumulation is to question the boundaries of each individual object as they overlap, intersect, and accumulate. The tension between identifiable elements and comingled bas-relief abstraction is part of the pleasure the architecture posits. In order to achieve this balance, there are three important aspects in the architecture’s aesthetics. One, the use of symmetry allows disparate elements to cohere as an overall composition. Two, the contours are wedded together so that multiple elements become perceived as larger groupings of intense formal expression. Three, the colour and materiality are unified as a single material, that of sculpted solid marble. Together these allow the object-image fusions to be perceived as the architectural surface. A third trajectory within this concept of accumulation can best be seen in the work of Junya Ishigami. In his projects, exemplified by Plant Buildings (2008), it is often vegetation and/or furniture that scatter architecture into an intensity of entourage. In Ishigami’s words: ‘I would like to regard plant life not just as a landscape element but as an element equivalent to buildings in the formation of space.’21 His designs often operate through an overabundance of elements, the architecture reduced to implied density. Plants, furniture and people are imaged as small distinct objects of equal weight, detached from a neutral background. This creates a scenario without hierarchies between objects, between the natural and artificial, between the container and the contained. Each of the plants is individually articulated through an illustrative hand drawing technique, but on closer inspection there are a number that are identical, suggesting that these are dropped blocks selected from a digital arboretum. The plant life here is not species specific, and apparently not a vegetation planted in the ground. They are objects, like chairs, rugs, and lamps. Nature is transformed from the wild other into domestic objects, which are then let loose to redefine domesticity as an accumulation of small things. There is an aesthetic attitude in Kovacs, Gage and Ishigami that alludes to the playfulness of miniature objects. For Ishigami, an overall mood of children’s illustration pervades throughout his images; Gage’s proposal consists of collections of digital stuffed animals bashed together; and for Kovacs, his elements are sometimes literally toys. This levity, or even joy in the playful combination of objects, is not to be underestimated. The aesthetics of these approaches can enchant the viewer, quickening an absorption into the speculative fictions they offer, an experience similar to the immersion in play as a child. This reflects an important aspect of how fiction can become ‘real’. And so it is easy to understand why fiction fascinates us so. It offers us the opportunity to employ limitlessly our faculties for perceiving the world and reconstructing the past. Fiction has the same function that

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games have. In playing, children learn to live, because they simulate situations in which they may find themselves as adults. And it is through fiction that we adults train our ability to structure our past and present experience.22 Another potential overlap concerns the prefix ‘eco’, the etymological root shared by economy and ecology in the ancient Greek of oîkos, ‘house or household.’ These three architectures of collected objects produce a crossing of economy and ecology. They operate in a kind of (mis)management of the household, whether that ‘house’ be conceived culturally or naturally. Their stances on the economies of exchange are attempts to make sense out of the wildness of image-objects in the world, to collect and domesticate the unruly detritus, yet also allow a degree of independence recognizing that materialcultural assemblies are made of individual pieces held together for relatively short periods of time. In this work, there is a valorization of everyday kitsch commodities, the economic exchange of reused refuse as recycled cultural objects, de-contextualized and re-contextualized into novel relations to each other and their environments. The profane realm is constantly renewed, because it is constantly filled with the refuse and waste products of valorized culture. The distinction between this refuse and the original, ‘virgin’, natural profane that is allegedly being destroyed by the influx of this refuse is arbitrary and purely ideological. A rubbish dump manifests the profane, reality, and life not less, but more than Amazonia’s virgin nature. It is no accident that ecological discourse stubbornly focuses on the problem of refuse when one might well expect that it would prefer to concern itself with untouched nature. Only with the emergence of ecology has cultural refuse acquired so important a place in the public mind.23 The discipline of architecture tends to treat ecology as the study of the interconnected processes of natural systems outside of human culture. This division places humans in the position of managers of the wilderness, protectors of the environment from the cultural waste of human actions. To say that we can protect the environment means that we can circumscribe what is always around us, that we can determine and define what is other, profane, real, natural. To ‘protect’ this is not only impossible, but absurd, and reveals just how culturally constructed and problematic these terms are. Groys’ idea of the cultural-economic exchange tweaks these misconceptions. Waste is a by-product of all exchanges. It can be the accumulation of exploited natural resources building wastelands of toxic landfills or discarded domestic products assembling into massive plastic gyres in the Pacific Ocean. It can also be the internet image deluge, with its accrual of spam clogging hard-drives and servers worldwide.24 It can be too the detritus pile of discarded concepts produced when facts become fetishes due to

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changing socio-political and epistemological structures.25 All of this is refuse consisting of devalued objects, images and concepts. Culture often serves the role of maintaining these borders protecting us from the accumulations. Although these borders exist, they can also shift, and these shifts occur through the processes of innovative exchange, a reconfiguration that is always initially a question of aesthetics that devalue or revalue an idea or object. In order to deal with ecology differently, an aesthetic revaluation might be one that devalues the human/cultural as the single force dividing within from without and speculates through an aesthetic where all objects, human and non-human, interact in potential exchanges.26 None of the three architects discussed here would claim that their work is ecologically based, at least not in the manners that the discipline has defined as ‘sustainability’. Yet each has a different suggestion for how an aesthetic exchange could take place, and in considering ecology in the broadest definition, their work posits intriguing implications for contemporary architectural speculations. In the case of Junya Ishigami, the environment defined through entourage suggests that the cultural purity of the minimal abstract architectural object can be dissolved into a plethora of accumulated nature. But it is not the wildness of chaotic flows, natural decay, or material ruination that is invoked here, instead it is the informal overabundance of plant entourage that expresses the aesthetic character. Architecture as the traditional division that establishes domesticity, the distinction between inside and out, nature and culture, is devalued and exchanged for the environment as a playful exuberance of domesticated objects. In Mark Foster Gage’s project, the aggregated elements of pop cultural icons serve to revalue classical techniques of composition. Disparate objects fuse into the surface articulation as a symmetrically deployed unified materiality. The overall accumulation becomes a balanced complete architecture. This is not a formalism used to revalue commodities but is closer to the use of pop cultural bling to revalue the debunked traditions of composition, allowing the classical and the kitsch to aggregate into the texture of the environment. Lastly, in Office Andrew Kovac’s work, the profane origin of each individual element is on heightened display. There is a clash between elements as they struggle to relate to each other as an overall environment. Through colour, scale and resolution their disparate origins as detritus is highlighted and aesthetically transformed into new relations. This accumulation strategy suggests that the project could go on forever as no cohesive figure can contain it. This is an exchange that revalues the profane object, while simultaneously devaluing traditional architectural composition towards the informality of arranging and assembling the environment as endlessly adjustable accumulation. In the nineteenth century, entourage was the non-architectural element that aided in the projection of a believable reality for the architectural image. Through the course of the twentieth century, there was a devaluing of the traditional cultural importance of architectural ornament accompanied by a

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revaluing of objects of entourage. With this there arose a new importance placed on the fictional scenarios of programmatic activities along with a critical stance towards mass-produced consumer society. As entourage became loaded with meaning, architecture became the background that encouraged or prohibited certain scenarios playing out in the socio-political domain. Architecture devalued this way can become problematic for it suppresses the wild interactions of objects in the world. The three examples studied in the second half of this essay potentially represent a shift where entourage image-objects are recycled, reused, revalued to create the environment itself. In this transition, architecture no longer remains a neutral stage set, nor does it set itself apart from constructions such as nature. The suggestion is that architecture can engage ecology not only through invisible ‘smart technologies’ of sustainable green building systems, not only by using resources in a more responsible manner, but also through the provocations of speculative fictions. Potentially, this exchange could redraw boundaries between economy and ecology, an aesthetic redistribution necessary given the stakes of our current climate emergencies. The division between the human and non-human is a cultural creation, and the border between them blocks engagement with the environment in terms outside of human sustenance or profit. In order to challenge this condition, we need images that provoke alternate aesthetic entanglements constituting innovative potential realities. These images may end up being the most critical, as they redefine the arbitrary borders problematically establishing divisions such as foreground/background, entourage/architecture, human/non-human, culture/nature.

Notes 1 This title is taken from a section heading in Boris Groys, On the New (1992) (London: Verso, 2014). 2 Entourage in the dictionary definition refers to one’s surroundings, typically persons. It enters architectural discourse initially through the imaging and pedagogy of the École des Beaux Arts. The École had three techniques required for rendering a design into a fully realized set of representations ready for presentation. These were entourage, poché, and mosaïque. Each was different in their area of application, but collectively they brought the abstract organizational principles of a geometric parti to life as an architectural proposition evoking allusive qualities of mood, character, atmosphere and decorum. These techniques transformed a design into a speculation, into an image of a potential reality, albeit within a tightly constrained set of institutional assumptions. The most banal definition of the three terms are as follows: entourage: the people, furniture, plants; poché: the graphic fill of a wall interior; mosaïque: the decoration of surfaces. As different as the three terms appear to our current sensibilities, it is important to remember that within the Beaux Arts system these imaging techniques worked together to create an aesthetic agenda

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of the design. See Richard Moore, ‘Academic “Dessin” Theory in France after the Reorganization of 1863’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 36, no.3 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977). Also Jean Paul Carlhian, ‘The Ecole des Beaux-Arts: Modes and Manners’, JAE, vol. 33, no. 2 (New York, NY: Taylor & Francis, 1979). 3

Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting (1435), trans. John R. Spencer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956).

4

Andrew Atwood has developed a fascinating reading of figures in relation to background/foreground attention in his book Not Interesting: On the Limits of Criticism in Architecture (Los Angeles: AR+D Press, 2018).

5

Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1983).

6

Alpers, The Art of Describing, 95.

7

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics (Chicago: Open Court, 2005).

8

Groys, On the New.

9

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2006), 19.

10 Alina Payne, From Ornament to Object (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). 11 Le Corbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (1925), trans. James Dunnett (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1987), 137. 12 Martino Stierli, Montage and the Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 4–16. 13 Prime examples include the montages that Paolozzi would create in the late 1940s and early 1950s, such as It’s a Psychological Fact Pleasure Helps your Disposition’ (1948) and the now famous montage from Richard Hamilton and John McHale created for the Independent Group exhibition This is Tomorrow of 1956, ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’. 14 John-Paul Stonard, ‘Pop in the Age of Boom’, The Burlington Magazine, September 2007. 15 Groys, On the New, 139. 16 Groys, On the New, 127. 17 Groys, On the New, 83–4. 18 Andrew Kovacs, ‘Ten Locations to Select Artifacts’, in Possible Mediums, ed. Kelley Bair, Kristy Balliet, Adam Fure, Kyle Miller (Barcelona, ES : Actar Publishing, 2018). 19 This observation of ‘thing after thing’ has been levelled at the aesthetics of realism since its emergence in nineteenth-century French painting and literature. 20 Mark Foster Gage, Projects and Provocations (New York, NY: Rizzoli, 2018) 21 Junya Ishigami, Small Images (Tokyo, Japan: LIXIL Publishing, 2008). 22 Umberto Eco, Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1998), 131.

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23 Groys, On the New, 128. 24 Hito Steyerl, ‘The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation’, in The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin, Germany: Sternberg Press & e-flux, Inc., 2012). 25 Bruno Latour, On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2010). 26 There is a potential revaluation and extension of Groy’s argument that engages the writing of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton that will have to wait for a future essay, but it must be acknowledged that the importance of dislodging the human-centered distinction of culture/nature owes a great debt to their arguments.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Architect Who Couldn’t Write Keith Mitnick

Looking back, it all made sense, but I was lost at the time. I had committed myself to a writing project for which I felt poorly equipped, despite my passion for the subject matter. An architect by training, I had spent my career designing buildings, and, over the course of many years, a desire to write about architecture – though not in a scholarly way – had grown in me as well. The son of a famous novelist, I had grown up with a love for literature that made it easy to imagine the creative potential of storytelling to communicate spatial ideas. And yet, as I began one draft after another of what I intended to be a love story told through spatial parables, I felt my wheels spinning. It wasn’t hard to imagine the buildings and the landscape, but I had difficulty communicating how the spatial narratives became inscribed in my two main characters’ views. As an architect and design professor, my interests were similar to those of a historian who reads buildings like revelatory road maps that trace the values and sensibilities of the people who produced them. Yet I felt equally inclined to launch into unknown realms of creative speculation. I wanted it both ways: the analytical rigour of a close reading of spatial organization (comprised of centres and margins, insides and exteriors) and a sense of reckless artistic abandon in which my rational mind yielded to more emotional instincts. This wasn’t the first time I had tried to communicate in words how I felt about architecture. In the early years of my teaching career, I wrote conference papers about various architectural subjects. But I had trouble holding people’s attention until I began making up stories about how 178

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buildings expressed the psychology of their designers in curious ways that impacted their inhabitants. Who doesn’t love imagining King François I’s wife arriving home to Chambord early, and the king’s mistress having to be shuttled out through the spectacular double-helix stair? It seemed unlikely that this scenario was the true motivation for the design, but the story brought architecture to life in a way that my droning academic papers about tectonic craft and the politics of materials could not. Over the years, I collected an arsenal of pithy anecdotes, some true and others made up, that I sprinkled throughout my lectures and resulted in a pleasant shift in my audience’s attention. Rather than suffering through tedious intellectual meditations, they were excited by the anecdotes’ drama and the experience of visualizing the stories. Years later, in the context of a new graduate seminar, I took my interests in architectural storytelling further by having students read short stories and novels in which spatial descriptions played a prominent role. The course was a big success. It wasn’t that the students preferred fiction to historical and theoretical writing, which they loved. However, they did feel that the experiential aspects of space that drew them to architecture in the first place were conspicuously absent from most scholarly texts. And rather than looking for academic writing on the subject of affective experience, they wanted to read mind-blowing stories about fucked-up architectural shit. /

/

When an acquisitions editor from a well-known literary press contacted me about the possibility of publishing a work of fiction, I was immediately suspicious. Knowing that the press wanted to exploit the marketability of my father’s fame, I initially ignored their offer. But later, needing a new project to lift me from a mid-career stall, I accepted. Using my idea for a love story as a beginning, I mapped a sequence of events in a long-term relationship and joined them to a collection of architectural descriptions, hoping to communicate an additional layer of information through spatial paradoxes and analogies. I filled dozens of note cards with information about the two main characters and backstories for the settings, contemplated different plot lines and twists, and devised a clever concluding resolution. And then, as I finished the first draft, I was hit with the realization that, while I had been writing academic papers for years, I didn’t know how to write fiction. The ability to pitch a compelling storyline for a novel is not the same as being able to write one. Overwhelmed by the prospect of writing an entire book, I experimented with different writing styles before committing to any one approach. To bolster my confidence, I fantasized about the finished book’s cover and the blurbs on the back: ‘A compelling story that reveals the degree to which our spatial surroundings shape our lives’ and ‘A beautiful book written by an architect who cannot write’.

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Chapter 1 ‘Joan Didion meets Borges on an airplane,’ was my response when my best friend, Iris, asked me to describe my novel. At a loss for how to begin, I thought about my experience making drawings. Never reluctant to fill a blank sheet of paper with marks, smears and erasures, I tried to do something similar with words by leaving some paragraphs unfinished and deleting entire sentences at random from others. Like a sketch that appears to extend out beyond the edges of the paper, I imagined an abruptly ending scene that continued on in the mind of the reader. Looking for inspiration as I began the first chapter, I recalled a passage written by the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector: Since one feels obliged to write, let it be without obscuring the space between the lines with words. The word fishes for something that is not a word. And when that non-word takes the bait, something has been written. Once the space between the lines has been fished, the word can be thrown away with relief.1 Not only did Lispector’s words address the spatial aspects of the written page, they triggered architectural ideas that could be adapted to my novel: A woman arranges for a man she has never met to sublet her apartment while she travels to Japan. Through a steady exchange of emails, they slowly fall in love. The man shares his observations of the woman’s home. ‘I look at the empty rooms and your imaginary voice fills the void.’ The woman responds with descriptions of Japanese gardens. ‘Small stones and far away mountains, separated in space, but joined into a single view.’ *

*

*

Iris doubted my approach. She thought my writing was overly complicated and that my spatial allusions were too contrived. In her opinion, the woman was more interesting than the man, and she wondered why I didn’t include more of her perspective. All of the things Iris liked about my drawings, the looping compositions and fade-outs, were nowhere to be found in the writing. She wondered why I didn’t simply include architectural drawings of all of the spaces rather than try to describe them in words? I panicked. Should I write a graphic novel or add a lot of dialogue, like a play? Did I need to hire an MFA student from the writing department to translate my outlines into prose? What if I played more to my artistic strengths and the page layouts mirrored my drawings? I could rotate the paragraphs and experiment with contrasting typefaces to make readers more aware of the space of the page?

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If I was worried, Iris was terrified. ‘I wish I could help,’ she said, ‘but all I can tell you is that it needs a lot of work.’ I accused her of not appreciating fiction, but I knew she was right. ‘Don’t show this to anyone,’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t bear to see you exposed.’ In the meantime, I promised Iris I wouldn’t make her read anything else, though we both knew it was a lie. She was the person I trusted most, the gatekeeper of what I revealed to the world. Only a fool would forego her insight, but I also knew that if she lost confidence in me, I would lose it in myself as well. Keep working, I told myself. *

*

*

My mother and father divorced when I was six years old. After that, I only met the man a few more times, but, according to my mother, we had much in common. Looking for inspiration, I re-read several of his novels. The writing was powerful. My father’s published stories were all thinly veiled versions of events from his own life, and yet his characters were diverse and relatable. I wondered if his feelings in real life were different from those he expressed in his writing? My mother was impressed by my father’s accomplishments but disappointed in him as a man. She described him as a chronic liar and a thief who stole other people’s ideas. Wanting to find out for myself, I read various interviews with him in which he described the most important events of his life. It was obvious from his responses that he mixed fact and fiction and enjoyed describing things that had happened to other people as though they had happened to him. But his casual attitude to reality struck me more as the product of a lucid imagination than an intention to deceive. He simply cared more about his art than he did about the truth. I loved his story about the occasion when the editor of The New York Times Book Review criticized the predictability of his most recent work. My father responded by sending him dozens of fake book reviews written in different styles about never-written books that he had made up. *

*

*

I used to play tricks on my students during lectures, to find out if they were paying attention, by projecting an image of one building on the screen then describing another. At first, most of them simply kept taking notes as though unaware of the discrepancy until I began making up descriptions that were impossible to believe. In one lecture on Philip Johnson’s Glass House, I told them the story of the day Marcel Breuer visited the house while Johnson was away and left a note written backwards in soap on the outside of the glass that could only be read from the inside. As my students looked up fascinated, I claimed the note was a line from a William Blake poem: ‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is: infinite.’ In fact, I had no idea what Breuer’s message had read.

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Chapter 2 Developing ideas for the second chapter of my novel, I thought about Iris’s criticism. I simplified the storyline and tried to make the spatial descriptions feel less contrived. I recalled an aphorism written by Franz Kafka: We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our designation has been changed; we are not told whether this has happened to Paradise as well.2 Moved by the spatial evocations of the aphorism, I adapted it to my storyline: The woman returns from her travels, and the couple moves into a small house. Obsessed with his image of their future, the man outlines the walls of a larger house around the one they live in--like a floor plan at fullscale. Wanting to please her husband, the woman obeys the logic of the outlined windows and doors as though they are real and sleeps besides him under the stars in the bed he drags outside. It was much easier to visualize the architecture from my own perspective than to describe how it appeared through the eyes of my characters. Iris wondered why I kept using first person narration. ‘What’s the point of inventing different voices if they all sound like you?’ She thought I should focus on the architectural premises of forced perspectives and parallax views rather than ‘trying to impersonate a fiction writer’.

Chapter 3 For the third chapter, I took Iris’s suggestion and tried to include visual distortion in my architectural descriptions by including a dream from the perspective of my main female character shortly after the birth of her second child. Looking for an example of surrealist writing, I discovered the Romanian novelist Max Blecher, who wrote: . . . I saw a picture of a wax casting of the inner ear in an anatomy book. Every canal, sinus, and cavity was filled in, forming a positive image. I cannot describe the impression that picture made on me. I all but fainted at the sight of it. In a flash I divined that the world could exist in a reality more real than ours, a positive cavern structure where everything hollow would be filled in and the prevailing reliefs hollowed out into identical spaces completely devoid of content like the strange, delicate fossils that reproduce the traces of a shell or leaf left over the ages to carve out the deep, fine imprint of its contours in stone.3

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Recalling Iris’s feedback, I tried to relate the dream in a way that didn’t sound like me: The woman wakes up alone in what appears to be a concrete bunker. Her husband is missing from the other side of the bed. She hears the sound of far away water dripping, and then the sound grows louder, like a rushing stream. The bunkers fills with a vile dark liquid, and the woman is sure she’s about to drown. The concrete walls turn into massive sponges that absorb the sewage as it reaches the woman’s head. Relieved to have survived, she suddenly realizes that the sponges are about to collapse from the additional weight. *

*

*

When I was twelve years old, I went to school dressed in my underwear and holding a set of fake teeth in my hand. It was Halloween, but no one understood my costume. ‘What are you supposed to be?’ my teacher asked. When I told her that I was a character from one of my dreams, she responded with a disturbed look. After my parents’ divorce, every year on my birthday, my mother made me write a letter to my father updating him about my life. Certain that the truth would bore him, I made things up – the number of books I read each week, and that I had won an essay contest at school. Reading what I had written, my mother would shake her head, fold up the paper, and seal it in an envelope. Years later, I found a stack of my unsent letters hidden in the back of one of her drawers. Thinking about the unsent letters, I recalled my attempts as a teenager to write a short story that would be published in Harper’s or The New Yorker. I must have assumed it was a real possibility given that both magazines had published pieces written by my father, but I had trouble finding a suitable premise. Anticipating the yearly letters to my father, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and used the format for my piece, titling the letter ‘Nothing Here’. My story was a naïve meditation on personal loss and isolation sublimated into the aesthetics of a banal 1970s suburban housing development. I completed multiple drafts. Each one received the same criticism from my mother: ‘It’s too blank. Nothing ever happens.’ *

*

*

It had been several weeks since I had last spoken to Iris. I assumed she was avoiding me for fear of having to read more of my drafts, but then she called. She had reconsidered her comments about not trying to impersonate a real writer and felt bad. ‘All that matters is that you write like yourself.’ As usual, I was touched by the fact that she cared so much. Curious to find out if my most recent story sounded like ‘me’, I played all of the treatments back on my computer with the ‘speech function’ using a female voice called

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‘Samantha’. Her voice was completely different, but our outlooks were exactly the same. In the process of re-reading my father’s work, I came across a novel that many considered his most autobiographical piece and immediately recognized a character based on my mother. I was impressed by his ability to both describe her from inside and out, but I was completely taken aback when I read that, after years of neglecting her as a consequence of his obsession with writing, my mother had cheated on him with another man. They eventually got divorced, my father wrote, but they never stopped loving one another.

Chapter 4 Looking for a suitable literary model for my fourth chapter, I read the part from Georges Perec’s book Species of Spaces called ‘Doors’: The door breaks space in two, splits it, prevents osmosis, imposes a partition. On one side, me and my place, the private, the domestic (a space overfilled with my possessions: my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books, (my odd copies of the Nouvelle Revue Française); on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics. You can’t simply let yourself slide from one into the other, can’t pass from one to the other, neither in one direction nor in the other. You have to have the password, have to cross the threshold, have to show your credentials, have to communicate, just as the prisoner communicates with the world outside.4 I bent my sense of Perec’s approach to my needs and used his notion of a divided space to express the failure of my main characters. After ten years of marriage, the couple decides to divorce. Wanting to limit the impact of their separation on their two children, they keep their house and rent a tiny nearby apartment. Rotating between the house with the children and the second apartment, the parents sleep in the same two beds on different days of the week while the children stay in place and cycle between them. *

*

*

Shaken by the description of my mother in my father’s book, I studied photographs of my father from different periods of his life. No longer able to see the physical resemblance that had once been so clear, I found a genetic history researching company called ‘23andMe’ and sent off samples of my saliva. I knew the results before I opened the envelope. The man I had thought was my father was not my father.

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Chapter 5 Searching for an appropriate writing style for the last story, I flipped through a collection by American writer Lydia Davis and found what I needed – a horrific one-paragraph story called ‘The Mother’,5 about a woman who subverts her daughter’s every effort to please her. The girl writes a story and the mother asks for a novel. The daughter builds a dollhouse and the mother requests a real house. At the end of the story, only a few lines later, the daughter digs a small hole to which the mother responds by requesting an even larger hole in which the daughter lies down and goes to sleep forever. Reading the Davis piece, I smiled. Clearly I would never write anything as powerful as that. But the motivation wasn’t to produce exquisite prose. It was to vivify my spatial perception. I had known all along that to adequately express in words the degree to which written narratives of space become inscribed within our views would require a writing talent far greater than my own. Yet the effort to do so had changed how I experienced my surroundings. I thought about how our physical surroundings are embedded in the stories we create to make sense of our lives, and how the logic of these forms are impressed upon our outlooks in ways that teach us how to see. The stories we tell about the world are how we make sense of it, and the buildings we construct make those stories real. But the voids and separations, blank spots and empty areas in between and among identifiable things, tell stories as well. And the stories they tell do not always agree. As Georges Perec writes in Species of Spaces, ‘To live is to pass from one space to another while doing your very best not to bump into yourself’.6 Long after his children have grown and left home, the man returns to the house. Weathered and dilapidated, the structure is about to be demolished. The exterior siding has been removed, and one can see through the walls to the exposed rooms within. The man enters and turns instinctively towards a large boarded window. Stepping aside, he notices an unfamiliar concrete stairway in the backyard. He walks towards it and descends down into the ground. Standing at the bottom, submerged in several feet of water, he looks down at the blurred reflection of the sky.

Notes 1 Clarice Lispector, The Foreign Legion, trans. Giovanni Pontiero (New York: New Directions Press, 1992), 114. 2 Franz Kafka, Aphorisms, trans. Michael Hofmann (New York: Shocken Books, 2006), 83. 3 Max Blecher, Adventures in Immediate Reality, trans. Michael Henry Heim (New York: New Directions Press, 2015), 35.

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4 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, trans. John Sturrock (New York: Penguin Books, 1974), 37. 5 Lydia Davis, ‘The Mother’, in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, (New York: Picador, 2009), 96 6 Perec, Species of Spaces, 6.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Return to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after The Marriage Plot Sandra Kaji-O’Grady

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) on the north shore of Long Island, New York, is one of the world’s most influential institutes for research in the life sciences. It has been home to eight Nobel Prize winning scientists – including James Watson, who was the CSHL’s Director and president for thirty-five years, and Barbara McClintock, the first woman to receive the prize unshared.1 The citation average of papers by its scientists for the period 1973–87 – a whopping 58.7 – makes it the most highly ranked of all independent research institutes, above even the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.2 Yet, where the Salk is renowned for its iconic buildings designed in the 1960s by Louis Kahn, the CSHL is a confusing mélange of buildings of diverse styles, materials and size. From its establishment in the 1890s right up until the 1970s, new buildings on the campus kept abreast of architectural fashion. Under Watson, the CSHL made great advances in funding and expanded accordingly, but the architecture went backwards, literally. Watson acquired houses built in the area during the 1910s and 1920s when the elite favoured English Tudor, French Chateau, Georgian and Mediterranean styles. The houses were re-located to the campus. He also commissioned over forty new structures that look old but aren’t: these could be described as temporally dislocated. Designed by Centerbrook Architects – a practice once headed by Charles Moore – the new works range in size from small garden structures and minor interior alterations to the large Hillside Campus of 2010. They vary in construction method and material, but each is dressed in a pre-modern style. It is astonishing that a place so advanced in its research 187

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FIGURE 15.1 The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory viewed from across the harbour. Photo credit: Sandra Kaji-O’Grady.

deals in images from the past in its architecture. The surprise is not just because new facilities for scientific research elsewhere tend to be expressions of technological enthusiasm or use scientific imagery to convey something of their purpose. It is that the CSHL has the sort of past one might expect would prompt a little distancing. It was the centre for American research in eugenics from the turn of the century until the outbreak of World War II.3 Its scientific prominence and its peculiar architecture compelled Chris L. Smith and I to include the CSHL as one of our case study buildings for the book, LabOratory: Speaking of Science and Its Architecture.4 We had to make sense of its architecture. To this end, I visited the campus and talked to the directors of Centerbrook Architects and Planners at their converted mill in Essex, Connecticut.5 I purchased two coffee-table tomes on its architecture and gardens: Houses for Science: A Pictorial History of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (1991) and Grounds for Knowledge: A Guide to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Landscapes and Buildings (2008). Both books are published by the CSHL and authored by Elizabeth L. Watson. I suffered James Watson’s autobiographies, including Genes, Girls and Gamow: After the Double Helix (2001), covering the period when he led CSHL’s expansion, as well as his ‘life-manual’, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science, (2007). I read the unauthorized biography of Watson by Victor McElheny, a science writer who was employed by the CSHL

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between 1978 and 1982. In researching Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (2003), McElheny interviewed forty-five scientists who were ‘remarkably frank’ about working under Watson at the CSHL.6 I followed the scandal of Watson’s forced ‘retirement’ following racist remarks made on a book tour in the UK.7 I scoured the New York social pages, social media, Forbes and the Financial Review for background information on the CSHL’s philanthropic donors, board members and scientists, arriving at the conclusion that they were as interbred as the families eugenicists reviled. Each of these sources was in some way motivated or fragmentary. The site visit took place within a public relations framework and I was a prejudiced visitor, dismissive of the ham-fisted visions of a bygone architecture so beloved of the East Coast elite. The architects were welcoming but ascribed the design strategy on campus to the Watsons, claiming that the couple have ‘guided our hands (slapping them occasionally)’.8 Elizabeth Watson’s relationship to the organization’s director and the commemorative intent of her first book, along with its origins as her Master’s thesis, made it an uneven mix of anecdote, pedantry and flattery.9 James Watson’s books were equally frustrating. As one critic noted, they are ‘extremely badly written, juvenile and in bad taste’.10 McElheny’s unauthorized biography of Watson was ‘heavily reliant on personal impressions’ garnered by former subordinates of the former CSHL director.11 The only published source not emotionally or professionally invested in talking the CSHL up or down is, ironically, straight-up fiction. A substantial part of the action in Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot, takes place at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory which is thinly disguised as ‘Pilgrim Lake’. Set in 1982, the novel tells the story of a love triangle between three college students at Brown University on Rhode Island: Mitchell Grammaticus, Leonard Bankhead and Madeleine Hanna. Leonard and Madeleine spend several months at Pilgrim Lake, where Leonard has an internship. There they encounter Dr Malkiel and Diane MacGregor, characters based on the real CSHL scientists James Watson and Barbara McClintock. The book’s protagonists also have their counterparts in living people. Mitchell stands in for Eugenides himself – sharing his Greek parentage, his Detroit childhood, his studies at Brown and his post-college self-exile in India. Literary critics have claimed that the character of Leonard Bankhead is based on fellow novelist David Foster Wallace, something the author has denied, although Bankhead and Foster Wallace share distinctive sartorial and behavioural traits.12 The same critics fail to speculate on the existence of a ‘real’ Madeleine Hanna. In recreating Pilgrim Lake, Eugenides relied on second-hand impressions from his wife, sculptor Karen Yamauchi, who had lived in the nearby town of Cold Spring Harbor for a year. Eugenides is so successful in recreating the scene that Dr Amar Klar ‘was flooded with 20-year-old memories’ when he read the novel.13 Klar claims Eugenides ‘got the facts and the setting of the institute right’.14 Klar is the geneticist whose real research on yeast at CSHL

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engages the character of Leonard. Indeed, Eugenides accurately captures the painstaking process of experimentation, the anxiety of failure that plagues scientists, and the complex social hierarchies of an intense and isolated scientific community. He eloquently conveys the shifting moods of the harbour, but not so the architecture. It is reduced to proper nouns: ‘the conference centre’, ‘the kitchen’, ‘the library’, ‘the dining hall’, ‘the boardwalk back toward her building’, ‘a large picture window’, ‘the sculpture garden’, ‘the genetics lab’, etc. I attempted a sequel to The Marriage Plot that begins with Madeleine returning to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. I set out to engage architecture, rather than landscape, as a character. Writing its opening pages allowed me to step out of the expectations and assumptions of an architectural critic – of judgement and justification. Writing through, or as, Madeleine gave me licence to speak freely and to incorporate some of the more salacious material I’d gathered. The resulting prose could not be included in LabOratory, for it strayed too far from the textual style Chris and I forged together. Yet this fictional perspective led me to discover how the campus might shape the dramas played out by the real occupants, working as they do in the architectural legacy brought into being by James Watson and his architects.

The Marriage Rot: A Sequel On the plane from Los Angeles to New York in June 2012, Madeleine is rereading Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. At a hefty 416 pages it is not ideal for travelling, but she has her reasons for lugging it on board. She opens to page 173 and reads: [Madeleine] hadn’t expected that there would be six indoor tennis courts, or a gym full of Nautilus equipment, or a screening room that showed first-run films on weekends. She hadn’t expected that the bar would be open twenty-four hours, or that it would be full of scientists at three in the morning, waiting test results. She hadn’t expected the limousines ferrying pharmaceutical executives and celebrities in from Logan to eat with Dr. Malkiel in his private dining room. She hadn’t expected the food, the expensive French wines and breads and olive oils hand-picked by Dr. Malkiel himself. Malkiel raised huge sums of money for the lab, lavishing it on the resident scientists and luring others to visit. It was Malkiel who bought the Cy Twombly painting that hung in the dining hall and who had commissioned the Richard Serra behind the Animal House [. . .] Almost every night there was a party where people did slightly queer, science-nerd things, such as serving daiquiris in Erlenmeyer flasks or evaporating dishes, or autoclaving clams instead of steaming them. Still, it was fun.15

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Three decades have passed since the summer and autumn that she spent with Lenny at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories, the book’s Pilgrim Lake. The novel, though, was published just a year ago. Coinciding with her fiftieth birthday, it has provoked something of an existential crisis. At Brown she’d taken some of the same English classes as Jeffrey and they’d become friends. Madeleine had not, until now, realized that he’d borne the role of confidant in the hope that she’d turn to him as a suitor. Jeffrey had been the person most sympathetic towards her passion for the scientific prodigy troubled by episodes of mania and depression. Now she feels exploited as a person and as a fellow author. She detects extracts from the letters she wrote to Jeffrey. Such as this, ‘Elegant, his gray hair swept back from his high forehead, Malkiel escorted his wife to the private dining room [. . .]’16 That the scientists – almost all men – referred to their wives and girlfriends as ‘bedfellows’ was something she’d complained about. When Leonard stares out the window and believes that the black water is, ‘telling him that he had come from nothing and would return to nothing. He wasn’t as smart as he’d thought. He was going to fail,’ these were Lenny’s words, reported by Madeleine, as she anxiously conveyed to Jeffrey the weight gain, impotence and trembling hands that were the side effects of Lenny’s treatment.17 Madeleine feels, in fact, like Jeffrey has written her story, and poorly. He has leached her experience of the curious details upon which memory fixates. The way Watson would untie the laces of his tennis shoes and muss his hair before meetings with investors and philanthropists, pandering to stereotypes of mad scientists and professors.18 The suffocating atmosphere amongst the resident scientists whose houses were so close that you would know what was frying in your neighbour’s pan at night.19 His description of the apartment at Pilgrim Lake is perfunctory: ‘[t]he living room had a sofa, two chairs, a dining table, and a desk. The bed was queen size and all the lights and plumbing functioned.’20 It was in a former firehouse with low ceilings that had forced her boyfriend to stoop, exaggerating his misery. Madeleine recalls that she’d planned her first novel on the dining table, staring at it so often she can still picture its piney knots and peeling varnish. The dining hall she remembers not for its olive oils, but for the remains of the Saturday night lobster banquet which were served as lobster bisque on Sunday and half-price salad on Monday.21 It was a grim, unadorned concrete building, perpetually under-heated and damp. Her own novels – in the historic romance genre – are replete with architecture, furniture, clothing, food; the material of history that renders improbable events believable. So, here she is, on her way back to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and again – she feels some shame in this – to accompany a man whose work is taking him there. Her husband, David Kawabata, is, like Jeffrey’s wife, a Japanese-American artist. David is one of a long line of artists to have won a three-month summer residency at CSHL. Madeleine has told their friends that she will be researching her next novel. She has been thinking for some time of publishing in ‘lab lit’, a newish genre of fiction where the action is

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centered on laboratories and the lives of scientists. It didn’t work in real life for her, but the laboratory seems like a promising setting for romantic fiction. The frisson of competition and collaboration, of high stakes for humankind, of experiments personal and scientific, are what she hopes to flesh out during their stay. Unspoken between them, though, is the desire that a vacation without their teenage son Kenji – dispatched to summer camp – might revive their marriage. After a few days in Manhattan, Madeleine and David take the Long Island Rail and the shuttle bus to the laboratory. They are staying in the guest suite at Airslie, the 1806 timber farmhouse playfully reimagined in 1972 for James Watson and his young wife by architect Charles Moore.22 David and she are fans of Moore’s early work, having honeymooned – as did the Watsons – at Sea Ranch. At Airslie, Moore has cut a three-storey hall into the front of the house through which the afternoon sun streams as they climb the elegant staircase to their room on the top floor. It is a disappointingly small and chaste room with twin beds, dressed in dainty floral quilts. Feeling suddenly awkward with each other, she is relieved when a staff member arrives to advise that Elizabeth herself is waiting downstairs. It is a warm reunion. Madeleine had often played tennis with Liz while Watson – twenty years older than his wife and already sporting a potbelly on his thin six foot, two-inch frame – coached, umpired, cajoled and humiliated them both. Liz, now in her early sixties, is astoundingly well preserved (Madeleine wonders if there is science involved or just good genes). The events of the intervening years cannot have been easy for Liz, Watson has been in and out of the news for his inflammatory sexist and racist comments. The laboratory’s public repudiation of Watson has not, however, cowed him: in any case, he is still receiving a salary.23 He cruises past them in his Jaguar XJL, dressed in his tennis whites and flat cap. Madeleine recognizes one of the architects in the passenger seat and her heart sinks. Watson, she recalls, had once proclaimed that he liked ‘beautiful buildings, just as I am generally dominated by the faces of beautiful girls’.24 But whereas his marriage to Liz had demonstrated impeccable taste, she has doubts about his architectural inclinations. The grounds had been disorderly and delightful with cover, vibrant with birds and animals,25 but the tangle of vines and undergrowth has been replaced with extensive lawns, new tennis courts, a cupola and several sculptures based on the double-helix, including one by the architecture critic, Charles Jencks. There are also many new buildings. Some are modest and quirky – a gazebo sports a finial in the shape of adenovirus – but others are stolid and monumental. The Beckmann laboratory is several storeys high, a gloomy dark brick slab resembling a Victorian workhouse, but Liz insists that from across the harbour it could be mistaken for a grand, Long Island mansion, designed in classical turn-ofthe-century style.26 She explains that her husband believes that solid, stylish buildings give donors the confidence that their descendants will one day bask in reflected glory. The lure of permanence inspires generosity.27 Beyond

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FIGURE 15.2 The Hillside Campus (2010), designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Photo credit: Sandra Kaji-O’Grady.

the Beckmann is the recently completed Hillside Campus. It seems to have been modelled on an alpine village complete with a bell tower that, Liz tells her, cleverly conceals the central exhaust stack.28 The six buildings that make up the ‘village’ look to Madeleine oddly like Monopoly pieces with their exaggerated chimneys, gables, and random arrangement. Each is painted a different colour – sienna, sage, olive, umber, yellow, tan – a technique the architects have apparently used to disguise size.29 They circle a courtyard paved with artificial stone and dotted with cafe chairs, but devoid of people. The scientists are below, in a warren of subterranean laboratories. Lenny would have hated that; he felt he was suffocating whenever they had used the subway in New York. Madeleine had felt the atmosphere back in 1982 had been rather unpleasant and a bit incestuous.30 Watson fostered competition between the scientists, which fuelled backbiting31 and when he wasn’t around their antics took on a childish, fraternity-like character.32 But now there seems to be no atmosphere at all. The number of scientists has increased tenfold but fewer than fifty people live on campus. Most of the scientists, along with the interns, gardeners, cleaners, cooks, technicians, administrators and others, commute from Queens and Brooklyn. There are acres of parking and even an underground parking garage cut into the hill. She notes the Volvos in the parking lots and Birkenstock-shod scientists clomping along the narrow

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pathways.33 The laboratory kitchens are stuffed with cereal boxes and packet noodles, and there is a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on a table in the neurosciences department, a sleeping bag underneath still holding the shape of a recent sleeper – signs of people working long hours in a remote location. The Eagle, the bar that Watson had named after the one he frequented in Cambridge, England, is deserted, its interior tired. Several weeks after their arrival, Madeleine and David are invited to afternoon tea with the Watsons at ‘Oaks at Ballybung’, a pink and cream reproduction of the English Regency style built in 1994 when the family outgrew Airlie. The party is joined by the architects, Jim and Todd. Over tea, Watson explains that the harbour-view house is suitable for large-scale entertaining and inspired by those outside Venice designed in the late sixteenth century by Andrea Palladio.34 He shows off the portières that break the winter drafts, exaggerating a French accent. She is sure the architects exchange a knowing smirk. They have brought watercolour sketches of a proposal for a college centred on a quadrangle modelled on those in Oxford and Cambridge. Sited above and beside the Hillside Campus, its neo-Gothic flourishes remind her of Hogwarts. She thinks it will look odd beside the bulky neo-classical symmetry of the new laboratories.35 Watson declares the proposed residences exactly what he was

FIGURE 15.3 The Watsons’ home, ‘Oaks at Ballybung’, designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners. Photo credit: Amit Indap.

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looking for and reminisces about the college dining halls of Cambridge. He suggests timber wainscoting and stained-glass windows to achieve the right amount of ‘pomp’. The architects, uncharacteristically for their profession, defer to their client. Jim recalls that, at his first visit to the campus, hours were spent divining the exact curve of a driveway that would satisfy Watson’s sense of balance and symmetry. ‘We still have great respect for his motivation,’ says Todd.36 Watson has not mellowed with age. The octogenarian approaches a chat over tea as if it were a race that only he can win. ‘I don’t know why we have to be polite about the Japanese,’ he says pointedly to David, ‘they’re not very polite about us. They go around bowing and giving presents, but that’s just their culture, that doesn’t mean they like us.’37 David looks like he might actually bite his tongue in two, so Madeleine changes the subject and inquires of the scientist whether he is still involved in research. ‘Oh, I’m too old to start anything new. I’m trying to improve my tennis game,’38 he snaps, but then talks at length about the consequences of genetic screening. ‘I think all genetic decisions should be made by women, not the state, not their husbands, just by women, because they’re going to give birth to those children, and they’re going to be the ones most responsible.’39 David retorts that it was he who stayed home with Kenji when he was younger, a comment that Madeleine greets with an outraged scoff that she quickly turns into a coughing fit. David wisely changes the subject to what he hopes is safer common ground – the laboratory art collection. Elizabeth explains that the collection, started in the 1970s, centres around three themes, the local landscape, genetic science, and portraits of scientists. Madeleine thinks to herself that this really doesn’t excuse the awful painting in the hall by Daniel W. Smith of Charles Darwin at four stages of his life in a poorly executed Warhol-style. They discuss the David Hockney drawing that Watson bought after selling his Nobel Prize medal to a Russian billionaire (he would have ‘preferred a painting’). Watson declares that he is ‘not interested in something unless he can own it’.40 He redirects David’s attention to an oil painting over the mantelpiece. Titled Whaling Vessels in Pilgrim Lake, it depicts a scene of the harbour in the mid-nineteenth century from the very place they are now sitting. Watson identifies the whaling vessels as the Splendid, the Nathaniel P. Tallmadge and the Tascora, the last towed by the steamer American Eagle.41 With a gloating expression, he dares her husband to guess the name of the artist. David inspects the painting for longer than is comfortable. ‘It’s probably painted in the last decade,”’ David finally announces, ‘is it by Bill Jonas? We bumped into him earlier this week at the opening party for the Parrish Art Museum. We thought you might have been there, actually. Very nice building that. Designed by Swiss architects. What’s their name, Maddy?’ Madeleine is struck mute. She can see that the Watsons are furious, a line has been crossed. Later, she learns it was they who had conceived the idea of the painting of Pilgrim Lake before the laboratory was founded, apparently because there were none in existence.42

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They are not invited back to the Watsons during the residency, which does not trouble her at all. The painting does, though. It is unlike the historical romances she writes, where the interplay of improbable fantasy and authentic detail is central to the conceit and the pleasure of the genre. The Hillside Campus laboratories are like her novels: no one would actually believe themselves to be sitting in an alpine village square. But other parts of the campus, like the painting, only an expert could discern as reproductions or know when an original has a new frame or has been retouched. It simply is not possible for her to guess the date or provenance of any of the structures with certainty. Madeleine knows from her childhood how the houses of the nouveau riche pretend to old money ancestry and pastoral interests. She has a sense of why these families work hard to conceal the shameful fact that they have to ‘buy their own furniture’ as a British Conservative MP once pronounced as a colleague’s fatal flaw. But she cannot understand how pseudo-village squares and retrogressive architecture relate to cutting-edge research and a driven work culture. Surely, the architecture should hint at a golden future, all glass and steel? Bristling with photovoltaic cells and nerdy graduates racing about on Segways? When she discusses it with David, he postulates the campus is designed so that the benefactors are not frightened off by the future that their donations are bringing into being. She recalls the tedious conversations Watson had with the laboratory’s neighbours and benefactors, about yachts, golf handicaps, divorce lawyers, their clubs, boards and philanthropy. The way the science itself – its risks and failures, its animal sacrifices – was glossed over and discussed in grand terms about ‘benefits to all mankind’. David thinks the organization’s loyalty to the architects and their ‘American place-making’ ethos reassures that nothing will change, that the peasants won’t revolt, that their kind will always be safe and in charge. He suspects it’s a futile cover-up. ‘Science,’ David dramatically proclaims, nuzzling into her shoulder, ‘is poised to render the body redundant, we are all code now. Are you hungry yet, Maddy? Shall we go out to Grasso’s or the Sandbar?’

Notes 1 Watson and Frances Crick made their first public presentation of the DNA double helix at a symposium at CSHL in 1953, and Watson returned in 1968 to become its Director. He brought with him the celebrity of a Nobel Prize, a reputation for eccentricity, and his new wife, Elizabeth, née Lewis, then a teenager. 2 David Pendlebury, ‘Cold Spring Harbor Tops Among Independent Labs’, The Scientist, March 1990. Available online: https://www.the-scientist.com/research/ cold-spring-harbor-tops-among-independent-labs-61440 (accessed 28 May 2019). 3 Jan A. Witkowski and John R. Inglis, Davenport’s Dream: 21st Century Reflections on Heredity and Eugenics (New York: CSHL Press, 2008).

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4

Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and Chris L. Smith, LabOratory: Speaking of Science and its Architecture (New York: MIT Press, 2019). The research was supported by a Discovery grant from the Australian Research Council.

5

Chris Smith and I visited several buildings featured in LabOratory together while others, such as CSHL, we investigated separately to ensure a sizeable global sample at minimum cost and air miles.

6

Victor K. McElheny, Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution (New York: Perseus/Wiley, 2003), xii.

7

While on a book tour to the UK in 2007, Watson was quoted in The Independent as saying he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours’. Milmo Cahal, ‘Fury at DNA Pioneer’s Theory: Africans are Less Intelligent than Westerners’, in The Independent (London), 17 October 2013. Available online: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/fury-atdna-pioneers-theory-africans-are-less-intelligent-than-westerners-394898.html (accessed 9 September, 2019). Watson also said that despite the desire that all human beings should be equal, ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’. Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, ‘The Elementary DNA of Dear Dr. Watson’, in Times Online (14 October 2007). Available online: https://library. wur.nl/WebQuery/file/cogem/cogem_t49203c8e_001.pdf (accessed 9 September, 2019).

8

Elizabeth Watson, Houses for Science: A Pictorial History of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 1991), x.

9

Houses for Science is a reworking of Elizabeth Watson’s Master’s thesis submitted to the Columbia University School of Architecture and Planning in 1983, titled Science by the Sea.

10 Maurice Wilkens, who pioneered the work on DNA alongside Rosalind Franklin in parallel with Watson and Crick, quoted in McElheny, Watson and DNA , 147. 11 McElheny, Watson and DNA, xiv. 12 Ruth Franklin, ‘The Hermaphrodite’, New Republic, 9 November 2011. Available online: https://newrepublic.com/article/97255/jeffrey-eugenidesmarriage-plot (accessed 12 July 2018). 13 Gina Kolata, ‘The Scientist Was a Figment, but His Work Was Real’, New York Times, 13 February 2012. 14 Nancy Parrish, ‘Genetics Research Discovered in a Bestseller’, NCIFrederick Poster, 7 June 2012. https://ncifrederick.cancer.gov/about/theposter/content/ genetics-research-discovered-bestseller 15 Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2011), 173–4. 16 Eugenides, The Marriage Plot, 267. 17 Ibid., 282. 18 McElheny, Watson and DNA , 169 19 Ibid., 199.

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20 Eugenides, The Marriage Plot, 266 21 Karen Hopkin, ‘Scientific Dining: Reviews of Research Institute Cafeterias, Blackford Hall’, Annals of Improbable Research, 1995. Available online: http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume1/v1i3/cold.htm (accessed 1 July 2019). 22 James Watson, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 295. 23 The CSHL made a public show of disowning Watson’s comments and suspending him as Chancellor but, privately, as the IRS Form 990 reveals, he remains a valued employee. In 2012 Watson’s salary from the CSHL as its Chancellor Emeritus, was US$384,238. ‘Schedule O’, Form 990-PS, 2012. 24 Larry Thompson, ‘The Man Behind the Double Helix’, Washington Post, 12 September 1989. Available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ lifestyle/wellness/1989/09/12/the-man-behind-the-double-helix/2df96b5e5134-4150-90e0-257f9cde8e92/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2c56bad9fcd0 (accessed 6 June 2019). 25 McElheny, Watson and DNA , 164. 26 Watson, Houses for Science, 315. 27 Watson, Avoid Boring People, 312–13. 28 Randal Jones, email correspondence with author, 28 April, 2015. 29 Centerbrook, ‘Marks Laboratory for Neuron Imaging: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’, Centerbrook homepage. Available online: http://www. centerbrook.com/project/cold_spring_harbor_laboratory_marks_laboratory_ for_neuron_imaging (accessed 12 February 2015). 30 McElheny, Watson and DNA , 199. 31 Ibid., 181. 32 Ibid., 200. 33 Roger Mummert, ‘Day Trip: Cutting-Edge Science in an old Whaling Village’, New York Times, 21 April 2006. Available online: https://www.nytimes. com/2006/04/21/travel/escapes/cuttingedge-science-in-an-old-whaling-village. html (accessed 8 February 2015). 34 Elizabeth Watson, Grounds for Knowledge: A Guide to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Landscapes and Buildings (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008), 127. 35 The proposed new ‘college-style’ residences were shown to the author by Centerbrook Architects in 2015. They are yet to be built. 36 Ibid., x. 37 “Interview James Watson”, The Academy of Achievement, 22 October 1991, Cold Spring Harbour, New York. Available online: http://www.achievement. org/autodoc/printmember/wat0int-1 (accessed 10 February 2018) 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid.

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40 Some of the CSHL art collection can be viewed on the Facebook page: https:// www.facebook.com/The-Art-and-Sculpture-Collection-at-Cold-Spring-HarborLaboratory-117870498057/ 41 CSHL News, “Local Painter Brings 1848 Whaling Vessels in Cold Spring Harbor to Life,” Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory homepage, 10 February, 2012. Available online: http://www.cshl.edu/news-a-features/local-painterbrings-1848-whaling-vessels-in-cold-spring-harbor-to-life.html (accessed 30 June 2010). 42 Ibid.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Bannister Katrina Simon

Two nights before I had to board a plane and travel to a northern city to present my most recent findings on the architectural history project that had preoccupied me for the last four years, I found myself even more than usually restless and unable to focus my thoughts on anything of substance. Books piled up on my desk in a disorderly way, and taunted me with their certainty and completeness, while my own pages of writing became more fragmented and unconvincing the longer I looked at them. What was the reason I was going? I wondered aloud to myself – what was the idea I had found so compelling those four years ago when a sense of inevitability had overwhelmed me with the need to capture something of this tale before my dwindling memory let it disintegrate and fall into the abyss forever? I turned again to one particular pile and brought out a slim, pale book with a black and white image on its cover – an image a bit like a puzzle, showing interlocked pieces of wood, of uncertain scale and curious perspective, with shaped timbers running perpendicular to one another. Almost abstract in its form, it was not an object, not a space, but a lock, or a pivot. In fact, a stair. Made with the craftiness of a jewellery box, the lower two treads led up into a limitless gloom while a larger, improbably high tread sat side on to the viewer. It could almost be a trunk or a box. Bulbous fingery wooden joints interlocked the larger timbers, small domes of wood covered what were presumably nails, and a tiny relief scroll wrapped its way around one end of a snake-like piece of timber that linked across various uprights. The book was a copy I had found completely by chance one day in the stacks of the architecture library of the school where I was an industrious but permanently perplexed student. Ending up there by dint of a desire to study something resolutely not available in my hometown university, I had thrown in my lot with a gang of energetic obsessives, whose main reason for waking was to read, write and draw architecture. My ambitions were far 200

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more nebulous and tremulous, and revolved around not being too conspicuous, or revealing that I had no idea what architecture was about or for, or how one might construct a life in service to this all-encompassing passion. Nevertheless, I was dutiful, and spent much time in the library, lifting out books that caught my eye, as, one drab afternoon, did this one, with the enigmatic but strangely engaging image on its cover. The title of the book was wrapped around the image: Greene and Greene: Architecture as a Fine Art. Glancing at the photograph on the back, I was surprised to see a house that seemed distinctly familiar – a dark wooden house with a roof of a very distinctive pitch. Even the palm tree at the front seemed to remind me of something. I flicked through the book, and suddenly felt as if I was looking at many fragments of the house where I had grown up, but transported to distant places and times. The striking forms of many of the houses, the intricate wooden details, massive stonework, panelled rooms, and even the ordered but overly lush gardens all brought me back to the house where I had lived with my family as a small child, and which had remained such a powerful presence in the memory of my early life. The house was, like many of those in the book, a black, creosoted timber house with a low-pitched roof, wide eaves and varied fenestration. Detailed

FIGURE 16.1 An early photograph of ‘Los Angeles’, American arts and crafts style bungalow in Fendalton, Christchurch, New Zealand. Photography Steffano Webb, c. 1913. Ref: 1/1-021835-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

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timberwork created protrusions all over the house – window boxes, joists, verandahs – and large piles of greywacke river stones marked the entrances and the chimneys, as well as surrounding the house as a low, wide, concretecapped wall. When I lived there, the house was thickly surrounded by dense trees, which gave it a shrouded and secretive air. The gate in the corner of the fence, right by a busy intersection, bore the name of the house, ‘Los Angeles’. Even though it sat on a very busy corner, known in the neighbourhood as Crash Corner due to the very great frequency of car accidents, the house held a sense of distance and remoteness. While the houses in the book were of a family with this house, it was very unlike its neighbours in suburban Christchurch, New Zealand. These were mainly of wood, but much more vertical, boxy and upright, decently painted, and more modest in their ornamentation. I came to live at the house when I was five. I don’t recall seeing the house for the first time, but I do recall often thinking about how many intricate spaces it had, with many of the rooms having carefully constructed cupboards, boxes, sliding doors, and interlocking spaces, often for apparently very practical purposes, but constructed with an ingenuity suggesting a more obsessive desire to connect unexpected objects and voids. I remember being fascinated by the huge black bin at the back of the house, with high wooden sides and a very heavy grey metal lid, which was the coal bin. Coal was tipped into this deep receptacle outside the house, but retrieved from the inside of the adjacent laundry, from a small low white cupboard, into which the coal would fall from the bin. This always seemed bizarre and almost magical to me, as did a small cupboard off a recess in the long hallway, which was ostensibly a coat rack for the house and particularly the guests in the adjacent living room, but was given a much more significant role by a nearly hidden door to another space under the stairs. This same area of the house could be rendered pitch black at any time of the day, when all the doors to the corridor were closed. Then, you could curl up in the recess, with its cushioning collection of coats and worn velvet cushion at sitting height, giving the sense that it would be possible to disappear completely into the interior of the house and not be found. The feeling that the house had spaces beyond those that we would normally inhabit was made even more potent by the remarkable proliferation of attic spaces in the upper levels, the result of the very low-pitched roofs that defined the house at several levels. The main attic was readily accessible, via the upstairs bathroom, by walking through what appeared to be cupboard doors. These opened into a large, dim, dusty, sloping space, with part walls at odd angles, some made with boards and others with lath and plaster – the plaster a rather lurid pink, bulging between the strips of wooden lath. While this attic space did have a remnant collection of some unusual objects from previous inhabitants, its main feature was the collection of many awkwardly shaped subsidiary spaces that could be seen leading off the

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main volume, inaccessible to people, and their extent indeterminate without the beam of a torch. There were even larger attics at the front of the house, above the main veranda. They were particularly difficult to access so I never saw the spaces myself, and only heard the descriptions of members of my family who had clambered up into them. This sense of the house having a reality to which I was only partly given access was further emphasised by the insistence with which other children would declare that the house was haunted. Many of them recounted this as if told authoritatively by their parents, especially fathers, I seem to recall. In these local legends, there was blood running down the bannister, and blood stains on the front doorstep that couldn’t be cleaned off. Denying the veracity of these accounts based on personal experience was futile – the house was dark, sinister, dimly lit, and so the rumours that the sea captain who had had it built had murdered his wife and buried her under the floorboards, occasioning the ever-flowing blood and indelible blood stains, were obviously true. My only distinct recollection of blood and the house was seeing a woman who had been helped from a car crash right outside the house, who was sitting on the wide concrete surface of the wall. Her face had completely disappeared and all I could see was a wet oval of blood, framed by her dark hair. Accidents happened regularly for many years until the road was widened, often occurring once a week, and on one long week, happening every day. We would often be watching television in a small panelled room next to the living room, which was cosier and easier to heat, when there would be a tell-tale screech of brakes, then a brief pause and a smash or a thud, sometimes several. The neighbours would all come out, give assistance where needed, remark on the frequency of the event, and then someone would appear with a broom and sweep up the glass. The mysterious figure of the murderous sea captain was at the heart of one of the stories about the origin of the house – listed in the national historic register, the records indicate a date of 1909–13, but note uncertainty about its architect.1 One story is that the house was designed on the west coast of America, hence its name, and brought over as a kit-set by the sea captain. Another is that it was designed by a local architect, John Guthrie. A couple of early photographs were in the drawer of the dining room when we moved to the house, showing elegant Arts and Crafts furnishings that matched the panel-lined rooms, but no images of a captain, or of any spectre of a missing wife, or indissoluble blood stains . . . The house was large and very beautiful, but also very dark and cold – cold in the summer and bitingly cold in the winter. After nearly ten years of living there, my parents bought a house in a relatively new suburb closer to the airport, and so we moved into a very ordinary house – roomy and light, full of swirly 1970s architectural features such as Glamatex Esterno cladding, rotating interior plaster finishes and a hectic Axminster carpet. But no legends. It was from this conventional residential abode that I plotted my

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escape from this relentlessly flat city, picked my geographically advantageous course of study, and translocated myself to a new life in the sub-tropical north of the country, to the architecture library and ultimately, one day, to the book that brought me to the Ultimate Bungalows of Pasadena architects Greene and Greene – vast residences that were the striking echo of the house in which I had spent my childhood. Though, of course, it was the house I knew that was the echo of those in the book. The similarity was unsettling. Not simply because they looked alike – I was familiar with ideas of architectural translation and migration of forms and types. Some other aspect also held my attention, though I couldn’t precisely identify it. Not long after, I found a copy of the book and bought it, and thought of it as a book that was somehow about my own life, though in a place that I didn’t recognize, and a time that was clearly long before mine. Of all the books that I bought and studied about architectural history, this was the one that gave me a sense that architecture was a real part of my story, even though other evidence suggested that it was an erratic and foolhardy choice of profession. Many years passed. I compounded my youthful error and embedded myself further into the built environment design disciplines, training in landscape architecture and then taking a series of academic jobs in architecture and landscape, with a growing research interest in cemeteries, in places that are built to perpetuate memory but inevitably fall subject to change and decay. By and large I didn’t find this a melancholic pursuit, and, like many areas of landscape and architectural research, it offered up new dimensions of discovery in virtually every new place, as it is one typology that is almost ubiquitous. Yet a certain fatigue had begun to creep into my investigations into the myriad ways that humans mark and attempt to remember their dead. One quote from my initial post-graduate investigation on the topic stayed with me, from a book with the winning title Tragic Sense of Life by Miguel de Unamuno. ‘What distinguishes man from other animals is that in one form or other he guards his dead . . . And from what does he so futilely protect them? The wretched consciousness shrinks from its own annihilation.’2 Cemeteries begin to disintegrate almost as soon as they are built. In some cases, the rigorous maintenance regime keeps the appearance of this at bay, but in other cases the relentless growth of plants, subsidence of soil, careless or deliberate destruction all leave their mark, and the landscape built to perpetuate memory instead begins to reveal its ultimate impermanence. At the time that I was wondering about what new direction I might take with this line of thinking, a new and expanded expression of the impermanence of human endeavour was visited directly and violently on the city where I had spent my early life, in the form of a major earthquake, in September of 2010. This set off a seismic sequence that lasted nearly two years, causing death, injury and widespread physical destruction across the city. Memory, architecture and landscape now became a vital concern for

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FIGURE 16.2 Moss growing in a tombstone inscription in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris, France. Photo credit: Katrina Simon, 2013.

everyone in different ways. The familiar setting for everyday life was suddenly and irrevocably changed, often in ways that seemed arbitrary and haphazard, and people frequently spoke and wrote of losing both their sense of orientation in space and of their individual and collective history. Also, for a time people spoke of how this affected their ability to remember anything properly. This sequence of events ignited in me a desire to find new ways to locate and cultivate other repositories of memory, and I began to actively research the connections that significant buildings and landscapes had to other places in various parts of the world. A paper meditating on the ruined steeple of the cathedral in the centre of the city, or more particularly the loss of the peal of bells that had heralded sacred and secular events, including the annual arrival of godwits migrating from Siberia, led me across the Pacific to a conference in Los Angeles,3 namesake of my former home, and thus to the source. The official reason for the journey became a mechanism to allow me to make a pilgrimage to the Greene and Greene houses that I had seen in photographs many years before, and which had stayed so powerfully in my imagination. My old house, I should mention, did not appear to suffer extensive irreparable damage during the earthquakes, though its two large stone chimneys began to lean badly, and were removed. Since the time we had lived there, it had been through a few occupiers, but the most recent owners

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had made extensive renovations to the interior and exterior as well as building a new garage, and a smart new wooden fence on top of the heritagelisted stone wall. An earthquake-damage assessor, who happened to see a drawing of the house in my parents’ new guest room, commented that he had been called out there too and the river-stone chimneys were estimated to weigh about nine tonnes. While relieved to see each time I visited the city that the house had survived the subsequent aftershocks (in the end there were over 13,000 of them), I felt a sense of anxiety about it, and a sensation that it was less permanent and solid than it had always appeared. So, some thirty years after I had left the house, I made my way to Pasadena to visit a collection of the remaining bungalows designed by the Greene Brothers. Most were only visible from the street, but one, the Gamble House, is now a house museum, which is furnished with much of the original or similar furniture from its days in the early 1900s when it was a winter residence for a wealthy family from the Midwest. I booked my timed tour of the house online, picking a time in the mid morning that followed a walking tour of the neighbourhood. The area was very leafy and quiet, with large houses sitting on large plots of land. I arrived at the Gamble House, which was the meeting place for the walking tour, with some time to spare. Only one other person was there, a man who showed no intention of reassuring me, by way of a glance, that I was in the right place. But the location was unmistakeable – even the small low garage off to one side reminded me of the simple black garage that had housed one of our cars, and a pile of bicycles. Our old garage had long been demolished and replaced with the more modern double garage that now takes over much of the old back garden. This garage in Pasadena too, was rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original structure. A thought stirred at the back of my mind. About things destroyed, and replaced, though never exactly as they were. Returning to the Gamble House following the tour of neighbouring Greene and Greene houses, the guide pointed out some of the features of the garden, including the subtly mounded lawn that concealed the driveway in front of the house and a small coal bin near the front door that, not unlike the coal bin of my memory, was linked to an interior receptacle. The main forms of the house fanned out in all directions with exposed rafters, and almost seemed to fly apart into the sky. As the tour dispersed, those of us waiting for the next tour of the interior of the house lingered outside on an elevated porch, framed with wooden columns and cross-beams, notched together with successive interlocking fixings of smaller and smaller dimension. After a while, another group came out of the front door, and headed over to the garage bookshop. Those of us on the porch filed into the house. We were given clear instructions. Not to touch, not to take photographs. I looked around the main entry space and felt as if I was in an elaborate box,

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FIGURE 16.3 The extended roofs and rafters of the Gamble House extending outward. Photo credit: Katrina Simon, 2014.

rather than a house. Almost every surface was wooden, intricately structured and layered, including the stair that I recognized from the front cover of the book. We were herded out of this space as another group was led in. Clusters of house tourists were being taken through the house simultaneously, giving a sense almost of theatrical entrances and exits. Yet, at the same time, there was a sense of a palpable but invisible space lurking in the house. I became suddenly aware of the void behind the panelling, flattened and watchful, that extended around the walls and up through the obsessively crafted wooden stair. Here in the panelled entrance and by the coal box, I had a strong feeling that my own house had joined me on the tour, not just that I was encountering a collection of similar features or forms, but a discrete quality, entering and moving through the House Museum just as I moved through it, unevenly but distinctly. We walked through the entire ground floor, then up the stair to the first floor bedrooms and gigantic sleeping terraces. Here, each area of the house had a different character as furniture and fittings had been designed for different members of the household. Finally, we ascended another stair to the top level. The sense of a pressure behind the panelled walls became stronger, the higher we climbed. As we reached the top, and entered a large attic space, this sensation became almost overwhelming, and was made even

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more oppressive by a pungent metallic smell. I had a sudden image of a thick viscous red substance oozing from out of the walls and flowing down the stairs. It was just a mental picture, a flight of my over-tired imagination, but it made me suddenly wonder – what if the stories I had always dismissed as fanciful and nonsensical were not just idle stories but something else? No-one else appeared to have noticed anything, or to have been affected by any strange atmosphere or smell. Our tour group was led back down to the ground floor and outside, where we were free to walk about the garden. Feeling slightly faint, I stood gazing up at the fraying rafters of the house. I turned to look at the low-lying garage turned into a museum shop. I recalled the recent photographs of the house in Christchurch, with its appropriately roomy new garage, its new higher wall, conveniently screening out the view and noise of the busy road, and the wide roofs, sensibly parted from their dangerously de-stabilized river-stone chimneys. And suddenly, this program of tasteful home renovation and improvement suggested an entirely different possibility. What if the shaking of the nine tonne stone chimneys had really wrecked the interior of the house during the earthquake? Torn up the floorboards? Unearthed a desiccated, semi-mummified figure of a woman, clad in a 1900s-style summer dress and wrapped in a blood-stained oriental rug?

FIGURE 16.4 The high fence on top of the river-stone wall, concealing the house from view. Photo credit: Schwede66, 2013. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Los_Angeles,_Christchurch_074.JPG accessed on 16.12.2019. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International licence.

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Maybe a tear-stained written confession buried with the body led to the garden being dug up, revealing the shattered bannister rail with which she had been killed, along with boxes with all her possessions, buried to conceal the fact that she had ever existed? Not to mention the sawn-up fragments of the original bannister, that was indelibly stained with blood, after she was bludgeoned at the landing on the top of the stair? That would certainly explain the grossly oversized garage built to cover the remnants of the garden. Not to mention the high new wall concealing the house and garden from prying view. And, of course, the destruction of the river stone chimneys, with the stones no doubt used to fill the hole under the house, as well as to re-bury and further conceal the body, no longer lying under the floorboards but now hermetically sealed under the seismically strengthened poured concrete slab of the new garage. I walked slowly to the museum shop. And bought a new copy of an old book to add to my collection. Tragic Sense of Life.

Notes 1 The house was listed by Heritage New Zealand: Pouhere Taonga as a Historic Place Category 1 on April 1985. The summary on the website notes the two ‘traditions’ about its origin. Available online: https://www.heritage.org.nz/ the-list/details/3680 (last accessed 6 September 2019). 2 Miguel de Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life (New York: Dover Publications, 1954), 40. 3 The conference was run by the International Association for the Study of Environment Space and Place and the paper was later revised and published in the Association’s journal: Katrina Simon, ‘Re-casting the past: re-instating once broken and tuneless bells and the recalling of past urban landscapes’, Environment, Space and Place 7, no.1 (Spring 2015): 28–46.

Bibliography Heritage New Zealand: Pouhere Taonga. Available online: https://www.heritage. org.nz/the-list/details/3680 (accessed 6 September 2019). Makinson, Randell L. Greene & Greene: Architecture as a Fine Art. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1977. Simon, Katrina. ‘Re-casting the Past: Re-instating once broken and tuneless bells and the recalling of past urban landscapes’. Environment, Space and Place, vol. 7, no. 1 (2015): 28–46. de Unamuno, Miguel. Tragic Sense of Life. New York: Dover Publications, 1954.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Nice House, Woodland Lakes Andrew P. Steen

1 The house was one of a type. There were six types. Each had been given the name of a city of which it was supposed to be reminiscent. None of the houses was remarkable. All were of similar construction type and material, which could be defined as cheap. Of course, home-buyers didn’t see cheapness in the construction or materials. They saw largeness of rooms, and number of bathrooms. Home-buyers also saw cheapness in price, and liked what they saw. This house was a Nice. The developers of Woodland Lakes had worried about the name in regards to potential mispronunciation. They decided to go with it, agreeing that if people said the name wrong, they would still be saying a positive word. And someone might correct them. That would make a pleasant talking point. The Nice was a three-bedroom type, with two bathrooms, an ensuite, kitchen with European appliances, open-plan living with floating timber floors, ducted air-conditioning throughout, cut-pile wool-carpeted bedrooms, and a double garage. It was painted Sand. Sand was the standard colour of the Nice. The developers didn’t think that the name of the colour was incongruous with Nice. No-one proposed Pebble. To paint any house in Woodland Lakes a different colour, the homeowner or -owners needed to get special dispensation from the local estate authority. The authority had a thick, printed covenant that spelled out what was allowed, and what was not. Nices had a timber-look product covering the face of the garage doors and the front door. All window frames were bronze aluminium. There were no shutters or awnings on the façades. There were Venetian blinds on the 210

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inside. The developers had thought of naming another of their types Venice. They decided against it. They thought all the romance in the world couldn’t overcome the fear of flooding. The roof of the Nice was tiled with terracotta tiles, and it had an overhang as thick as the zincalume® guttering. This Nice had ordinary gardens. The back garden was entirely comprised of concrete pavers spaced with ornamental grass. The back garden included the one-metre-wide spaces between the sides of the house and the timberpaling side fences. The front garden featured a small cluster of shrubs and a semi-mature tree that was native to the area but not to that specific location. These plants were surrounded by well-maintained grass. On one side of the front garden, a pebblecrete® driveway led from the street to the garage. At 8:59 am, this Nice had its blinds to the street tightly shut. This was partly because the front of the house faced east, but mostly because all of its blinds were always tightly shut. This Nice had a second door facing the street. This door was also faced with the timber-look product. Next to this second door was a small plaque. The plaque had been there two months. It was exceptional. The estate authority was planning to ensure that it remained exceptional. The plaque required special approval, and this approval was given only after a painstaking process was undertaken. The approval took seven months. The plaque next to the second door was bronze, matching the window frames. It had neat sans serif lettering that read ‘Mark Jones, Private Investigator’. The name ‘Mark Jones’ was in a larger font and was on its own line. The words ‘Private Investigator’ sat below, in smaller lettering, three-quarters the size. The door beside the ‘Mark Jones / Private Investigator’ plaque had replaced an almost full-length fixed window. There was some associated internal work done. The area behind the door was formerly part of the large, open-plan living space. It had been subdivided into a room two-and-a-half metres wide by four metres long. The permission for this second front door and internal room reconfiguration had taken six weeks to obtain. The permission for the plaque had come later. The estate authority approved the plaque because they didn’t want people thinking they discriminated against the self-employed. They wished they’d never approved the door. At 9:00 am, the front door of the Nice opened. A man stepped out dressed in a dark blue polo shirt and a pair of beige cotton trousers. Some people might call them chinos. The man’s wardrobe was almost entirely filled with polo shirts and cotton trousers. This was the result of a strategic decision. Any combination of polo shirt and cotton trouser resulted in an unobjectionable outfit. The man was wearing brown leather boat shoes. He could’ve selected black leather Oxford shoes or Asics Gel sneakers from his closet, but didn’t. They were for formal occasions and exercise, respectively. The man wasn’t wearing sunglasses, and he wasn’t carrying a bag, a newspaper or a laptop. His thick, dry, mid-brown hair was parted to one side, neatly trimmed but not short.

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After stepping out of the door, the man turned to lock it. This was Mr. Mark Jones, owner and resident.

2 Mark extricated the key from the front door lock. Then he walked threeand-a-half metres to his right to the other door. During these steps, he looked through the other keys on his keychain. He found the right one in the walk. It wasn’t difficult. The office-door key was stainless steel, and his house keys were bronze. At the second door, Mark inserted the stainless-steel key in the keyhole, turned it, and opened his office. Mark walked into the office and closed the door behind him. There was no one in the office to greet. He had no secretary or partner. It was a oneman operation. More accurately, it was a no-man operation. Or a one-man, non-operation. Mark’s Private Investigation practice wasn’t earning any money. His outgoings to date were higher than his incomings. This wasn’t a concern. Mark had earned enough money in his previous job to keep him financially secure for the rest of his life. Mark began computer programming to earn a living. As it happened, he was good at it. After working for ten years, he wrote a program that allowed him to retire. But Mark didn’t want to be officially unemployed. So he decided to be a Private Investigator. He didn’t know if he liked the work of a Private Investigator. He’d never had a single job. He wasn’t going out of his way to look for work, either. The plaque was his only form of advertising. Mark’s Private Investigator’s office was simply, but he hoped suitably, furnished. It had two, black, leather tub chairs near the front of the room, and a low timber side-table. The side-table did not carry periodicals. Mark thought a Private Investigator wasn’t a service people would return to periodically, so he didn’t see the sense in continually updating the reading material. Besides which, he had no clients to worry about. And if he did have one, he didn’t think he would keep them waiting. Mark liked to be efficient, and had no time for affectations. At the back of the room was Mark’s desk. On it sat his desktop computer, a printer, a telephone, and a lamp. The telephone also served as an answering machine. It had a display that showed the number of messages it was holding. It currently said ‘0’. The telephone had a different number to his home number. Once he’d heard it ringing through the wall when he was at home after hours. He had ignored it. Mark had other things in his desk drawers: ball-point and felt-tipped pens; A4 paper and post-it notes; a digital SLR camera; other hi-tech equipment – namely, listening devices and a GPS tracker. He also had a box of tissues. Mark thought these would be useful if he had a client who was crying. Behind the desk sat Mark’s leather swivel chair. In front of the desk, but to the side and against the wall, was another chair. This one was an everyday

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dining room type, with armrests. It was for clients to sit on. There was a small, wire-mesh bin on the floor under the desk’s drawers. He collected paper for recycling in it. He always emptied it before it overflowed. The walls of the room were painted Pale Cardamom, satin finish. There was a framed document on the rear wall. It was a current Private Investigator licence. It was A4 in size, with a red stamp in the bottom right-hand corner. In the corner of the room there was a black, metal filing cabinet. It had three drawers: two were totally empty; the other was largely empty. The ceiling housed two LED downlights. There was also a vent through which air-conditioning breezed into the room. The vent was added when the room was subdivided, along with the required ducting in the roof cavity. Mark liked it to be twenty-two degrees Celsius. The ceiling was painted Raw Meringue White. Mark sat down at his desk and turned on his computer. Though the room was quite well lit, he turned on the lamp. He always turned on the lamp when he sat down. He didn’t like finding himself sitting in dim light, staring at the glowing screen. It made him feel like he’d lost time.

3 It was Mark’s habit to go to lunch at 1.00 p.m. His computer told him when it reached that hour. It said: ‘The time is now one o’clock, p.m.’ Mark was strict about personal discipline. One broken rule could lead to another, and another, and another, and another. When the time came, Mark would roll his chair back on the floating timber floor, get out of his seat, check he was carrying his wallet in his front-right pocket and his phone in his front-left pocket, and walk towards the office door. Once at the office door, he would open it, step outside, and lock it behind him. He would then put his keys with his wallet in his front-right trouser pocket, and turn to walk towards the one café in Woodland Lakes. It was called Café Marais. The name Café Marais was quite appropriate for Woodland Lakes. The area was swampy marshland before mud was moved around to make two stagnant lakes and a just-above-sea-level ground. Mark enjoyed the flatness of the suburb. It made it easy to walk around. Café Marais was not, however, called Café Marais because of the suburb’s history. It was called that because, at one meeting, one of the developers wouldn’t stop raving about the kebabs he ate in Paris. He spoke for at least five minutes. The other developers agreed to name the café ‘Café Marais’ when the kebab lover had to pause to use the toilet. The name was thus less an homage, and more an expedient. Café Marais was a twelve-minute walk from Mark’s Nice at his usual, steady pace. The path he walked took him past a number of houses, and a park with a children’s play set and an electric, coin-fed barbeque. Walking from Mark’s house, Café Marais was the first in a line of four commercial units. It was followed by a newsagent, a bakery and a small

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convenience store. On the other side of the street was a post office, and a restaurant called The Lakes. The name was a reference to the name of the suburb. There was a view of one of the lakes from a window near the entrance that reinforced this reference. Mark thought one of the best features of Woodland Lakes was its commercial precinct’s car parking strategy. Cars parked at the rear of the building blocks. The street between the shops was pedestrianized. The level of that pedestrianized street was continuous with the footpath. Rather than guttering, there was a channel drain down the centre of the road. This allowed for Café Marais and The Lakes to offer ‘alfresco dining’. This was a term 98 per cent of survey respondents thought was either attractive or very attractive. If Mark had been a respondent, he would’ve answered either attractive or very attractive. It was difficult to consider ‘alfresco dining’ neutral, unattractive, or very unattractive. Every day, Mark went to the counter of Café Marais and ordered a sandwich from its owner or one of her young female assistants. The female assistants seemed to be on a variable roster. They were invariably pretty. Mark wasn’t much of a small-talker. He would respond if one of the girls asked him if he had any plans for the weekend or made a comment regarding the weather. Mark didn’t know the names of any of the Café Marais staff, and none of them knew his, but there was definitely a sense of mutual recognition. Mark enjoyed this mutual recognition. Mark tried not to order the same thing twice in one week. There was a wide enough variety of fillings in Café Marais’ sandwich bar to make this possible. He did, however, always have the same bread type: a baguette. Each ‘baguette’ was actually a third of a whole baguette. All the bread at Café Marais came from the bakery two doors up. Mark always had his baguette without butter. Mark stared at the ingredients behind the glass in their small, chilled, stainless steel containers. He always left the decision-making until he was staring at the ingredients behind the glass. Freshness was important. Today he decided on roast beef, Jarlsberg cheese, homemade chutney, tomato and alfalfa sprouts. Mark always watched as the staff member made the sandwich. Today it was the young, slight, fair girl. He was happy about this. She was quite generous with the amount of ingredients she put on sandwiches. The owner was quite measured. The girl with dyed hair, three piercings per ear, and a propensity for applying makeup and perfume too heavily, was stingy. If Mark could not avoid her, he tried to order something strongly flavoured. Often curried egg. After his sandwich was made, Mark moved across to the cash register. He handed the young, slight, fair girl the amount due for the sandwich and an apple juice he said he would take from the refrigerator next to the counter. He then collected his juice, and took his lunch out to the alfresco dining area.

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Mark stared at passers-by as he ate. There were usually enough of them to keep him entertained. There were regulars. He often saw a young woman jogging. She wore a baggy t-shirt and Lycra® pants. Lately she was starting to look much fitter. Her t-shirts were becoming very baggy. There was also an old man that carried an umbrella. He bought a small bag of items from the convenience store every day, and sometimes a loaf of bread from the bakery. Mark hadn’t worked out how regularly he bought bread, or whether it was always the same loaf. Most of the customers of the café were Woodland Lakes residents. Mark recognized them, but never tried to start a conversation. He knew that if he had a conversation with someone once, the next time they saw each other it would be awkward. Neither he nor the other person would know whether they should speak again, or on what terms. Mark liked to avoid awkward social scenarios if at all possible. But he always smiled if he made eye contact. He didn’t want to seem unfriendly.

4 After he finished his lunch, Mark strolled back to his office. He took the same path in reverse. It usually took him around fourteen minutes. He didn’t intentionally walk more slowly. The added two minutes were a function of his body spending energy on digestion. Mark made a stop at his mailbox on his way to the office door. The mailman came every day at 11.00 am, give or take half an hour. Mark left it until after lunch to check for mail. Today there were three envelopes. One was imprinted with the logo of his electricity supplier. One was imprinted with the name of his local member of parliament. One was a gold, C5, plainface, heavy-weight, pocket peel-and-seal, imprinted with one line of text. Mark glanced at the envelopes as he walked to the office door. He also took his keychain out of his pocket, and found the stainless-steel key. When he reached the timber-look-faced door, he let himself in. He closed the door behind him and approached his swivel chair. He sat down gently. He selected the mail from the electricity supplier and the local parliamentarian, scrunched them together, and threw them in his bin. He paid his electrical accounts online, and had little interest in politics. The remaining envelope was addressed to ‘Mark Jones, Private Investigator’. No address; no stamp; no return address. ‘Mark Jones, Private Investigator’ was printed directly onto the envelope in Calibri. It was a generic font. It was also the font Mark used. Mark thought all generic forms were the result of considered design processes, and that individuals should adopt the results of such processes. Unlike his plaque, the text was all the same size and on the same line. And there was that comma. Mark Jones opened his top drawer, and took out his teak-handled, stainless-steel-bladed letter opener. He slid the letter opener under the flap

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of the envelope slowly, then swiftly sliced the envelope open. He reached in and removed a single piece of 80gsm, A4 paper folded into two, roughly-equal parts, and a white, C6, wallet envelope, unmarked but wellsealed. Mark unfolded the piece of paper. He pressed the creases flat against the top of his desk. The page contained typewritten words. Again, Calibri. The page contained none of the marks of a conventional letter. There was no sender address, no receiver address, and no date. Just six words, and two punctuation marks: Please help me, I am lost. Mark read the letter once and paused. He turned the page over to check if there was anything on the other side. There was nothing, not even a watermark. Mark smelled the paper. He’d seen this done in movies. He wasn’t sure which movies. He wasn’t even sure if they were detective movies. He thought he remembered seeing a man smell a page to detect perfume. Possibly also a woman to detect a male pheromone. It seemed like smelling could extract important information. This piece of paper seemed to have no smell other than paper smell. Mark put the unscented paper on his desk printed side up, then turned his attention to the sealed white envelope. He picked up his letter opener. He used the blade to find the small gap at one corner of the flap. He repeated his slicing gesture. The envelope did not give evenly at the edge, but rather tore. The contents of the envelope were nevertheless revealed. They comprised a stack of hundred-dollar notes. Mark pulled the notes from the envelope. He counted the notes. There were ten. Mark put the torn-open white envelope and the stack of ten, hundreddollar notes on his desk next to the letter. Hands resting on the desk, Mark read the letter again. He read slowly and deliberately. The first time he’d read slowly, but not deliberately; he just couldn’t get his mind to work any faster. This time he read word by word. Whether read deliberately or not deliberately, the message was the same. Mark understood what it meant abstractly, but not practically. Mark heard the air-conditioner humming. His computer screen illuminated due to an accidental mouse touch.

5 Mark’s daily homecomings lacked the significance some homecomings have. This was largely due to the fact that his office and his home were adjoining. It was also because his life was largely free of trappings. He didn’t have a briefcase to dump; he didn’t have a tie to loosen; he didn’t have uncomfortable shoes, or sweaty socks to remove. He had his keys, wallet

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and phone, a polo shirt, comfortable shoes and largely fresh socks. He was single and without children, so he didn’t have to greet anyone, or be greeted by anyone. Nevertheless, Mark’s entrance through the front door of his home was not without a sense of arrival. He’d set up motion-detecting lights in the open-plan living space that extended to the front door. Market research commissioned by the developers revealed most people thought open plans provided more space, and were thus better value for money. When Mark entered his open-plan space, the swing of the front door was detected by a mechanical eye. Mark had mounted the eye in the corner of the room, and carefully calibrated it to sense the door swing. Detection triggered a field of six LED downlights. If Mark threw the door open very quickly, he could see part of the room in darkness before the lights came on and caught the remainder doing whatever it was doing. It was usually doing nothing. The revelation was nevertheless pleasant. Mark didn’t feel like being surrounded by the noise of his subdivided but still empty open-plan living space, so he turned on the stereo and it broadcast the radio. He wasn’t really a fan of the music the radio station played, but didn’t find it objectionable. On a company social occasion, someone with whom Mark used to work in IT had accused him of lacking culture. The colleague used Mark’s disinterest in music as evidence. Mark thought that was unfair. He liked studying languages. Just because they were unspoken computer languages, that didn’t mean they were less cultured than, say, French. The room filled with a bland song. Mark walked towards his coffee machine. His coffee machine was like his pet. The cat in his Nice was also like his pet. But the coffee machine was always there when he came home, unlike the striped brown tabby that he’d agreed to take care of for his sister when she moved overseas a year ago. It always hid. The cat in Mark’s house was called Sugar. Mark got the impression that she would’ve preferred to be put to sleep than fostered out with him. She had not adjusted well to becoming an inside cat. She’d lost the will to live as she lost the ability to kill. She was depressed. She had never escaped the house in the time that Mark had kept her alive and physically healthy. Mark was very vigilant around doors and windows. He’d also gone to the trouble and expense of changing Sugar’s food to make it lower in calories to compensate for her move indoors and sedentary lifestyle. Sugar didn’t like her low-calorie food. She ate it in secret. Mark could never be entirely sure that she did eat it. Her bowl was empty every morning and every afternoon, and she wasn’t starving, so he thought she had to be eating it. Mark’s coffee machine was far less resentful and far more direct than Sugar. Beans went in the top, and milk was drawn from a removable container on the side. Mark stored the container in the fridge even if it was empty. That meant if Mark wanted to have milk in his coffee – which he always did – he had to stop by the fridge before using the machine. To make

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a coffee, he pushed one button. After a succession of noises, there was a cup of coffee. Unless you forgot to put a cup beneath the spouts. That afternoon, Mark put a cup beneath the spouts and pressed the button showing a cup divided equally into thirds. The top third was halffilled with tiny dots to denote foam; the bottom third was unpainted stainless steel to denote coffee; the middle third was white to denote steamed milk. That was the icon for cappuccino. Mark watched as the machine went through its motions. It finished letting out the silky foam and made a final beep to signal its completion. It was perfect as usual: the microbubbles entirely consistent and lustrous. Mark took the cup by the handle. He didn’t add sugar or sprinkle chocolate powder on top. He drank cappuccinos like the icon. He even used the cup that came with the machine. It was exactly the right size for the programmed contents. Mark took his cappuccino over to the replica Eames lounge chair in front of his flat-screen television. He put the cup down on the IKEA side-table. He stared at the blank television. He was thinking about the letter he received that day. He would really like to help. But where could he start? Mark put his feet on his replica Eames footstool and reclined his chair. He tilted his head back and stared at the ceiling. He noted the straightness of the two rows of three LED downlights, and the whiteness of the flush-set ceiling. If the ceiling was black, and the downlights were much smaller, he could be looking at a constellation in the night sky. The End.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Door Left Ajar: On Dissident Waiting and Collective Fiction* Sepideh Karami

If waiting absorbs the person who waits, stories in turn absorb waiting, making the person emerge from his temporary absence in the enchantment of waiting to take his place in his story and thus in memory and expectation. HAROLD SCHWEIZER 1

The waiting room It’s two in the afternoon. You try to make a piece of music in your head with all the ticking things, rhythms and beats in this waiting room. The marriage didn’t work out after all. You pretended to be happy for way too long. The air-conditioning unit rattles and leaks into a bucket; its dripping fills the room with yet another rhythm. You notice some familiar faces that you have encountered during the last few days, hollow gazes, dozing bodies, sunk in thoughts or in intense soliloquy. The chairs and armchairs are faux brown leather, arranged around the hall. The four white doors open and close irregularly. Their handles are a golden coloured steel. A clock ticks on the wall. The aluminium-sliding window opens to a backyard, onto which another building also looks. You feel something humorous in this Marriage & Divorce Office, and a drop of sweat rolling down your back tickles you further. You don’t want to take up that newspaper on the glass table in the middle of the waiting room. But you read the headlines from afar while looking at the photo of an orange city: The Orange City Warns Us To Stay 219

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At Home Today. ‘Oxygen is orange,’ you think. It’s weird that you should wait all day long for an institution to recognise your falling-out-of-love. You hear the thump of stamps from next door. You make up a game for yourself, guessing which of the stamps are for falling in and which are for falling out of love. You randomly appoint a hesitation to the falling out. And you count: 74, 75, 76 . . ., 82, . . . The stamp beats blend with the ticking of the clock, the rattling of the air-conditioning unit, the sound of water running in the backyard. A symphony of (dys)function, of leaking, of failing. You crane your neck out of the window and look down to the backyard. A middleaged man is washing a carpet. The carpet is flanked by a row of Victorian style armchairs that are arranged by the concrete wall on your left side. In front of the row of armchairs, there lays a row of plant pots, holding red geraniums. The man pushes a snow shovel across the surface of the carpet, which is covered with suds, and with each movement you get to see the blue and white flowers on its red background briefly revealed. The geraniums tremble by the splash of water. You sniff at the smell of the dust mixed with water, direct your attention back to the waiting room and continue your counting: 104, 105, 106. *

*

*

When filled with imagination and passion, waiting becomes a mission; it becomes spatial, it creates a site, it produces a story. Harold Schweizer describes the time of waiting as ‘slow and thick’, it is that which ‘must suddenly be endured rather than traversed, felt rather than thought.2 When time becomes thick and viscous, it becomes difficult for one to move about, to act, to attain one’s agency. This viscous time ‘absorbs the person who waits’,3 and she disappears into that passive time of waiting. Without a story in which the person could reappear, it becomes difficult to imagine an alternative for what the waiting could deliver or how the time could be experienced. But when a story emerges in the time of waiting, it makes the waiting fast and thin; waiting becomes active; paradoxically bearable and unbearable. The one who actively waits both longs for it to come to an end, and inhabits its every second. The one who waits transforms into a maker, a dreamer, who attains agency over time by inhabiting the time of waiting, and by constructing the performing ground for the act of waiting. Active waiting transforms passively spent time into a story that, in Schweizer’s words, ‘absorbs waiting’.4 The one who actively waits becomes the performer in the story of waiting. The story of waiting in this text is told by dissidents who wait in various situations. Although sometimes individually, sometimes with others, they always wait together in an invisible network of connection; collectively, they write a fiction while they wait. The story of waiting here takes place in a city suffocating in dirt and crime, in cruelty and mercy. Cars rush along the highways. Taxis hoot around the crossroads. Passers-by slow down in the vicinity of street acrobats. Children pause by the mechanic shops. Beggars do their best to lay

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a guilt trip on the well-dressed citizens. Policemen ignore petty crimes. Cats tear open rubbish bags. Stray dogs cool off in narrow canals. Pickpockets scream about their bad luck. Developers, shading their eyes with their hands, check the cranes moving across the sky. Cranes swing in circles over the city; their unoiled joints send squeaks into the surrounding mountains. Crows measure their weight on leafless plane trees. Wind tosses the laundry to and fro, allowing rooftop love-making to slip out. The roof lies in silence under the bench legs, under the antennae supports. Wires criss-cross the sky from antenna supports to patios. Spiders soften the corners with their white webs. Thieves take a rest behind the chimneys, revolutionaries scream their slogans, cats give birth to kittens. From the roof of the house, the orange sky melts into dark blue, creating brown shades. A woman’s moan of pleasure causes a crow to take flight. It shoots behind the moving laundry, the wires and the chimneys before disappearing into the orange sky. Later, the roof looks at the moon and stars in silence, swallowing the remaining raindrops into the hole that is covered with a stone. You remove the stone, and drop the folded paper into that tiny hole. It disappears slowly in the vertical darkness of the hole • The punching sound of steps from the upper world shakes the drops of water hanging from the ceiling, waiting to drop. The one who waits underground is still waiting for the right moment to reappear on the ground. The life of the one who waits is divided into durations of waiting and durations of moving from one mode of waiting to another; from one place of waiting to another. But every single time the one who waits, waits and moves to another place of waiting, she becomes someone else, something else: She goes out wearing red, comes in wearing yellow, goes out wearing yellow, comes back wearing wings, goes out with a pen, comes back with a hat, goes out with a moustache, comes back with a sack, goes out with a cat, comes back with a horse, goes out as a he, comes back as an it. While this text concerns waiting understood as a device of control, it questions how such a mode of waiting can be turned into a ground for

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imagination, where the duration of waiting becomes the ‘critical inhabitation’ of the event of waiting.5 Instead of tolerating the dullness of the time, how can every second of waiting be turned into an act, producing grounds for change? The restriction and control of waiting spaces and waiting behaviours by those in positions of power manifests the subversive potential in the act of waiting. Although this potential depends on situation and context, to some extent waiting always holds the potential to produce chance encounters, disruptive acts or chaotic events by opening a duration of simply being in a specific place where the imagination is triggered. In their essay ‘Waiting Places as Temporal Interstices and Agents of Change’, Mattias Kärrholm and Gunnar Sandin investigate different kinds of ‘waiting modes’ and the spaces associated with them.6 They describe ‘waiting situations’ as a form of ‘in between time-space’ and argue that they can be given a ‘transformative role’.7 While arguing that there is a level of contingency in any sort of waiting, they organise waiting into four modes: ‘settled’, ‘pre-settled’, ‘unsettled’, and ‘non-settled’ or ‘chaotic’. In the fourth mode of waiting – the non-settled or chaotic kind – they describe waiting as a time–space agency out of everyday life, where waiting is ‘part of an uncontrolled series of events without any pre-programmed or even spontaneous action in sight at all’. They suggest that the characteristic of this mode of waiting is the ‘abrupt shifts-of-context’ that can introduce ‘extra-ordinary events’.8 In relation to these types of waiting, I suggest the dissident mode of waiting, regardless of whether it is ‘settled’ or ‘chaotic’, does not strive for ‘extra-ordinary events’, but slowly and in silence, and deep in imagination and fiction, transforms the act of waiting into an act of dissent. Dissidence is ‘an implicit, slow, and minor mode of political struggle, taking shape not by making an appearance, but through low-key mechanisms and tools, methods and tactics’ that ‘circumvent an oppressive power structure.’9 It is a mode of political engagement that humiliates the oppressive power by living an oppositional life in the heart of its tyranny, and thereby challenging it on every micro-level. Such political action is a slow process that simultaneously combines thinking, imagining and acting. Its slowness involves moments of waiting, waiting for the right moment to act. When the duration of waiting is not taken as an obedient act but as the one enriched by what David Bissell calls an awareness of ‘the relationality between activity and inactivity’10 that allows a space for imagination, it could be turned into an inhabitation of time, looking for potentials hidden in the elements of the context through which subversive activity could take shape. The ongoing tension between a controlled waiting and active waiting is where the dissidents construct their act of dissent. In a context where tyranny’s fictions structure the city spaces and citizens as obedient, dissident worlds emerge in queues, waiting rooms, bus-stops, doorways, crossroads, balconies, rooftops, and so forth, interrupting the consistency of control. While controlled waiting is visible, staged, and cautious, dissident waiting is radically lived and characterized by being underground. It is a waiting in the

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wings of the theatre of political performances, waiting to appear on the stage. In these moments and spaces of waiting, dissidents safely perform their political acts and points of view by adopting fictional identities and roles; they turn every single moment of waiting into a project of change, into a fiction that imagines new political realities.

Slides that travel down beneath the visible world Fiction and fictional worlds are home to dissidents; here is where they encounter the unknown others, the welcome and the unwelcome characters. While the world around the dissidents appears logical, cities where people work, highways where people drive, alleys where they walk, oceans they stand by, mountains they climb, forests they get lost in, houses they sleep, eat and live in, dissidents instead run along non-existent highways, climb disappearing ladders, swim in withdrawing oceans, and hide under shrinking trees. They construct slides that travel down beneath the visible world, into the world of fiction. In the world of fiction, dissidents can safely perform their political acts.

Criticality of dissident fiction Fiction, as Amanda Boulter writes, enables ‘creative and critical responses to the world’.11 It allows one to become ‘a stranger in [their] own streets’, to see existing reality in new ways, creatively and critically.12 Fiction writers tell stories, they ‘plunge’ readers into ‘imaginary worlds’, ‘enthral them with invented lives, tantalise them with made-up events’.13 When dissidence as covert method of dissent is at work, fiction becomes an effective tool in the construction of the figure of the dissident. While fiction writers work through curiosity about ideas, experiment with creative possibilities developing a ‘critically creative imagination’ and enter ‘a clash with the world’ in Vladimir Nabokov’s words, dissidents live their fiction through understanding the power relations, experimenting with the art of the impossible in an oppressed and impossible situation, and expand their imagination to find ways of manoeuvring within that situation.14 Dissidents are both the authors and the characters of their own fiction. They are both the reader and the writer of their fiction, moving in a complex fictional world written by many authors. They constantly become the strangers in their own streets, as the streets are written anew with the presence of every single dissident. For the dissidents, making fiction becomes the risky art of a political life; the art of not being caught while challenging an oppressive power structure. In the words of Jacques Rancière, fiction acts to ‘visualize an encounter of incompatibilities’.15 In opposition to the false understanding of fiction vs

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reality, he explains that the configurations of what is presented as real are in fact ‘a matter of construction, a matter of fiction’, and what is imposed on us as ‘real’ is in fact the constructed fiction of the police order i.e. the established political relations through which a certain power hierarchy and its oppressive mechanism can work in favour of sustaining itself. He puts forth fiction as ‘the reframing of the “real”, or the framing of dissensus’.16 Following Rancière’s political understanding of fiction as an act of dissensus, fiction itself can be applied as a political project of challenging that ‘police order’, and dissenting from it. Dissidence takes a fictional position in order to disrupt the fiction of the police order by living a fictional life – by making and playing fictional identities and roles. What is interesting in the discussion of fiction in relation to dissidence, is that the dissident and the tyranny both inhabit and act in the same spaces through fiction. This shared space of fiction is a complex one that Bonnie Nadzam’s metaphor of ‘a series of theaters within theaters’, can expose its complexity. She describes the world in fiction as ‘a series of theaters within theaters, where “truth” is hidden behind one, then another, and still another stage curtain.’17 In this way, it is in the spaces that the dissident and the tyranny inhabit and encounter, hide and reveal behind multiple curtains, that the character of dissident is constructed and where the criticality of fiction can come to work. Fiction becomes critical and political as it constantly involves an encounter with an oppressive power structure through a covert language. In this series of theatres, the fiction constructed by dissidents is twofold. On one hand it protects them against the tyranny when they critically engage with the power structures; they can safely perform their political acts and views by adopting fictional characters while appearing and hiding behind many ‘stage curtains’. On the other hand by playing such fictional characters, they create spaces, through which they can remain within the system instead of taking a critical distance. In the introduction to Fiction as Method, Jon K. Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison refer to two strands of fiction as method: ‘those that reveal structures and gain agency in the construction of the everyday, and those that are deployed as holes to let in the “future” or “abstract-outside”.’18 The dissident methods of fiction, works through both: while they understand and inhabit the fiction of police order and reveal possibilities to imagine the unimaginable through a covert language, they create cracks within the body of dominant power, and gradually make a change from within. In this sense, political application of fiction by dissidents, is a criticality from within. These holes or cracks are also spaces that invite other dissidents to inhabit and to participate in the construction of a collective fiction. In line with this discussion of criticality from within in dissident fiction, spaces of waiting, is one of the potential spaces that because of the duration of being in a place and constructing a relation to its existing power relations, can become the space of critical fiction. When dissidents inhabit spaces of

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waiting, the duration of waiting allows them to ‘reveal structures’ and ‘gain agency’. Spaces of waiting can themselves be transformed into those ‘holes’ in the dominant system, where other alternatives can leak in. Duration of waiting allows the dissidents to find each other, exchange their roles, and collectively build a critical fiction.

The lamp post: The anchor for a collective fiction A shadow disappears in the act of turning off the lights. You don’t see if she is waiting in the dark or if she has already fallen asleep; if she has unlocked the door and left it ajar, or if she has locked it behind her and descended the stairs. The lamp post on the crossroad facing her window is the anchor of the story. While he waits on the edge of the spotlight on the tarmac sidewalk, leaning into the lamp post, the story evolves in all the following possible tracks. The woman behind the dark window, becomes many, moving through all of the different following story tracks simultaneously: 01

02

03

The cats run away through the bars by the squish of the metal door opening in darkness. The house is on the left side of the lamp post, where a silhouette drags a suitcase along and disappears around the corner. The story is still holding the one waiting under the lamp-post, but the silhouette with the luggage doesn’t know about the presence of a man waiting by the lamp post, and continues her long walk down the street, where she doesn’t wait for any unexpected encounter with a stranger.

She descends the stairs down to the ground floor, then pauses and opens a horizontal metal door and continues downwards on a ladder. Underground things seem colder, sharper, untouched. It is a world of sound, noises, voices, echoing along tunnels. On her arrival, into the darkness, she faintly sees the roots of the lamp posts hanging from the ceiling all in a row. She pauses by one, and hears a tapping sound, as if someone is waiting up there in the street, tapping their foot in impatience.

Behind the dark window, she waits to see what happens to the story, while the one waiting by the lamp post, takes out a folded paper, and slides it on its concrete rung. Then disappears into the darkness behind the spotlight. Uncertain of each other’s presence in the darkness, they continue waiting for the story to evolve.

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03 + Oscillation = The queue The one who waits balances her weight over her spine. She oscillates left and right, leaning on the left foot for two minutes and switching to the right foot for two minutes, trying to rest each leg for a moment. When she leans on the left foot, she sees an arm covered in a loose white sleeve with roses embroidered on its lower edge, hung freely beside a white dress. When she leans back on the right foot, she sees a restless hand flipping a piece of white cardboard continuously. When she leans on the left foot, she sees the profile of a person, lips moving, pronouncing inaudible words addressing someone across the street. When she leans back on the right foot, she sees a red plastic basket filled with three empty bottles. When she leans on the left foot, she sees a foot in a worn-down brown shoe, moving a pebble around carefully. When she leans back on the right foot, she sees half a face, facing the opposite direction of the queue, looking straight into her eyes. When she leans on the left foot, she sees the other half of the face, facing the opposite direction of the queue, looking straight into her eyes. When she leans back on the right foot, she sees the other half of the face, looking straight into her eyes. When she leans on the left foot, she sees again the other half of the face, looking straight into her eyes. And when she leans back on the right foot, she sees again the other half of the face, looking straight into her eyes.

Queue: A collective fiction What dissident fiction brings to the discussion of critical fiction is the collective form of authorship i.e. writing with many authors, of whom not all are welcome. To discuss the importance of collective fiction in relation to dissident waiting, the queue is a paramount context of collective waiting, where people are connected in an invisible tunnel of control; a linear invisible architecture that curates the crowd in specific times and places. In his essay ‘In-Queue Life’, Abbas Kazemi situates the discussion of waiting in the Iranian context and investigates how the queue was applied as a mechanism of control in the post-revolutionary era of 1980s and during the war between Iran and Iraq.19 At the time, waiting in queues had become an inexorable part of life, essential for survival and for providing the basic necessities of life. The country was subjected to economic austerity and the government had to apply mechanisms for the fair distribution of the subsidised basic commodities. Because the war had broken out right after the 1979 Revolution and society was still dealing with post-revolutionary instability, the new regime needed to maintain pervasive control over various aspects of life. For people accustomed to being out in the streets during the Revolution, the queue was a good transient device in the hands of those in power; letting them remain out in the streets whilst controlling them in invisible tunnels.

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Furthermore, the queue was not only limited to the time spent waiting in line, it also cast a pervasive shadow over life; it had become a ritual forming other aspects of life to the extent that one could call that era in-queue life, as Kazemi writes.20 As a ‘ritual’, queuing had its own series of actions and orders and had both added new orders to everyday life and introduced its own material objects, spaces and organizations. It had influenced the urban environment and transformed the existing buildings and urban spaces into infrastructures for queuing. Sidewalks had become places for standing in queue; mosques had become centres for distributing coupons; big stores had been transformed into storage places. The queue as Kazemi pictures it was extended from public spaces to domestic spaces. The small booklets of coupons handed to people had become important objects of survival that regulated a family’s life. These were not only documents making people eligible for waiting in queue, but also tools for accessing people’s personal information and keeping a record of their lives. To be able to survive, one had to be rendered visible by applying for these coupons. Furthermore, the special TV and radio programmes that announced the coupon numbers each night represented another time frame that made people wait – not in queues, but in their houses; one waited in the living room in preparation for waiting in queue. The ritual of periodically queuing suspended underground life by dragging people to the surface, to specific places at specific times, and making them visible. Making people wait is to position them in a state of powerlessness; it is a way of annihilating the specificity of each individual.21 Kazemi argues that the queue kept people under surveillance, militarily organized, predictable, distracted and unified. It composed a façade of the social body, exposing its constituents, making individuals visible, locating them in a linear geometry not as a group, but as separate individuals who do not look at each other, but instead look toward what they are queuing for. The queue had created a different form of togetherness without being together, a ‘distracted’22 group of people that substituted the revolutionary collective. The queues, however, were the only possibility for public social gathering free from any dominant ideology or major political connotation at the time. Queuing time became a time when the dissidents could find each other and connect. In this unifying structure, one could paradoxically hide oneself, shift roles and perform differently under a mask of similarity imposed through the architecture of the queue. Queues had constructed a maze, a series of tunnels leading all over the city. As mazes, they entered into living rooms and appeared in public spaces again, flavoured by the underground’s lively and messy lives, jokes, stories and various forms of dissent. From the midst of this rigid ritual, more chaotic gestures and disruptive tiny acts were sparked. In two works of fiction, both entitled The Queue – one by Vladimir Sorokin and the other by Basma Abdel Aziz – the queue is used as a narrative

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element of the story, and as a structure that makes spontaneous conversations happen between people. Abdel Aziz’ novel, published in 2016, takes place in an unspecified Middle Eastern city, and the queue is formed behind a gate forever closed after what the writer calls, ‘disgraceful events’.23 The queue that never moves forward is a dystopian structure through which Abdel Aziz lets the characters remain in the narrative, connect to each other and unravel their stories. As Carmen Maria Machado writes in a review of the book, ‘A whole community springs up around the queue: systems of barter and trade, gossip and deals.’24 Sorokin, on the other hand, finds a liberating potential in the restrictive structure of the queue. The story, which takes place in the late Soviet ‘years of stagnation’,25 depicts life through the narrations occurring in a queue; a queue in which no one knows what they are waiting for. The whole story unfolds through conversations, jokes, and curses exchanged between those waiting in queue. In Sorokin’s comedy of the queue, the rigid linearity of the queue is disrupted, decomposed and deconstructed through the voice of people, their chatter, laughter and various plays on language. While waiting in a queue, a foundation for a collective social life and chance encounters can be created. Beyond the mechanism of the queue working as invisible tunnels of control, what really connected people waiting in the queue was a shared story or stories they shared while waiting. Queues became ‘an entrance into imaginative and experiential depth’ in Peter Bishop’s words,26 yet not an individual imagination but a collective one. Through a collective imagination, stories are constructed among the dissidents and connect them together. Ariella Azoulay discusses such collective imagination as ‘political imagination’ and describes it as what ‘exceeds the grasp of the individual mind’ and ‘a form of imagination that transcends the single individual alone and exists between individuals and is shared by them.27 Such collective aspect of imagination is inherent in the art of fiction; as Elif Shafak writes, fiction can work as ‘a transcendental journey to other lives’ and ‘other possibilities’.28 Dissident fiction specifically, is rooted in such collective imagination as its method is oscillation from one character to another, acting through masks of the others, sometimes pretending to be loyal to the tyranny, other times being oppositional. While waiting, dissidents imagine themselves being the other with whom they are waiting. These others are those toward whom the dissident reaches out, to connect with in order to enlarge the complex web of dissidence. At other times these others are the ones in power, the ones who oppress, the unwelcome ones. Such complex situations force dissidents to invent a language of ‘writing with an unwelcome co-author;’29 a language that as Mohsin Hamid writes, can ‘say publicly what might otherwise appear unsayable’ and that can combat ‘coerced silence that is a favored weapon of those who have power’.30 While dissidents act in politically impossible situations, collective fiction becomes an effective tool to overcome such impossibility.

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02 + The wires and pipes = The queue Underworld. Wires hanging from the ceiling, thin and thick, of different colours, tied and twisted. Wires are the roots of infrastructures up above, on the ground. You pull one, and a bridge opens. You pull the other, a door to a kitchen on the fifth floor of an apartment flaps closed. You pull the yellow one that is bent over the floor, and the light on the lamp post across from the woman’s window, turns off. You pull the red one and the trash bin by the queue is emptied. Those on the ground, who have never been underground, think that everything is controlled by the ones sitting somewhere on top of the towers. But dissidents know that things can be played with from underground, through a complex system of wires. If you pull the blue wire, someone might appear in the middle of the queue. The queue breaker. But others think that it is the queue that has dragged the person out of the underground.

01 + The door left ajar = . . . The queue is a maze where at each moment, at each turn, your position changes. I arrived half an hour ago and there are, as far as I can see, five queues. He says he is the first in the queue, yet I thought he was the last. There are also some in the middle of the queue who think they are the first. And there are others just next to them who think they are the last. I never decided to wait in this queue, yet I ended up in this maze, while waiting by the lamp post. While waiting by the lamp post, I saw a shadow disappearing into the darkness of the window. And I never understood if he was waiting in the darkness, or if he fell asleep. Now I am stuck in this queue that is going up the stairs, onto the landing and through an open wooden door to the waiting hall. Leaning on my left foot, I only see half a face, looking straight into my eyes. Leaning on my right foot, I only see half a face, looking straight into my eyes. Leaning on my right foot I see a person descending the stairs, counting to a far thump of a stamp coming from the waiting hall: 189, 190, 191. . . . When I lean back on my left foot, I see half a face looking straight into my eyes while moving her lips: 198, 199, 200. . . . And all I think is: Has he left the door ajar?

Notes * This text is a re-worked version of parts of my PhD thesis, Interruption: Writing a Dissident Architecture, presented at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, in April 2018. The thesis can be found at this address: http://kth. diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2%3A1191313&dswid=2450. 1 Harold Schweizer, On Waiting. London: Routledge, 2008, 280–1.

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2

Ibid., 02.

3

Ibid., 280–1.

4

Ibid.

5

Sepideh Karami, ‘Critical Inhabitation: Interruption and Performative Criticality’, in After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research, ed. Hélène Frichot and Gunnar Sandin (Barcelona/ New York: Actar, 2018), 307.

6

Mattias Kärrholm and Gunnar Sandin, ‘Waiting Places as Temporal Interstices and Agents of Change’, Trans Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, no. 18 (2011), accessed 23 June 2014, url: http://www.inst.at/trans/18/ ccks-staedte-kulturen-wissensgesellschaften-cities-cultures-knowledge-societies/ ii-1/trans-18-mattias-kaerrholm-waiting-places-as-temporal-interstices-andagents-of-change-sandin-waiting-places-as-temporal-interstices-and-agents-ofchange-sandin-titel/.

7

Ibid.

8

Ibid.

9

Sepideh Karami, ‘Stories We Can’t Tell: On Writing Dissident Architecture’, TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, no. 55: Special Issue: Writing Architecture (2019), accessed 1 September 2019, url: http://www.textjournal. com.au/speciss/issue55/content.htm.

10 David Bissell, ‘Animating Suspension: Waiting for Mobilities’, Mobilities 2, no. 2 (2007): 277. 11 Amanda Boulther, Writing Fiction: Creative and Critical Approaches (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2007), 1. 12 Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (New York: TarcherPrigee, 1981), 115. 13 Boulther, Writing Fiction, 1. 14 Ibid. 15 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, trans. S. Corcoran. (London: Continuum, 2011), 149. 16 Ibid. 17 Bonnie Nadzam, ‘What Should Fiction Do?’, LitHub, (2016), accessed 25 August 2019, url: https://lithub.com/what-should-fiction-do/. 18 Jon K. Shaw and Theo Reeves-Evison, ‘Introduction’, in Fiction as Method, ed. K. J. Shaw and T. Reeves-Evison (Berlin: SternbergPress, 2017), 8. 19 Abbas Kazemi, ‘Zendegi beh Saf’ [In-Queue Life], Jameaeh Shenasi va Zendegi e Roozmareh dar Iran (2012), accessed 15 August 2014, url: http://kazemia. persianblog.ir/post/66/. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Carmen Maria Machado, “ ‘The Queue’ Carries On A Dystopian Lineage’, Npr (2016), accessed 10 July 2017, url: https://www.npr. org/2016/05/05/476048221/the-queue-carries-on-a-dystopian-lineage.

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24 Ibid. 25 Vladimir Sorokin, ‘Farewell to the Queue’, Words Without Borders (2008), accessed 26 March 2014, url: http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/ farewell-to-the-queue. 26 Peter Bishop, ‘Surveying “The Waiting Room” ’, Architectural Theory Review, vol. 18, no. 2 (2013): 140. 27 Ariella Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (London & New York: Verso, 2012), 5. 28 Elif Shafak, ‘The Politics of Fiction’, TED (2010), accessed 1 March 2019, url:https://www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction/ transcript?language=en. 29 Karami, ‘Stories We Can’t Tell’. 30 Mohsin Hamid and Francine Prose, ‘Does Fiction Have the Power to Sway Politics?’, The New York Times (2015), accessed 7 November 2018 url: https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/books/review/does-fiction-have-the-power-tosway-politics.html.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Postlude: Fictocriticism after Critique Stephen Muecke

The filing cabinet in my bush camp at Millibinyarri is like a dream. Like in a dream, things are not quite right. It has drawers, but they won’t open. They must be rusted shut. The gloss has gone off the outside paint, so it remains a kind of buff red ochre. I have an idea, but I can’t file it correctly. I tug at a drawer. It won’t open. I think my artist friend Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman, who lived here once, composed this filing cabinet with things on top: An empty bird cage with a white cocky feather sticking out. A fish shape made from a bent coat-hanger wire. Shells and rocks from the beach. A hurricane lamp. This filing cabinet belongs in a dream. Out of it seeps a fondness that floats around the Millibinyarri bush camp.1

The conceptual architecture The structure of the writing scene no longer feels right. What I mean by ‘writing scene’ is how subjects and objects are situated; how the architecture of the whole arrangement is structured. There is a long-standing romantic image: the writer sits in a room of her own, preferably with a window looking out onto something natural. It is quiet, except for the scratching of the fountain pen flying over the page when inspiration flows. That particular architecture of thought gives priority to the mind as an isolated source of imagination, which then ‘flows out’ into the text on the page. And nature plays the part of the muse: external, passive. Hélène 232

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Frichot (Chapter 5) embraces the concept of ‘environmentality’ to rethink this architecture, to recast the writing scene as something less static, more ‘processual’, more heterotopic (Foucault), and above all less linear in that subject-to-object sense. ‘Stories deny their progenitors’, she offers helpfully: ‘Contrariwise, stories produce the subjects who attempt to tell them’ (Chapter 5). Once we allow ‘environmentality’ to assert itself, we realize we are governed and created not only by the stories that tell us, but that ‘we’ are enmeshed in a multispecies, multinatural network that is hard to classify in my dreamlike filing cabinet. And now, as I write, I am amazed to see for the first time, in a city far away: FIRE AT COCONUT WELLS RESIDENTS URGED TO EVACUATE as a TV news crawler; yet more evidence that Gaia has ‘intruded’ as Isabelle Stengers says.2 Now we can feel this intrusion it is not just all around us, but in us and through us and caused by us. Environment is not the word any more; umwelt, perhaps, as Naomi Klein cries out that this changes everything.3 The sciences, the law, economics, art, history, all need to be reinstituted, and have already been, somewhat4 . . . was this anticipated for writing when it was urged to do something different via fictocriticism? For Katrina Schlunke it was an ‘obvious’ thing to do because the world is structured like that, the fact/fiction opposition was always a fiction: ‘In a world so obviously fictocritical, simultaneously made up of fiction and fact, we need the techniques of fictocriticism to hold actions to all they are accountable to and to forge surprising alliances.’ (Chapter 4) It is those alliances (especially the surprising ones) that have got me going lately, as the ‘architecture’ has shifted from binary oppositions to networks, from the dialectic (pace Mick Taussig5) to attachments or belongings.

Alliances It is great that fictocriticism has a new ally in architecture, and that this volume has reinstituted that alliance. I can now add to the series of disciplines that a while ago I suggested had been touched by a bit of fictocritical magic.6 Within the field of archeology Denis Byrne created something of a new branch digging down through layers of affect with his book, Surface Collection, where he recasts his discipline, with Proustian sensitivity, in South-East Asia.7 Fictocriticism is what Alphonso Lingis does with philosophy, as Merleau-Ponty and Nietzsche are ‘tested’ by his extensive travel experiences and then performed in his writing8; it is what Greg Dening and Katrina Schlunke do with history9; what Michael Taussig and Kathleen Stewart do with anthropology10, what Bruno Latour does with science and technology studies,11 what Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart do with cultural criticism.12 We could even argue that the turn to fictocriticism happens when a lawyer pleads a case by sticking ‘strictly’ to the letter of the law, while

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cleverly elaborating a quite new argument that the law has never seen before. Or when a theoretical physicist can explain difficult theory so lucidly that it finds a broad popular readership. The ficto- side of fictocriticism follows the twists and turns of animated language as it finds new pathways. The -criticism part comes in the risky leap of taking the story to a different ‘world’. But that ‘world’ is not just there. We need to do something, get active. By turning world into worlding, we identify the craft activity that is inherent in both writing and architecture. When I wrote Ancient & Modern, I attempted, writing in relation to Aboriginal Australia (thoughts that might have had their genesis, reading Michel Serres in that bush camp at Millinbinyarri) ‘. . .to build an architecture of thought incorporating the ancient and the modern’.13 Because modern structures always incorporate their mythic origins. Architectural concepts and structures cannot be composed without feelings as well as logics, ‘just as the real architect’ (I wrote back then) ‘knows that the people who will come to live in a new house will want to feel good in this space that will accommodate their bodies in movement as well reproducing a kind of ‘culture’, something that is by nature expansive rather than restrictive. The house will thus tell them stories as they move in from the outside and wander around, sit down, eat, or go to bed.’ And I felt I had to interrogate the ‘concrete effects’ of ‘expressions of the abstract’ as in elevation or upwardness. Isn’t that an echo of the desire for transcendence as a persistent Christian idea that gets played out in Western philosophies and cultures? If one wants to critique the ‘upwards’ metaphor, then the structure of Bruno Latour’s ‘modernist constitution’ helps. It has its one God up above that the spires of the gothic cathedrals were striving to reach, the politics of the ‘real’ world ‘down here’ and Nature with its immutable laws ‘out there’ all around. So, if you are critical of all that, you have to put another kind of conceptual architecture in its place, plus another kind of activity that is not mere resistance or negative dialectics, achieving a positivity through the negation of negation.

After critique It was the universal application of the language of critique that made it ‘run out of steam.’14 Like modernization itself, it was too successful, this critical two-stroke engine. It could denounce bad stuff on the downstroke and offer liberation or utopia on the upstroke. Thousands of revolutions per minute. But it was not a machine for composing, which is something that architecture always was, art too, not to mention ficto, which foregrounds its own techniques: ‘Anna Gibbs notes that it is tactical, designed to respond to specific problems. It is performative and undertakes critique not only of its chosen site or problems, but of its own process, or what it is in the midst of doing. Ficto-criticism operates in process, it explains and demonstrates, it interrupts and troubles itself’ (Frichot and Stead, Introduction).

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That kind of critique is constructive. Interruption, reinforced in Sepideh Karami’s text, makes us stop until we figure out the workings of the system. There are so many systems on the go that we rely on, but we don’t even know how they work. How hard is it to boil an egg? It can be quite hard if there is a kink in your gas hose or rain has wet (interrupted) your matches. Now, moving on, what happens if we remove the idea of the transcendent from our compositions? Katrina Simon reminded me that it was Hannah Arendt who advised us to rip the bannisters out of our thinking.15 That kind of experimenting with compositions is a virtue of fictocriticism. It becomes a self-testing ambulatory theory: see if it works somewhere else, out of your comfort zone. If it works, you may have gained another ally. But you have also, no doubt, modified your pitch according to the new environmental conditions. That is why it has worked, because you have negotiated with the local experts, some of whom are mosquitoes. Will you take modernist architecture to the Millibinyarri bush camp? Of course not: you don’t want to turn all of Australia into a suburb of McMansions. I will make do with that old camp, maybe modify it a bit on my next field trip, occasions where I have learnt, like Jacky Bowring, that the field trip ‘can become a vehicle for exploring the domain between the “real” and the fictional. Like the “documentary fiction” of W.G. Sebald the ficto-critical field trip is an objective-subjective hybrid.’ Camping, with due permission, in Goolarabooloo country, opens up different kinds of knowledge pathways where the Aboriginal custodians are in charge, that’s what happens when you go up to see Phil each time and ask

FIGURE 19.1 Photo credit: Stephen Muecke.

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if it’s OK to camp at Millibinyarri, where my old camp just survived the bushfires. It retains its post-apocalyptic style, and everything is on edge and emergent and ideas are like Kim Roberts’ words ‘rattl[ing] in the margins of my everyday realities’ because it is an oneiric structure, unclassifiable: It has drawers, but they won’t open A fish shape made from a bent coat-hanger wire An empty bird cage with a white cocky feather.

Notes 1

Millibinyarri is a block of land secured by Paddy Roe in the 1970s, where some of his family now live. It is in the Coconut Wells locality, about 20 kms north of Broome, Western Australia.

2

Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, trans. A. Goffey (London: Open Humanities Press, 2015).

3

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon Schuster, 2014).

4

Didier Debaise, Pablo Jensen, M. Pierre Montebello, Nicolas Prignot, Isabelle Stengers and Aline Wiame, trans. and intro. S. Muecke, ‘Reinstituting Nature: A Latourian Workshop’, Environmental Humanities, vol. 6 (2015): 167–74. http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol6/6.8.pdf

5

Michael Taussig, ‘I’d like to write something that comes from things the way wine comes from grapes’, New Writing, vol 16, no. 4 (2019): 400–03, and related articles in this special issue of New Writing, ‘Convoluting the Dialectical Image’.

6

Stephen Muecke, ‘What is Fictocriticism?’, in The Mother’s Day Protest and other Fictocritical Essays (London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2016), xi–xviii, xii.

7

Denis Byrne, Surface Collection: Archaeological Travels in Southeast Asia, (Lanham, MD : AltaMira, 2007).

8

Numerous books by Alphonso Lingis, starting with Excesses: Eros and Culture (New York: SUNY Press, 1984).

9

Greg Dening, Performances (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Katrina Schlunke, Bluff Rock: Autobiography of a Massacre (Perth: Curtin University & Fremantle Arts Centre, 2005).

10 An especially adventurous Michael Taussig book is Magic of the State (New York: Routledge, 1997); Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an ‘Other’ America, (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 1996). 11 Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2013), a work of philosophical anthropology, uses the simple device of a fictional character conducting the inquiry.

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12 Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, The Hundreds (Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2018). 13 Stephen Muecke, Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy (Kensington: University of NSW Press, 2004), 32. 14 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, no. 30 (2004). 15 Hannah Arendt, ‘On Hannah Arendt’, in M. A. Hill, Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 336.

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Italics are used in headings for names of artworks and publications. Abdel Aziz, Basma 228 Abrams, David 33 Acconci, Vito 85 actors, objects as 141 Adelaide, Australia 14 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound 74 affects and the subject 53 agencement 31 Agrawal, Arun 54 Ahmed, Sara 5 air-conditioning ducts 143–4 Aldiss, Brian, Earthworks 85, 86 alliances with other disciplines 233–4 Alpers, Svetlana 167 anecdotes, use of in writing 178–9 anthropocentrism 43 Aragon, Louis 126 archaeology 62–3, 233 architect who couldn’t write 178–85 architectural images 165, 168 architectural storytelling 178–9, 185 see also fiction, writing of architecture and writing 1–2, 17, 20–1 Arendt, Hannah 133 art-writing 2 Artaud, Antonin 126 Arts and Crafts style houses 201–3, 201, 205–8, 207–8 as if method 60, 61–2 attention, tests for 181 Austin, J.L. 2 Australia 13–14, 18, 26, 34, 42 see also Fraser Island, Australia; Millibinyarri bush camp auto-theory 6 autonomous devices 159–60 238

autumn, image of 28 Azoulay, Ariella 228 baggies 145 Bakhtin, Mikhail 30 bannister 200–9 Arts and Crafts style houses 201–3, 201, 205–8, 207–8 blood stains 203, 209 car accidents 203 cemeteries 204, 205 earthquakes 204–5, 206, 208 Greene and Greene houses 201–2, 205, 206–8, 207 legends 203, 208–9 memory 204–5 what if mode 208 Barthes, Roland 30 Bauhaus 167–8 Beauvoir, Simone de 13 belonging 136 Benjamin, Walter 126, 127, 129 Bennett, Jane 43, 141 Birch, Tony 34 Bird-Rose, Deborah 42 Bishop, Peter 228 Bissell, David 222 Blecher, Max 182 blood stains 203, 209 Boulter, Amanda 223 Brecht, Bertolt 126, 128 Breuer, Marcel 181 Bristol Maid (ship) 48, 50 Britannia (ship) 48, 50, 56 Brommer, Benjamin 75, 76 Brook, Scott 15

INDEX

Brossard, Nicole 7 Brown, Bill 142 Burroughs, William S. 84–5 bush camp 232, 235–6 Byrne, Denis, Surface Collection 233 Café Marais 213–14 Calle, Sophie 85 Calvino, Italo 125 camera 70–1 camp for exiles see prison on Trikeri Island Canada 13, 18 captions 81–2 car accidents 203 Carrier, David 2 Carson, Ann 107 Casey, Edward S. 143 cat 217 cemeteries 204, 205 Centerbrook Architects 187, 188, 193–4 Certeau, Michel de 98 Chamberlain, Lindy 51 children, detained 52 children, inspiration from 172–3 Christchurch, New Zealand houses 201–3, 201, 205–6, 208–9, 208 as Passaic 86–92, 87–91 Christian philosophy 234 Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid 153 Cixous, Hélène 13, 134, 135 Clarke, David B. 82 Cocker, Emma 7 coffee machine 217–18 coincidence 26 Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) 187–96 architecture of 187–8, 188, 193–4 in fiction 190, 191, 192–3, 194–5, 196 collage 29, 29, 31–2 see also montage collective concepts 52–3 collective fiction 226, 228 collective imagination 228 colours 31, 84–5 commemoration 62

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commercial precincts 213–14 Commonwealth countries 13 community consultation 40–1 completion 38–9 conceptual writing 4–5 construction 37–45 anthropocentrism 43 community consultation 40–1 completion 38–9 deaths 42 demolition 42–3 description 37–8 diggers 42–3 flying tree 37, 38, 39–40, 39, 41–2 inorganicism 43–4 mothering 43, 44 processes of 38 ruins in reverse 86, 88, 88 space of 40 writing 44–5 control, mechanisms of 226 convicts 28 country 28 cracks 146–7 Creative NonFiction 4 critical poetics 7 criticism 2–3, 3–4, 7 critique 234–5 Curtis, John 50 cutting up as fictocritical composition 25–34 agencement 31 autumn image 28 collage 29, 29, 31–2 colour 31 family 34 fictocriticism 30 genealogy 26–7 houses 29–30 hyphens 25 imagetext 32 language and images 30 Longford Project 25–6, 27, 33–4 mapping 33 metapictures 32 reading 33 Skullbone Plains (exhibition) 28 writing into images 33–4

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Dadaism 168 Dante Alighieri 40 Davis, Lydia 185 Day, Elizabeth 26 deaths 42 Debord, Guy 83, 84, 88–9 decals 148–9 declarations of repentance 75–6, 76 decoration 167 Deleuze, Gilles 48, 98, 100, 105 demolition 42–3 dérives 83, 84, 86–9, 91, 128 Derrida, Jacques 16, 30, 74–5, 120 description 37–8 detained children 52 détournement 128 diggers 42–3 Dillon, Brian 15 dingoes 51, 54 dissidence 222 dissident fiction 223–5, 226, 228 dissident waiting 222–3, 227–8 dockless technologies 159–60 Dolan, Jill 134 doors 148, 184, 211 drawings, architectural 131–2, 166 dreams 182–3 Drucker, Johanna 33 drug paraphernalia 145 Drummond, Yolanda 49 Duchamp, Marcel, Fountain 82 earthquakes 204–5, 206, 208 ‘eco,’ as house or household 173 ecological system of the story 48–9 ecology 173, 175 electronic devices 159–60 elevation 234 Elkin, Lauren 15 embodiment 134, 143 emplacement 143 entourage 165–6, 168, 169, 170, 174–5 envelopes 215–16 environmentalities 47, 54, 233 epistolary writing 141 see also Sydney Letters escalators 149–51 essays 13, 15

INDEX

ethics 8 ethopoietics 8 Eugenides, Jeffrey in fiction 189, 191 The Marriage Plot 189–90 exchange 168 exiles 62, 63, 71 expanded field of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park 98, 102, 104–5 expeditions 80–1 exploration 84–5 factish of Latour 47, 53–4 family 26–7, 34 father, of Keith Mitnick 178, 181, 183, 184 female gaze 135 feminist literary theory 6–7 fiction collective fiction 226, 228 and criticism 3–4, 11 dissident fiction 223–5, 226, 228 social 47, 52–3 theory of 6–7 writing of 179–80, 182, 183–4, 185 fiction théorique 5 Fiction Theory 6–7 ficto-criticism 11–21 after critique 232–6 and architecture 14 benefits of 15 critique, mode of 15–16 encounters with 13–14 and feminism 17–18 function of 16–17, 18–19 and genre 15 history of 12–13, 30 and objectivity 18 fictocritical composition see cutting up as fictocritical composition field notes for Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park 100–1, 102–3, 104, 104 London in the eighteenth century 112–15 field trips 80–1 figures, use of 166–7 Filon, Jacques 83 flâneurs 127

INDEX

flâneuses 130–1 Flavell, Helen 13, 17–18 flies 71 flying tree 37, 38, 39–40, 39, 41–2 following 85 footsteps, indelible traces of 125–36 flâneurs 127–8 Medusa 135–6 prescriptive gaze 133–5 storytelling cities 129–31 street haunting 125–6 street photography 131–2 Foucault, Michel 8, 13, 16, 53–4 foundation myths 53 see also Fraser, Eliza Fournier, Lauren 6 Fraser, Eliza 47–8, 49, 50–1, 52, 55, 56 Fraser Island, Australia 47–56 affects and the subject 53 Beauty Spots Tour 49, 51–2, 54 critique and Eliza Fraser 55–6 detained children 52 dingoes of 51, 54 ecological system of the story 48–9 Eliza Fraser 47–8, 49, 50–1, 52, 55, 56 environmentalities 47, 54 factish of Latour 53–4 fiction and social bonds 52–3 incompossible accounts 48, 50–1 Mrs Roxburgh 48, 50, 55 naming of the island 49 native title to the island 51–2 shipwrecks 48, 49–50 unreliable storytelling 50–1 French Theory 13 Frichot, Hélène 4, 232–3 furniture 153 Gage, Mark Foster, Guggenheim Helsinki 171–2, 171, 174 Gatens, Moira 52–3 Gay, John, Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London 113 gaze, prescriptive 133–5 genders 130–1 genealogy 26–7 Giannisi, Phoebe 62

241

Gibbs, Anna 16, 27 god-trick 18 Godard, Barbara 6, 7 Goldsmith, Kenneth 4–5 Gough, Julie 26–7, 28 Gratton, Peter 43 Greece see prison on Trikeri Island Greek Civil War 62, 66, 75 Greene and Greene houses 201–2, 205, 206–8, 207 Groys, Boris 166, 168–9 Guattari, Félix 31, 100 Gunaratnam, Yasmin 112 Hamid, Mohsin 228 Hamilton, Carrie 112 hangings 42 Haraway, Donna 18, 21, 134 Hartman, Saidiya 4 Hilavaara, Katja 4 Hill, Peter 80 Hiroshima mon amour (film, Resnais) 101 Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan 96–108 expanded field of 98, 102, 104–5 field notes 100–1, 102–3, 104, 104 landscape of the park 97, 98–9 memories of 105–7, 107 memory 98 monument, definition of 99–100 retrospective accounts 104–5 site-writing 99, 101 holiday resort see Fraser Island, Australia homecomings 216–17 hooks, bell 135 Hou Je Bek, Wilfried 84 houses Arts and Crafts style 201–3, 201, 205–8, 207–8 at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) 187, 192, 194, 194 concept of house 173 of fiction 25, 29–30 in fiction 182, 185 Nice House, Woodland Lakes 210–11, 212–13, 217

242

Hughes, Owen 28 hyphens 3, 25 images, and language 30 images, architectural 165, 168 imagetext 32 imaginaries 47, 51 imaginary exploration 79–80, 84 imagination 222, 228 incompossible accounts 48, 50–1 innovation 168–9 inorganicism 43–4 interruption 222, 234–5 Iran 226 Irigaray, Luce 13 Ishigami, Junya, Plant Buildings 172, 174 James, Henry 29–30 Japan see Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, Japan Johnson, Philip 181 Jones, Mark 211–18 Kafka, Franz 182 Kaji-O’Grady, Sandra, The Marriage Rot 190–6 Kärrholm, Mattias 222 Kazemi, Abbas 226, 227 Keiller, Patrick, London (film) 82 King, Noel 18 Klar, Amar 189–90 Klein, Naomi 233 Kovacs, Andrew 170–1 Proposal for Collective Living II 170, 171, 174 Krauss, Rosalind 98, 99 Kristiansson, Thérèse 17 Kyriakaki, Efi 66 lamp posts 225 Lamy, Suzanne 5 landscapes 28, 81–2, 84, 98–9, 105 language and images 30 Latour, Bruno 53, 141, 234 Lazzarato, Maurizio 30, 31 Le Dœuff, Michèle 30 lectures 178–9, 181 legends 203, 208–9

INDEX

lenses 131–2 Lerup, Lars 153 Lean-To 156, 157 Maus 157, 157 Racer 155, 156 Room 154 Tallboy 157, 158 Letarouilly, Paul, Edifices de Rome Moderne 166 letters 141, 183, 215–16 see also Sydney Letters Lingis, Alphonso 39, 233 Lingwood, James 81 Lispector, Clarice 180 Livholts, Mona 17 Lloyd, Genevieve 52–3 London 112–21 maps of 113 preparations for walking 113–14 walking in the eighteenth century 114–20 walking in the present day 112–13, 125–6 London (film, Keiller) 82 Longford Project 25–6, 27, 33–4 Longford, Tasmania 26, 27–8, 34 lunch 213–15 MacFarlane, Robert 83, 84, 85 Machado, Carmen Maria 228 Madrid, Spain 153, 161–3 Maier, Vivian 135 Makinson, Randell L., Greene & Greene: Architecture as a Fine Art 201 male gaze 134 mapping 33, 101 maps of Christchurch and Passaic 86–7, 87 imaginary 84 of London 113 of Trikeri Island 64–5 Mariani, Philomena 3–4 Marlatt, Daphne 6, 7 Mastroleon-Zerva, Marigoula 67, 69–70 materials, listening to 61, 75 Mazé, Ramia 17

INDEX

mazes 227, 229 McClintock, Barbara 187, 189 McElheny, Victor 188–9 Medusa 135–6 Meiselas, Susan 131 Melville, Robert 55 memorials 62 memory 98, 105–7, 107, 204–5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 31 metapictures 32 method 112 Mezei, Kathy 6, 7 Millibinyarri bush camp 232, 235–6 miniature objects 172 Mitchell, W.J.T. 32, 142 montage 166, 168, 169 see also collage monuments definition of 99–100 made-up 82, 88, 89, 89–90 and place 98 Moore, Charles 192 Morrison, Rachel 135 mother, of Keith Mitnick 181, 183, 184 mothering 43, 44 Muecke, Stephen 16, 17, 18, 45, 151 Mulvey, Laura 134 Nadzam, Bonnie 224 nationalism 53 Nettlebeck, Amanda 44–5 New Zealand see Christchurch, New Zealand Nice House, Woodland Lakes 210–11, 212–13, 217 Nolan, Sidney 51, 55 Norfolk Island, Australia 28 notebooks 66–7 novels 29–30 Oberhausen, Germany 80–1 objects 141–2, 165, 167, 168, 172 Oe, Kenzaburo 96 offices 212–13 Ogborn, Miles 113 Ono, Yoko 84 Orley, Emily 4 ornament 167, 174–5

243

outrage on Calle de Alcalá 153–64, 154–9 background 159–61 confrontation 163 consequence 163–4 escape 153–5 initial response 155–9 protests 161–2 paintings 166–7 papyrus 65–6 Paris, France 83, 84–5, 126, 127, 129–30, 134 Passaic, New Jersey 79, 80, 85, 86 Payne, Alina 167 perception 79 Perec, Georges 89, 91, 184, 185 perspective drawings 131–2, 166 Perth, Australia 13–14 photographers 131–2 photographs 81–2, 134, 136 photomontage 166, 168, 169 poethics 7 poetry 107 points of view 131–2 political action see dissidence politics 131 Pop Art 168 Portela, Manuel 33 Pratt, Mary Louise 131 prescriptive gaze 133–5 prison on Trikeri Island 60–76 arrival in Trikeri 68–9 building of 63 camera 70–1 declarations of repentance 75–6, 76 epilogue 74–5 flies 71 landing in Trikeri 69–70 listening to stones 60–4 maps 64–5 materials, memory of 75 notebooks of prisoners 66–7 nouns 73 other evidence 67–8 palimpsest of 71–3 papyrus 65–6 participles and adjectives 73 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) 74

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INDEX

structures 62, 64 verbs 73–4 wells 65 witness statements 71 women exiles 62, 63, 64, 67–8, 69–70, 71 Private Investigator 212 profane realm 168–9, 173 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) 74 Prouvost, Laure 81 psychogeography 84–5 queues 226–7, 228, 229 queuing 227, 228 Rancière, Jacques 131, 132, 223–4 Randolph, Jeanne 18 Rea, Naomi 81 reading 33 ready-mades 82 Re:assemblage (film, Trinh T. Minhha), Trinh T. Minh-ha 114 recycling of cultural refuse 165–75 architectures of accumulation 170–5, 170–1 decoration 167 entourage 165–7, 168 exchange 168 objects 165, 167, 168 ornament 167 profane realm 168–9 red, colour 31 Reeves-Evison, Theo 224 Rendell, Jane 17, 99 Resnais, Alain, Hiroshima mon amour (film) 101 Retallack, Joan 7 Reynolds, Henry 29 Roxburgh, Mrs 48, 50, 55 ruins 62 ruins in reverse 86, 88, 88 Rumney, Ralph 85 Sadler, Simon 83 Sand, George 130 Sandin, Gunnar 222 sandwiches 214 Schaffer, Kay 51, 53, 55 Schalk, Meike 17

Schlunke, Katrina 34, 233 Schweizer, Harold 219, 220 Schwenger, Peter 141 Scott, Gail 7 sculpture 98 Shafak, Elif 228 Shakespeare, William 40 Shaw, Jon K. 224 shipwrecks 48, 49–50 Shklovsky, Viktor 79, 128 signs 62, 91, 91 Sinclair, Iain 80, 84 site-writing 3, 99, 101 situated writing 17 Situationism 83, 84, 85, 86–7, 128 Skullbone Plains (exhibition) 28 Smithson, Robert 79, 80–1, 82, 83, 85–6 Smithson, Robert, visits Christchurch, New Zealand 79–92 becoming Robert Smithson 85–6 Christchurch as Passaic 86–92, 87–91 epilogue 92 field trips and expeditions 80–1 made-up monuments 82 Passaic, New Jersey, field trip to 80 photographs and captions 81–2 psychogeography and situationism 82–5 social fiction 47, 52–3 Solnit, Rebecca 80, 126 Soloway, Jill 135 Sontag, Susan 125, 135 Sorokin, Vladimir 228 space and politics 132 space of construction 40 Spain see outrage on Calle de Alcalá stalking 85 Stead, Naomi 17 Stein, Gertrude 96 Stengers, Isabelle 53, 55, 233 Stewart, Kathleen 37–8, 48, 53 stickers 148–9 still life paintings 167 Stirling Castle (ship) 48, 50 storytelling 178–9, 185 see also fiction, writing of strangemaking 82–3, 93 n.26 street haunting 125–6 street photography 132, 134, 135

INDEX

subjects, affects and 53 superfiction 80 sweaty concepts 5 Sydney, Australia 42 Sydney Letters 141–51 air-conditioning ducts 143–4 baggies 145–6 cracks 146–7 decals 148–9 doors 148 escalators 149–51 Tasmania, Australia 26, 27–8, 34 Taussig, Michael 16, 53 tests for attention 181 theatre, metaphor of 224 Theodorou, Victoria 66, 67, 69 theoretical fiction 5 things 141–2, 165 see also objects tours Fraser Island, Australia 49, 51–2, 54 Paris, France 83, 84–5 see also field trips toys, in architectural models 172 tracing 101 trauma, history of 61 travel guides 83 tree, flying 37, 38, 39–40, 39, 41–2 Trikeri Island, Greece see prison on Trikeri Island Trinh T. Minh-ha, Re:assemblage (film) 114 Unamuno, Miguel de 204 United States of America see Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL); Passaic, New Jersey upwardness 234 violence, histories of 61 visual storytelling 135 see also street photography waiting as control device 221 dissident 222–3, 224–5, 227–8

245

modes of 222 and stories 219, 220 waiting room 219–20 Walker, Linda Marie 14 walking in Christchurch 80, 86–92, 87–91 in London in the eighteenth century 114–20 in London in the present day 112–13, 125–6 in Paris 127, 129–30 Wallace, David Foster 189 waste 173–4 Watson, Elizabeth 188, 189, 192, 195 Watson, James 187, 188–9, 191, 192, 193, 194–5 wells 65 Western philosophy 234 what if mode 60, 79, 208 White, Patrick 50 Winnicott, D. 7 witness statements 71 Wittig, Monique 130 Wolfhagen, Philip 28 women in eighteenth century London 113, 115, 117–19 exiled to Trikeri Island 62, 63, 64, 67–8, 69–70, 71 and Fiction Theory 6 in Paris 130–1 see also Fraser, Eliza Woolf, Virginia 125–6 worlding 234 writing, act of 120, 179–80, 182, 183–4, 185 writing and architecture 1–2, 17, 20–1, 44–5 writing-architecture-ascommemoration 62, 63–4 writing into images 33–4 Yamauchi, Karen 189 zip-lock bags 145

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